People, when they say they are hungry, describe hunger as a feeling.

I am confused.
I am joyful.
I am hungry.
Hunger is no feeling of mine.
It is a state of being.

I am not just hungry, I am made of hunger, the absence of filling that has swallowed me up, no pun intended, the glass palace in which I fold my pale legs in a graceful arch and stare up at the perfect bubble of nonexistence looming above that I have created.

If I had to pinpoint a moment when the girl in my head appeared, the one with the slicked-on lip gloss smile and stick-straight blown out plastic barbie hair, I would say it was the moment I looked around at the people in my brand-new neighborhood, and decided I would be reborn.

No more little girl with her patches of childlike softness, no ma’am, no sir. I would remake myself to be what other people wanted me to be. I molded myself like a stiff, grey clay, working my arms and legs over and over again until they smoothed out into lithe lines. I composed my open, freckled face into a masqueraded facade, I became a clown with angular eyebrows and hidden uniform teeth. I folded myself smaller and smaller until I tucked myself tidily into this new societal form, the one that the people around me started to smile at. I started to smile, too, a humorless smirk of the mouth that turned up the edges of my cheeks and hid my giggly dimples. I had achieved their definition of perfection.

But one often finds that, when they have finished their puzzle, a crucial piece is missing.

Hunger was no longer my pastime, it was my habit. Then my hobby. Then, as I began to push away my lunch because, hey, I had already eaten half an apple for breakfast, it became my obsession.

120. 116. 110. 109.5. The numbers dwindled into a forgotten drone, and with it, so did I. Who cared if I wore three sweaters in the middle of June because I could not stop the shivers? I had eaten no lunch and no dinner. I didn’t mind, didn’t care if my friends’ looks of admiration turned to concern and then to alarm. You’re too thin. Are you alright? What have you eaten today? Can you hear me? I shut them out. I was in control. I knew exactly what I was doing. I was ruler of my own empty kingdom. My glass palace was near completion.

It was when I went back to visit my hometown that I started pounding on the walls I had trapped myself in. My friend walked past me without a second glance, looking for me, and then turned and did a double take. She hadn’t recognized me. It was then that I realized that that was because I was no longer “me”. The childlike girl I had trapped in the dungeons of my glass castle had been starved into submission.
With every dictatorship, there is a rebellion. There is always a second chance. That girl, the one who sat on the throne and waved away the plates of delicacies placed before her, she needed to go. I had had enough of myself.

So I took my hammer, the one thing I had left, my control of my own self, and I swung it in a wide arc, letting go at the crucial moment.
I smashed the fragile walls of my supposedly sturdy palace with one blow. There was no constitution I had to follow, this new rebel leader reasoned. Hadn’t I recognized my own handwriting? By letting go of control, I pulled the supports out from under the walls I had painstakingly crafted, never realizing that if the palace had fallen to non-local forces, the glass of my fortress would have tumbled down on top of me in millions of shards, slicing me to ribbons and destroying me with it.

It took a long time to establish a new government, one that let the freckled, humorously childlike girl out of the dungeons. After all, the line between anarchy and chaos is thin and unsure. It took nearly a year for the imprisoned girl to recover; the ideals to which she had been submitted while in captivity were long and difficult, and she had nearly lost her voice. It took many attempts for her to stand, and many more for her to speak again. But now she rules, not with a commanding hand, but with a kind one, letting her auburn hair down and turning her green eyes to the sky. The clouds have diminished now, and the shards of my glass palace have been sculpted into memorials, for those who wish to view but never to experience. The houses are made of soft grass and sweet-smelling brick, now, stronger and more sensible than before. There is still hunger in my kingdom, but it is few and far between, and there are those who are now strong enough to fight it. I have a force of 125, to be exact, and although the number bounces up and down sometimes with the tide, it never plummets as it did in the famine of the years before. My kingdom is strong, and my people wise. By befriending myself, I allowed all the pieces of my puzzle to be found.
I feel pride now, rather than hunger.

I feel joy now, rather than sadness.

I feel love, rather than uncontrolled hatred.

I no longer wish to lose everything that has been given to me, and I give to myself and others rather than take unceasingly. There are some who would believe that to be myself is to defy the social norm, to take away the very definition of our country, that girls and boys ought to be and look and act a certain way, that the anarchy that rules me now is not freely built, but simply temporary.

But there are worse things to build.