"The night before my surgery, feeling perhaps a bit of sadness at losing my identity as a 'large-breasted woman'..."

"... I took a last look at my breasts in the mirror and—on the advice of a friend—Marie Kondo’ed them. I thanked them for their (purely cosmetic) service, and bid them, in their current iteration, farewell. At the hospital, the surgeon twisted each of my breasts up as if he was about to cut bangs and marked them with a Magic Marker. This was, he explained, a French technique...."

Writes Xochitl Gonzalez, in "Me and My Bosom/I wasn’t ready for the 'Doña Body'" (The Atlantic).

After the surgery:

What I really felt was restored.... I feel rejuvenated. To feel younger would be to have this same body and not think it was enough. To feel younger would be to have this same body and compare it, incessantly, with the bodies of others: women I know, models and actresses I don’t. To feel younger would be to have this beautiful, fit body and squander it by living in an endless loop of insecurity and envy and doubt. 

So losing the bosom...

Earlier, Gonzalez had used the word "bosom" to refer to what had happened to her "my once-fabulous tits" — they'd "transmogrified into a bosom."

... might have made me look younger, but I feel—thankfully—a solidly healthy 46. I’ve probably lost 10 pounds of breast weight... 

Now that my breasts were smaller, my eyes zeroed in on my newly revealed stomach.... Perhaps this might have been my moment, the beginning of my slippery slope, and no amount of change or modification or injection would ever have been enough to capture the feeling of me “at my best.”...

I'm eliding the part about a family member with breast cancer. 

I started out wanting to write an essay about how, with this bevy of choices in front of me, I should age. The answer, I realized, is gratefully.