This young girl, a girl with a corrupted childhood and a lack of an understanding towards the deeper components in life, looked in the mirror again one day, analysing the relflection. She told herself, "I know I will never change, I will never be thin, and I just have to accept this." Wishing there was another way, yet realising there would never be, she accepted herself, as a chubby little girl who would never be pretty and never be thin.
That is the last moment the young girl could remember. Before, that is, she transformed into a beautifu butterfly, and began to spread her wings. See, this thirteen year old girl was coming to many revelations. Boys, friends, parties, makeup, clothing. She noticed her friends, particulary the girl who would consistently eat a single apple each day at lunch, nothing more, nothing less. The young girl became very perceptive to the bodies on television shows, such as the o.c. Girls in bikinis. She could be one of those girls. And so she began to exercise, a daily walk, a few hundred situps.
Summer holidays came, summer holidays went, and the young girl returned to school. After an entire summer of eating fruits and vegetables, and small amounts. After an entire summer of continuos exercise, of dusting on makeup after dying her hair. After an entire summer of a routine she did not know she was completing, of a diet she did not know she was following, of an exercising regime she did not realise she was finishing each day... She had changed, she had transformed, well... she was close to it.
As she returned to school that summer, compliments came flying in her direction, praise an cheers and gasps. Girls telling her she was gorgeous, thin, stunning. "what did you do?" "how did you do it?" "did you diet?"
And the young girl, almost fourteen now, looked back at these girls, at her family, at the world. She looked into the mirror, at the relection, at herself, and smiled for a short second. Then she frowned, a tear fell, she dropped to the floor.
She was not pretty, she was not thin.
These girls, her family, the world. They were all crazy, insane, insulting.
She was not pretty, she was not thin.
She was the same, why would people suggest otherwise?
The girl looked back into the mirror, at the relection only she could see, the relection that had changed for others, and not for her.
She stared toward her perception...
That was when the battle began.
That was when the eating stopped, the exercise started.
That was when the happiness halted, the lies began.
That was when she lost herself, the girl she accepted.
That was when she became a butterfly in the making, and she didn't even know it.
That..
That was anorexia.
Real anorexia.
Anorexia Nervosa.
The kind that you are blind to.
The kind you do not notice.
The kind you do not control.
The kind that see's you.
The kind that notices you.
The kind that controls you.
As the girl stared at her relection, and skipped her meals, and stopped eating in public, and exercised constantly, and stopped bothering with school, and became all about appearance, and distanced from her family, she fought a battle she didn't know she had.
Her perception had changed, her reality was altered.
She saw a caterpillar, when in fact, she was a butterfly.
And to this day, now almost eighteen years old, the girls perception hasn't healed, the girl still see's a caterpillar, and wishes that one day, she could be a butterly, again.
