After years telling herself that she shouldn’t want what she wanted, Julie decided differently.
For three days a week, nearly three years straight, Julie was in the gym. She’d committed to getting stronger after three pregnancies and two C-sections, and her body responded. But there was a limit to what she could do on her own.
“So then it was, how do I change what I can’t change?”
Reframing
The answer, she knew, was surgery. But knowing and acting are different things —especially when every impulse toward self-investment runs through a filter of should. She should wait, she told herself. She should be grateful. She should put it toward something for her kids.
“As women, we tend not to prioritize ourselves,” Julie says. “I had to reframe it in my mind: No, I do deserve this.”
She heard it from the culture, from herself, and—in its gentlest form—from her husband, who told her that she didn’t need to do this. He meant it as love. But even love can carry a familiar script.
Her answer was always the same. “I’m not doing it for anybody but myself.”
As a nurse practitioner, Julie understands clinical environments from the inside. When she scheduled her consultation at the Quatela Center for Plastic Surgery, she expected that knowledge to make the process easier.
It didn’t.
Instead, she found herself worrying about asking questions she felt she should already know the answers to.
“At the end of the day, I’m still a human being, standing in a gown, sharing every insecurity,” she says.
Dr. Ashley Amalfi, Julie’s surgeon, dissolved all of it. A mother herself, direct and honest, she met Julie not as a colleague or a case but as a person.
“It never felt transactional,” Julie says. “I could ask her anything.”
A few months after her procedure, Julie put on a dress and realized something had shifted, not just in how she looked, but in what she no longer felt. The discomfort she’d carried for years was simply absent. She wasn’t imagining how she wanted to feel anymore. She was just feeling it.
“I’m not picturing it in my head,” she says. “I’m there. I’ve transformed into the person I imagined I could be.”
As a mother of three daughters, Julie thinks about what they see. She didn’t want them growing up watching her stand in front of the mirror and talk about the things she didn’t like about herself—because that’s what they would do.
“It was important for me, for them to see that I take care of myself.”
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