This self-portrait was completed shortly after I underwent a gender-affirming double mastectomy (top surgery). This was an opportunity to meditate on the physical and mental healing that surgery demands but also enables a conversation about authorial intent. Self-portraits allow an artist the highest degree of autonomy to present themselves as they experience their physicality. Body modification (gender-affirming, life-saving, or not) is an opportunity to invoke that autonomy with your physical self. The twin factors of representative agency and biological agency unite in this painting as I engage with the ongoing project of inventing/representing myself