Before and After

I went to a friend's clothing exchange and scored a really neat hat. It isn't a summer hat, but I wear it anyway because the air conditioning blowing on my head makes me really cold indoors in Texas. It is big enough that I could possibly have a pixie cut under my hat. I like it a lot.

I was leaving Krogers the other day, wearing my hat, a pair of summer shorts, and a loose tee, and the young man who was bringing the carts back from the parking lot to the store stopped as we passed and said, "How are you doing?"

Now, it wasn't a Joey from Friends,"How you doing?" but it wasn't a simple "Hi" either.

I said fine, and chuckled as I reached my car. Had he known that I had one boob hacked off and was completely bald, there is no way in hell he would have asked me how I was in that flirtatious tone. But he didn't know, so he did.

This incident made me reflect a bit on how my interaction with men in general has changed since I have had my surgery and lost my hair.

This is not me, but I don't have a good before and after pic. Just an illustration.

As a 28 year old, albeit a married one, my interactions with men are always laced with a bit of flirtation, and I believe this to be true of all young women.

That doesn't mean that before I was leaning over counters exposing cleavage, or not mentioning my husband, or touching males on their elbow as I talked to them,. Far from! However, there was always a subconscious body language that I was aware of to use to my advantage. This could be to order a drink at a bar, get a better tip, simply get faster service or a bigger scoop of ice cream.

Sometimes I knew that lingering in a conversation, while not any benefit to me, could make someone's day.

It would also affect my interactions with women too. Women expect good looking women to "be" a certain way. There are snap judgments made upon meeting someone (checkout girl, friend of a friend, whatever) that is good looking (we all do it girls). I would need to use my body language, tone of voice, change the stories I chose to tell, smile a lot more, etc, to either reinforce or dissipate what I thought they felt.

Now that my appearance has changed so drastically, I have removed this from the equation. Now I know that men do not find me in the slightest attractive, cute, desirable, or whatever, my interactions are completely different. As attraction (males) or wariness (females) is no longer in the picture, my interactions are actually far more short and to the point, without any game theory or afterthought involved at all.

Now there is other baggage of course that comes with looking skinny, bald, with one tit, and with a scary looking port popping out of my chest, because I don't hide it. I don't feel I flaunt it, but I wear a camisole tank top with a shelf- bra and it is obvious that something is missing. So I need to change my behavior to make people feel comfortable because people do not want to meet your eye, lest they feel as so they are staring.

But anyway, I realized that the other day, and wanted to share.