A love letter to my belly

A major surgery is about to take away the part of me I hated the most. I'm finding it surprisingly hard to say goodbye.

Self-portrait at golden hour (Plakias, Crete, September 2024)

By the time you read this, I will be undergoing a breast reconstruction procedure called a DIEP (deep inferior epigastric perforator) flap surgery. My lower belly will be sliced from hip to hip, and a chunk of fat and skin used, together with its blood supply from an accompanying vein called a perforator, to create a replacement breast for the one I lost.

The perforator will be detached from my abdomen and reconnected, thanks to the modern marvel of microsurgery, to a blood vessel in my chest.

No silicone, no worries about implant leaks or recalls, just a warm, natural-feeling, hopefully permanent new boob that will age with me, from my very own tissue.

The operation will be done by two plastic surgeons working simultaneously for 6-10 hours, with a 5-day hospital stay and 6-8 weeks’ recovery time, although my surgeon has told me it really takes about three months to feel normal again.

It’s like a boob job and a tummy tuck in one! some people around me have said, and I guess it’s true.

Lucky you! they add, in a well-meaning attempt to point out the silver lining of a pre-cancer diagnosis and complicated mastectomy, which I’ve written about in previous posts.

Lucky me, because well, don’t all women want to get rid of that pooch?

I have feelings about this.

Because to my surprise, the prospect of finally being rid of my belly, fulfilling the most fervent wish of my adolescent self, doesn’t fill me with joy.

In her brilliant essay collection Girlhood, memoirist Melissa Febos shares a prompt she assigns to her creative writing students: write a love letter to the part (or parts) of your body with which you have the most fraught relationship.

On the eve of losing a body part I’ve love-hated, mostly hated for most of my adult life, I wrote a love letter to my belly.

And I’m sharing it with you.

Teenage Deepa would NEVER have allowed her belly to be seen like this.

Dear Belly,

I can’t believe I’m saying goodbye to you after 42 years.

The first thing that wants to break loose from me is a rush of apologies. For all the time we lost, and all the time I wasted wishing you didn’t exist.

I’m sorry for all the years I hated you. I’m sorry for all the years I didn’t know better, when my feelings for you were drowned out and shaped by all the voices that taught me to hate you. For all the times I was ashamed of you, instead of accepting you as vital to my wholeness as any other part of me.

Do you remember when we first met? When I think back, I realize never got the chance to know you on my own terms. Throughout my girlhood I am certain that many people called my attention to you, for by the time I reached my teens I had already built up an implicit understanding of you as ugly, linking your existence with my shame.

One of my earliest memories of you is shopping at Corso Marconi for discount Italian clothing with my mom and sister back in Manila in the 90s. I remember trying on a long, slinky black Italian dress that looked and felt amazing on me—almost too hot for a seventeen year-old. In my mind’s eye I knew I looked good in it, but my eyes fell on you and I immediately negated myself.

I thought to myself: I look great, but—, the but being the way you jutted forward, forever the obstacle to unreachable perfection, thwarting my path to the beautiful, skinny me I could be if not for you.

My mother bought me the dress anyway, but I would only work up the courage to wear it once or twice. I remember wearing that slinky black dress to my first public engagement as a Glee Club trainee, Ramon Cruz and Emilie Tenorio’s wedding at Santuario de San Antonio. Immediately I was punished for my boldness when A——, a senior alumnus, called you out. Ano ba yang puson mo, Deepa! he cackled, all three hundred pounds of him, in front of everyone. Para kang nanganak! (“What kind of belly is that, Deepa! It’s like you just gave birth!”)

I burned with shame. I wanted to disappear. And I hated you, not him. It would take me decades to realize that his hatred for his own body then simply needed an outlet, and he had found a target at the bottom of the pecking order who wouldn’t fight back. And I didn’t. I wasn’t brave enough.

