Outward appearances have always been important to me. When I was in elementary school and my mother came into my room in the morning to get me dressed, we were sure to get into an argument about what I would be wearing to school. I always wanted to wear dresses, but when it was cold outside my mother insisted that I wear pants.

ˇ°But pants are ugly! I would repeatedly complain.

Usually, I would end up winning the argument and would wear a dress to school. In fact, when I was in first grade, I was known as the ˇ°girl with 100 dresses. Even my teachers complimented my appearance and showed an appreciation for the long, flowing dresses I sported on an almost daily basis. When someone would say something positive about what I was wearing, my day was made.

I simply enjoyed the attention I got from looking nice, so my desire to have a pleasing outward apperance remained healthy and seemingly normal. However, when I discovered that I could manipulate my body in order to ˇ°improve my appearnce, my obsession became dangerous.

I began dieting for the first time in fifth grade. I was reading the nutrition facts label on the back of a pudding snack I had packed in my lunch for school. I looked at the fat content of the pudding, and it occurred to me that I could shrink my body by eating fewer calories from fat. I announced to my friends sitting at the table with me that I was going on a diet to lose weight. Most of them objected, saying that I was already too thin, but their comments didn't matter to me. I was determined to alter my body.

In the beginning, these diets usually only lasted for a week or two at a time, but I developed a lasting love-hate relationship with my body, and by the time I was in eighth grade, I was dieiting every day of my life. What began as wanting to change my body and ˇ°tone up eventually turned into anorexia.

I began weighing myself on a daily basis, and every time I lost a pound I felt euphoric and closer to my goal of achieving perfection in my outward apperance. I knew deep down that my attemps to make myself appear beautiful on the outside were a desperate effort to fix the things I was feeling on the inside, but focusing on my outer shell was far easier than addressing all the external issues.

I chose to ignore what I was feeling on the inside, and I continued on with my eating disorder. It was not until I reached a sickly eighty-six pounds that I realized I was killing myself and creating the very thing I feared. By starving myself down to a skeletal apperance, I had become ugly, which was what I had dreaded for so long. Once I realized that I had become unappealing, I knew it was time to change. It was time to seek help and finally admit that I had a problem.

So, I saw a counselor. And it turns out that my deep desire to achieve external perfection was a desperate cry for love. I simply wanted to be loved, and I thought that by being ˇ°beautiful I would be deserving of love. But, what I did not realize all along was that I had always been deserving of love. I just needed to love myself before I could let others love me.