A Bulimic's Epiphany
by Rebekah
(USA)
I posted this on a teen dieting community I'm a member of:
You know what? I feel cheated. Lied to. Hoodwinked.
How come fitness videos don't tell us that "in no time" means a few years? How come crash diets don't tell us that they lose us ten pounds and gain us thirty? And how come when the whole Dieting Market Of America caters to us and lies to us and flatters us and makes promises to us just to coax us into spending billions of dollars wracking our bodies, trying to make ourselves sexy... and then blame US when we fail?
And now that our entire culture has absorbed the definition of beauty being skinny hotties living on tic tacs, now that everywhere we go every window and every stranger reflects the images they've drilled into us, all of a sudden we realize it's not even what we want.
Yeah. I know some days it seems like ALL you want is to be skinny, that if you just lost that 10 pounds, that 30 pounds, that 50 or 100+ pounds, you would be happy. But it's not being skinny that you want. You want to be a whole different PERSON.
You want to be that star who smiles with gorgeous teeth at the camera, that person everyone worships, that person who skips through life taking adversity as a breeze. Or maybe you want to be a person with philosophic depth, with misty eyes and a notebook full of award winning poetry. Or maybe you want to be popular, loved by all, envied by all, with the right thing to say at all the right moments, with the right friends and the right guy and the right LIFE.
You don't want to be skinny. You want to be all that being skinny PROMISES it is. Be skinny - and your personality falls into line. Your music skills quadruple. Your agent trips over himself or herself to hire you. Your friends all stare in wide-eyed amazement as you waltz into the room, confident, sure of yourself, BEAUTIFUL. If you were just skinny, you'd tackle all your fears and kill them. If you were just skinny, you'd be so confident. If you were just skinny, you'd change the WORLD.
Only it doesn't work that way. If you were just skinny, you'd just be skinny.
That's all.
And one day you'd stare in the mirror and wonder where your life went.
Confidence starts NOW. Beauty starts NOW. Talent and strength and winning starts NOW. Skinny is just something you can become. Beautiful and confident is something you ARE. You have to let it out, stop promising yourself that ONCE YOU'RE SKINNY you'll change the world. Change it RIGHT NOW.
And all that stupid advertising for who you should be? GARBAGE. You're ALREADY beautiful. You shouldn't need a number on the scale or on your pants to tell you that. Just because some magazine editor somewhere in their basement came up with this amazing idea to make people spend gazillions on products that are as easy to create as air shouldn't DEFINE you. Who CARES what people think? They don't even think what we think they think, because "they" are "us." And we don't watch people as much as we think we are watched.
Yeah. I've been cheated. Lied to. Hoodwinked.
I'm already beautiful.
I don't need a magazine or anything else to tell me that.