Ever since I was young I was been bullied, for everything from not being able to read well to not wearing the right clothes and not watching the right shows. As I got older and I frequently changed schools, and was bullied everywhere I went, I began to believe the awful things people would say. I thought that because so many people said the same sorts of things about me that they must be true.

When I was about 11 I began to injure myself. I would get so frustrated and mad that I couldn't just be “normal” that I would claw at my skin with my fingernails and punch my thighs till they bruised. I became convinced that if I could just fit in and be “normal” that everything would be OK and my life would get better. I began to act like the popular girls in school and dress and talk like them and eventually I became sort of popular but my self hate and depression did not stop. If anything it got worse.

I was so eager to impress these girls that I would do anything they told me to, including bully other girls. It breaks my heart that I did that, even then it broke me. I began to hate myself even more. One day when I was putting up posters in my room I became very frustrated and took one of the tacks I was holding and used it to cut myself. The relief from the frustration was instant. Soon cutting became my cure for everything. At first it was just shallow cuts done with a tack or a safety pin but soon that was no longer enough and I began to use anything I could get my hands on.

I was almost 13 when the other girls that I hung out with started honing in on my weight. I had never been “large” but I was chunky, healthy really, but thanks to the snide comments of the girls around me I started to feel that I was fat needed to lose weight. I began to skip meals. I started loosing weight fast, shocking the other girls who now wanted to know “my secret”. I loved this new found popularity and I decided that since I knew I would never be the prettiest girl that the next best thing would be the skinniest. I tried to stop eating altogether. When I was at home and alone though I would eat anything and everything I could get my hands on and stuff myself to the point were I would puke. I soon learned that if I only ate a little bit and I puked that little bit out I could lose weight much faster and wouldn't go on those huge binges.

For years this went on the cutting and the bulimia and no one ever knew about it. It went to the point that when I was 15 I began to try to kill myself. It had begun to be too much work and pressure to be the fake popular girl that everyone expected me to be. I tried many different things many different times and I thank god that none of them ever worked.

Finally two days before I had been planning to try again I met someone. It didn't all just get better but this person gave me hope. This person saw through everything that I had worked so hard to be and saw the terrified little girl inside that just wanted to be good enough. This person loved her. And I loved him back fiercely.

It’s been almost exactly a year now since I met that person and I won’t lie and say it got all better. This isn't a movie. No I still have bad days where I hate myself and hate what I've done, but I am no where near what I was. I've been in recovery from bulimia for eight months now. I still have cut a few times since then but those times have been few and far between. I’m nowhere near all better but I’m so much better than I have been. Sometimes the world gets to be too much and you feel like you have to escape and that’s OK that's normal. But don’t escape the way I did instead escape with a good book or a television series or something you enjoy doing. Most importantly you are perfect exactly the way you are never ever change yourself to fit someone else’s standards because you’re already perfect.