Sometimes, you look into the mirror and you see wrong.

It’s quite as simple as that. You literally see wrong. You don’t realize it until much later, when all the pain has washed away. At that point, the “glory” of young adulthood has faded into a midnight blackness that, at some point, turns into a sunrise.

The distortion that you see in the mirror… it isn’t you. It’s how everybody wants you to see yourself. It’s every single girl at school who wears her skirt so much shorter and holds her nose so much higher. The skinny girls. The beautiful blondes and brunets that seem to look the same and dress the same and judge anybody who doesn’t copy that. You’d be envious of their assertiveness, but you don’t think you deserve it. These girls are fundamentally confident, which is an occupational hazard of being inherently gorgeous.

At first, when you walked into school, it had felt like a chance to prove yourself, to be the amazing person that you have always desperately wanted to be. As you grow up there, though, you begin to see something different within yourself. You’re not like the other girls. You don’t think like them or speak like them or dress like them or act like them. Sometimes you feel as though you’re capable of more than they are- after all, having been born unbeautiful, you’ve had to work a little bit harder to become noticed. It’s more than just putting on a short skirt and wearing your makeup right. It’s wiggling your way out of the masses to show a tiny piece of individuality; it’s worming your way onto the radars of the teachers.

This may be obnoxious to the other kids, but you still have to do it.

Sometimes, you wish that it was easier. That you could wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and not feel your stomach clench painfully at what you see. That all of your problems could be solved by looking at your reflection and going, “Well, at least I’m hot.” Sometimes, you wish that you could wear short skirts and fix your problems with the wave of a straightener.

It isn’t that you don’t like yourself. You love yourself. You love who you are. You love the breathlessness that you get when you’re reading a book, flipping frantically through the pages, feeling the way the smooth paper slips through your fingers as you turn them faster, faster, faster. You love the desperation of getting an essay done, the feeling that you get as your pen etches your words onto a piece of paper, knowing that this is all coming from your brain and your mind and even your heart. You love the emotions that you sometimes feel when you’re spending time with your friends, the silliness, the need to please, the gratefulness that they have chosen to spend their time with you.

It isn’t that you don’t like yourself. It’s that you don’t like how other people see you.

Almost as soon as you arrive at school, their opinions of you are set. There isn’t a chance of a brand new start because these people are congenitally different from you and congenitally the same as each other. As a child, you had always noticed how other girls seemed to meet and click. Like they fit together instantly. Like something within them just worked together. Even as a child, you had noticed that you didn’t click like they did. As you get older, this does not improve, leading inevitably to isolation.

There are some days that you just sit in the bathroom and stare at the face of a girl who isn’t like other girls but wishes that she was, and hates herself for wishing that wish. Instead of seeing a girl who is the smart and talented and caring, you see a girl with an alarmingly ugly body and the plainest face that’s ever peaked tentatively into a mirror. You see a nose that protrudes offensively from its position and acne that never seems to fully go away no matter how hard you try to make it vanish. You see a girl who will never be worth the boy that she’s in love with, merely because she isn’t alluring enough for him. He deserves better, he deserves more.

Sometimes, you complain to your friends that you’re fat just because you need them to tell you that you aren’t.

This situation mostly comes up on days when your mom comes downstairs in the morning before you get on the bus, and she takes one look at you and tells you that you have to change your shirt.

“Why?” you ask, and her snide reply is, “Because it makes you look fat.”

Fat. Like fat is the worst thing in the world that a girl could be.

Still, you always find yourself listening to her, find yourself dejectedly trudging up the stairs with the black cloud of worthlessness that constantly consumes you during these situations. After all, who loves you more than your mother? If your own mother thinks that you look awful enough that you have to change your clothes, it must be true. And it doesn’t matter if you don’t get to eat breakfast, or if you forget a piece of homework on the counter in your haste, or if tears sting your eyes as you make a brake for the school bus that she has made you late for.

It doesn’t even matter that it hurts.

So when you casually complain to your friends at lunch that you’re feeling overweight that day, the wave of gratefulness that washes over you when they adamantly protest that you are not fat is indescribable. There are no words to properly communicate the appreciation you feel for the way that they insist that you are beautiful, yet you also can’t forget another thing that your mother once said. That one day, they’re all going to get so sick of telling you that you’re pretty. That one day, they’re just going to get annoyed and leave you.

Or worse. Tell the truth.

Whoever said that the truth is necessary probably didn’t understand how it felt to be a teenage girl who is unsure about everything. Unsure about her personality, unsure about her body, unsure about her future. Unsure if anybody at all is ever going to be able to fall in love with her, seeing as if her own mother spends all that time resenting her daughter for being fat, there’s no possible way that a guy would be able to see past it. And aren't you supposed to be your own worst critic?

