My name is Anna and I live in the City of Angels. Located deep in the heart of Southern California, Los Angeles is called home by more than ten million people. I am one of those people and this is my story. I am of average height and build, or at least I was before I got sick. My ordeal started from a deep hatred of myself and grew with the comments people made. The comments were like gasoline to an ever growing wildfire. Nobody knew of the suffering I felt deep inside. Nobody heard the voices in my head that screamed at me and begged me not to eat. They beg me not to give in and to stay strong. They beg me to slowly ruin my life.
“I’m anorexic, I need help,” I slowly wrote over and over in my journal. Who am I kidding? I’ll never get help. I’m too strong for that. I will get myself to a weight that is so low even my biggest enemies will be jealous. I’ll prove that I can’t be brought down. Life is sometimes unfair. It always seems like no matter what I do it is never enough. As I drop pounds, I get fatter. As I drop pounds, I feel the need to exercise even more. As I drop pounds and pass my goal weight, I need to restrict more. I’m fat. I don’t understand, I just want to be perfect. Why bother trying to get better until I’m perfect?
I am a victim of myself, tearing myself down before I can put myself up. I am my own worst enemy and I crave the impossible. I starve myself to reach perfection which is a goal I can’t obtain. They will never understand. It’s not for the popularity, it’s not to be envied, and it’s not really even for beauty. I know when I kiss porcelain or dig my nails into my hands to stop myself from eating that the ugly truth is staring me right in the face. I know that this isn’t the scenic route to beauty. I know that there is nothing wrong with my mirror but my mind is distorting the image in front of me. I’ve paved my own route through hell.
Going through hell to get to where I want is worth it to me. For me, it’s not about the size, the weight, the inches or how other people look. For me, it’s about feeling comfortable in my own body and not seeing this beast whenever I look in the mirror. I don’t see what most people see when I stare at my reflection. Most people are disgusted when they see me. My arms and legs are so thin that they look like toothpicks. My long auburn hair coming out in clumps from my head and my finger nails brittle and cracked. The deep cut on the knuckle of my pointer finger from hitting my teeth as I force myself to throw up the mere 200 calories I have eaten in a day. My torso is riddled with burn marks and white scars against tan skin from years of punishing myself for eating. My face is gaunt and my gums are receding from a continuous cycle of binging and purging. My fingers are constantly picking at my skin looking for fat to pinch. The bruises all over my body make it painful to sit and remind me of what a failure I am. I will forever be damaged and this will never go away. I will forever be destroyed.

At moments of weakness I wish someone would ask me if I’m alright just so I can finally tell them that I’m not. My struggle with anorexia is like a street fight. There are so many onlookers by nobody offers to help. None of my so called “friends”, my parents, or my teachers offers to talk about what is going on. Nobody notices the tall girl walking around in a baggy sweatshirt in the middle of summer. Nobody at my house notices that I eat at most once a day because frankly, they don’t care. Nobody notices the shallow cuts on my wrists or the deeper ones hidden under my clothing. Nobody notices that living in Los Angeles is by far the worst thing for my disease. I have to go day to day watching thin girls walk past me, staring at me, pushing me to beat them. It feels as if the magazines are looking at me begging me to not get better, the stick thin models that grace the pages would never go as far as eating a full meal. Nobody notices that while my parents push me to eat, I’m pushing myself farther away from food. They don’t notice how utterly miserable I am and how much I hate everything and everyone around me. Nobody notices that I am slowly pushing away from my boyfriend even though he loves me. Nobody notices that I am slowly killing myself. Nobody notices me.

I am a high school senior with so much potential ahead of me. Ask any of my classmates what their goal is and most will answer “I want to have a family”, “I want to be insert a profession here”, or “I want to do all of the above”. My goal is to get so skinny that it hurts to look at me. I will become that girl who is so thin that if she turns sideways she will disappear. It is my life and I will hide behind my problems to keep from seeing reality. I feel that if I can see my collarbones and hipbones, I’ll have finally made it. I will finally be to a point that looking into the mirror doesn’t disgust me. I will finally get to a point where I’m not ashamed to have people stare at me in public because I know that no matter what I will always be skinnier than them. They will never have that space between their thighs that I long for deep into the night. They will never be skin and bone like I am. They will never be perfect like I will be when I finally get there.

I am as fragile as a china doll, my heart fluttering like tiny hummingbird wings against my ribs. As I look at my face in the mirror I realize that I only feel beautiful when I’m starving away the ugly. My whole life I have heard that even if other people can’t see it, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t beautiful. I am not beautiful and I wish people would stop trying to tell me otherwise. I have made up my mind of what I need to do. I know that no matter how much suffering I have to put my family through to get there, I will be thin. That is what keeps me going.

I don’t think I’ve ever really thought that I will ever be okay. When I least expect it I get that compulsory urge to stick my fingers down my throat until there is nothing left. In that moment, that is what I did. My life was ended because of a never ending hatred of myself. The last thing that I saw was the blue water, white porcelain, and a pink slip of fabric as my head slowly started to sink closer and closer to the water. Black spots begin appearing in my vision and my breathing started to slow. The last thing I realized before I was pulled into the dark, deep abyss of death was that I had finally reached perfection. But now instead of watching what I eat and burning what I never had, I am watching over the City of Angels and I can’t think of any place I would rather be.