Dress shopping with new boobs

We have a wedding coming up this weekend and in trying to figure out what to pack, I realized I have no dresses with zippers or buttons - all over the top.  This is not good when my range of motion is still prohibiting me from being able to wear certain types of clothes.

So we set off to the mall.

I've always felt insecure about certain parts of my body and I'm convinced that Dillard's purposefully installs the ugliest carpet/wall color/lighting combo so you question everything you have eaten in the past 3 weeks.

I tried on more than a few dresses at a few stores and have come to realize that I don't recognize my own body shape anymore.  

And then I cried.

I've always been a size 8/10 and I'm ok with that.  Depending on the store and sizing I'm a M/L and I'm ok with that.  But my boobs aren't as big as they used to be, so now I feel like my stomach sticks out.  Where I used to be curvy, I'm now pear-shaped.  Where I used to have cleavage to counterbalance my thicker thighs, I now just have thick thighs.

Yesterday was International Women's Day and there were a lot of encouraging posts from beautiful people telling other people to not feel bad about their bodies.  And I read some of them.

And then I cried.

It's not the same to be told by Kim K to not body shame and to feel liberated by your body when you look in the mirror and feel like a lesser version of yourself.  

I know that this is temporary.  

I have taken control of my fate and I can change the way that I look and feel about myself, but yesterday, in that Dillard's dressing room, I was faced with a very different version of myself that I had not seen in public.  I've been able to avoid brightly lit rooms and full length mirrors.  

Luckily, I did find a cute dress and it makes me feel like a pretty pretty princess and all is well in the world. But, for about an hour and a half, I felt really crummy about myself and my prospects of finding a cute dress to wear to this wedding.  I almost settled on a pantsuit.  

Maybe that is Hillary Clinton's secret to being a badass lady of power and prestige...pantsuits.