When you were a little girl, about ten years old, and you started gaining weight, the people that had pointed it out had inflamed it and made it worse. It became a game. Somebody would fuel your anger, and then you would attack the whoopee pies in the pantry with a vengeance. That’ll teach them. That’ll punish them.

It would have been extremely nice if this habit had vanished when you got older, but it hadn’t. You still eat when you’re stressed. You still eat to get revenge. Cheese-Itz have become the fuel of couch potato champions.

Maybe the worst part is that whenever people ask you to picture your future, somewhere in the image there is always you being skinny. It doesn’t even matter what else you’re doing- after all, that’s just secondary. Out of all of your enormous hopes and passionate dreams, the one that pops first into your mind is skinniness.

That, more than anything, makes you disgust yourself.

To describe your stance on life, there are many clichés that could easily suffice. Life’s a journey. Life’s too short. Live every day to its fullest. And one of the main aspects of life is eating. It’s enjoying yourself. It’s throwing caution to the wind and not caring about the whole “moment on the lips, lifetime on the hips” thing.

Dieting is boring. So what if you don’t really look like any of your friends? You like food. You like eating. You feel safe amidst your unattractiveness. (“At least,” you joke to your mother as you take a bite of cheesecake, “my virginity is forever intact because of this.” She doesn’t think that’s funny. She wants grandkids.)

But when your grandmother starts making jokes about your weight? That’s when you maybesortofkindof think that it’s time for a change. When your mother tells you that your family members- and worse, your friends- have started commenting to her about you gaining weight? That makes it worse.

“Who?” you demand, ignoring tightening of your throat. “Who said that to you?”

It’s none of their business. It is not their business to worry about you. It is not their business to judge you. It is not their business to make the situation between you and your parents worse.

Then again, maybe it’s not entirely your fault. After all, when the only thing your parents can talk about with you is the shape of your body, it’s no wonder that you never seem to be able to focus on all of the good aspects of yourself. That you have talents, and that there are people who love you, and that you’re a genuinely kind person if your peers would only be willing to give you a chance. You like that you are fiercely loyal to the people you love- you will do anything to keep them safe and happy. Still, when you’re overweight, it barely matters to your parents what you do. Whether it be feeding the dog, cleaning your room until it sparkles, or getting straight A’s, there’s a part of you that knows that no “good job!” will ever be quite as enthusiastic as it would be if you had been telling them that you lost ten pounds.

It’s a surefire way to make a girl feel worthless. No matter how accomplished she is, her accomplishments will always be dimmer so long as she doesn’t look good in a pencil skirt. Still, it makes you wonder. If your own parents look down upon you because of your dress size, how would future employers look at you? Is there a possibility that somebody would choose not to hire you just because you’re flabby? Is it possible that the world is truly that frighteningly shallow?

You think of Hemingway and how he wrote an entire novel about a man who refuses to go along with the social norms. Then you think of Megan Fox, who every single boy in the world thinks is drop dead gorgeous because of her body. Who do you want to be? Santiago or Megan Fox? The fact that you’re even asking yourself that question makes you capital p Pathetic.

Existentialism aside, you pack your pride into a duffel bag and find yourself going to the gym three times a week. It’s boring. It’s time consuming. It’s embarrassing. But you do it anyways because it makes your parents happy and because your mom makes a point of reminding you of how hot you would be if you were skinny.

“Maybe,” she says, “He’ll fall in love with you if you have a better body.”

“Do I want a guy who would fall in love with me just because I have a nice body?” I ask rhetorically.

There’s actually no way to answer that question without sounding like a horrible person, so she ignores it.

Sometimes, you look into the mirror and you see wrong.

But then, other times, you don’t. You look into the mirror and you tell yourself that everything is okay. It’s going to be okay. Whether you’re skinny or not, you’re still a good person. You have wonderful friends, a personality that you are proud of, and parents who only want the best for you. And life is going to happen the way that it happens and there’s nothing you can do about that. If you miraculously become skinny- whether it be through hard work or the magical skinny fairy- then that’s fine. If you don’t? That’s okay too. It’s not a life requirement. You’re beautiful in other ways.

Everybody is gorgeous in their own way, and special, and wonderful, and kind. Different things matter to different people. Nobody is worthless or unspecial or unimportant because life simply doesn’t work that way.

Sometimes, you look into the mirror and you tell yourself, “You are smart, you are beautiful, you are perfect.”

It totally sounds like an Oprah-esque self-help thing, but you know you’ll thank yourself later.