I’m sorry for all the ways I tried to hide you. All the times I tried on pants, skirts, and shorts in countless fitting rooms, and wished you weren’t there. All the long t-shirts, peplum tops, the shirts I never tucked in so they could fall over you, the strategically draped dresses, the swimsuits I never bought because I feared that baring you would invite the ridicule of others.

Most of all, I am sorry for the way my mind became conditioned to automatically contort itself in the relentless subterfuge of your concealment.

Everything changed when I became truly aware of you—not through the gaze or voices of others, but through the touch of another.

The first time you were squeezed by a lover’s hands—with the force of desire, in the throes of pleasure—transformed how I saw and experienced you. It transformed how I saw and experienced myself. Suddenly, you were a part of me that could be desired, and I became a woman who could be desired not in spite of you, but with you… perhaps even because of you.

From then on, you ceased being a part of me that had to be ignored by men to get to what they really wanted, and became essential to the exploration and expression of my own sexuality and desire.

From then on, I understood that my entire body could, and must, be included in the pleasure of sex—and not only the bits of me that men had been conditioned to lust after.

I loved getting to know you then. We could finally relax, stop sucking it in, and take up space. You were the gateway for me to love and cherish the rest of my body as I had never been taught to love it.

With my daughter, my appreciation of you grew even deeper.

The touch of her tiny chubby hands on the marks of her birth; the expression of pure contentment on her face when she lies on your softness, her ear pressed to the gurgles and rumbles beneath your surface; even the silly and endearing nickname she gave you—all of these showed me an unconditional love for you that is so pure, so genuine, that I can’t help but be caught up in it.

Becoming a witness to her love for both of us completed the picture of what it means to truly love you.

I learned to love you even more through yoga, bodywork and breathwork.

I know that when my breath drops deep into you, I feel the calmest and safest I can be in my body. Thank you for being the sanctuary of my breath, the seat of my intuition, and the home of my peace.

The love I have for you today is hard-won and far from perfect, but it is real and I treasure it. My voice is stronger than the voices of my past, and in listening to my own chorus of self-love I have learned to embrace the way you bring fullness, dimension and depth to my curves.

I’ve learned to override the tiny voice that chimes ‘but’ when I’m shopping or fitting on clothes and see you jutting out in a way I was taught to find ugly and shameful.

I’ve learned to cradle your weight against the tops of my thighs in every yoga pose that brings you close to me, instead of seeing you as an obstacle to achieving perfection in that pose.

And I’ve learned to ignore that moment of embarrassment at the fleshy, floppy sound of you slapping against a lover’s body when I’m on top, lean into it, and just ride fucking harder.

“Let her see the sun,” suggested a writer friend. So I did.

I’m so glad we had that final week in Crete together. It was a last-minute hurrah with my family and boyfriend, but in a way it was also a last hurrah with you. I loved seeing you in the sun, knowing I looked and felt absolutely smoking in the tiny, belly-baring string bikinis I never had the courage to wear.

In a way I’m glad that you have been with me all my life, waiting for this crucial moment to be called into play and give way to the change that needs to take place.

When I really think about it, isn’t it a wonder and a miracle that I’ve always carried the raw material of my own rebirth? That everything I need to bridge my old self to the new one that awaits has always been with me?

And in a way I’m glad that part of you will always be with me, just in a new place and form. That the best and most skilled hands will handle you, and care for you as you deserve. That the smaller, flatter belly that emerges will still be you, not better or worse, only different. And that we have a whole lifetime ahead of us to discover, appreciate, and love each other anew.

I love you so much, my belly. I can never express enough gratitude for everything you’ve done and will do for me. Thank you for making this new me possible.

With squeezes, jiggles, and kisses,

Deepa

---

Thank you for reading! Please send me all your good vibes for a successful surgery and a smooth recovery. In return, I leave you this playlist from a wonderful little cafe in Crete where I enjoyed a delectably foamy iced cappuccino, people-watched, and wrote morning pages every day.

Listening to it has made summer last just that little bit longer for me; I hope it does for you too. See you on the other side.