Miss VIP October, 2013 | Page 27

and March. I was under a lot of pressure because it was my last year of high school and I was dreading my final exams. I started to eat too much again, and in a couple of weeks I was once again the same fat and ugly girl that I was before. Some people around me started to notice, most of all some relatives, and their words really broke me. I kept eating, because I told myself that even when I was thinner people didn’t care about me. They didn’t want to get to know me, boys didn’t ask me to go out with them. So why should I have tried to be thin if things weren’t changing for me? So I kept eating, until I had the courage to look at myself in the mirror and to see what I had become. I tried some of the clothes I had bought after I lost weight and of course they didn’t fit me anymore. I knew I was fatter, but having the reality in front of my eyes, seeing the too small clothes, was simply too much. I started feeling bad about myself again. I refused to go out, I spent entire afternoons and weekends in my room, without seeing any of my friends. Then May arrived, and the exams were just a month away. That pressure, added to my weight and my usual shyness and social anxiety, was simply too much. I started to think that I needed someone to talk to, but I didn’t know who. Of course I could’ve talked to my friends, but I didn’t want to, because there they were, beautiful, skinny and so easy going with boys. I felt different, separated even, from them. My parents were out of discussion, because my father had lost his job and there was a lot of tension and troubles in my house, I just didn’t want to be another problem for them. DIFFERENT I thought I could manage it. I thought it was just another tough period, and that I could overcome it alone, as I’d always done before. I still don’t know what made that difficult time different from all the others. Maybe it was the fact that I had no idea of what to do with my life after high school, the fact that my future scared me rather than excited me. I felt lik e everything I did was pointless, because there was no way I could get rid of those negative thoughts. High school or not, I knew I was always going to feel uncomfortable with new people, always ashamed of myself, and let’s be clear, I knew that being the way I was, so scared all the time, I was going to fail at everything that I felt like doing in my life. I was just hopeless and I guess the idea of not being able to escape of myself was what made me reckless and cut in that shower. It’s just, I was so sick of feeling hurt and bad about myself, but it was a kind of pain that wasn’t touchable, because it only existed in my mind. I knew that is was real, though, so I wanted to be able to feel it, to taste it, to demonstrate I wasn’t just paranoid, that all those feelings were really killing me, even if my body was fine and nobody could have { } I wish I hadn’t been so scared all the time and that I had taken more risks.