Chapter 3.

To start this off, I began binding my chest even before I came out. At age 21, I believe. Like many others, I started out with ordinary bandages and tied them around my back, but that never worked for me. Sometimes I used sports bras and leveled them on another. They didn’t provide as much comfort as I hoped they would. 
Over the years, I found out about binders and quickly got associated with gc2b, the best and most quality source of binders I had come across to date. At first, I was hesitant. They were from the US and I lived in Germany. Shipping would take a long time, and I was not sure whether I could wait that long. Three weeks later, they were there. When the notification came in, I remember rushing to the post office with a pulse so high, I felt like falling over. I was thrilled. With shaky hands, I grabbed it from the counter and ran home. First thing, I locked myself in the bathroom. I remember weeping like a baby when I saw how flat it made my chest. 
For a moment, I thought. This is it? This is what it feels like to be more comfortable in my own skin. Was this happiness? I must have stared at my chest a hundred times that day, grinning like a joyous child, but a few years later, my body dysphoria got so bad that I began to binge-eat to get rid of the ‘female curves’. Depression and anxiety were surely a part of that too, and before I knew it, my chest grew in mass as well. So I bought another binder and began to level them on top so it would be flat enough that I didn’t have to waft my t-shirt so often. And that worked, until summer came, and my chest just wouldn’t sit still. I began taping, the common kinetic sports tape. And finally, after watching hundreds of tutorials on the web and going to Tumblr to ask for help, it worked. So I put my binder on top of it and it looked great.
The tape worked, it did what it did, but soon I realized that I was allergic to it. Round dots and stripes riddled my chest. I sought out solutions but found none. I cried a lot. By that time, I couldn’t not tape. I needed it. So I thought, if my skin is reacting to the tape, I need a barrier between. Common art glue was my solution, and it worked for a few hours until it began to dry and crumble out of my t-shirt. I knew I had to change something, which drove me to go to the grocery store the next day. As I was walking by the cosmetology section, these 60 cent face masks caught my eye. Peel off masks, hypoallergenic. They were perfect, I thought. I bought them and applied them to my skin. I let it dry and put the tape on top of it. And it didn’t itch. 
Applying the mask to my chest was the most disgusting thing I had done that day. It meant I had to touch it, it meant I had to acknowledge this strange mass on my chest, and it made me feel so dysphoric that I couldn’t even look at it. It had to dry for about a minute and then, finally, I could put the tape on. In haste, I threw on the binder and t-shirt, and finally, I allowed myself to breathe and brush away the tears that had dwelled in my eyes. Sometimes, I still don’t notice how difficult it is for me until I become aware of my body. Breathing still gets difficult. Sometimes I hear a clicking in my throat when I breathe in too much. It’s normal, they said on the trans-masc binding thread on Reddit. So I didn’t question it.