My life has not always been full of happiness, love, and the burning passion to try and live my life to the fullest. I haven't always tried my best to succeed, or try hard in school. I knew I had a problem, but the biggest thing was admitting it. My world revolved around one thing, and that was where it all began.

"Pass this to Jessi." a girl with a quiet voice said to another student. A crumpled, ugly, off white piece of paper landed on my desk, I opened it. I saw the words I least wanted to read. In big black letters the words I see are: "I know your secret." I think to myself, how do they know? can they tell? is it that noticeable? From that moment on everything changed. I seemed to go into a deep depression.

In sixth grade I was unhappy of the person I was and how I looked on the outside. No matter what anyone told me, whether it be a youth leader, pastor, teacher, friend, or parent, I didn't believe it. No matter what I was told I had seemingly convinced myself one thing and I had my mind set on that and nothing could change my mind.

No one knew about my so called "problem", and no one would know. I had wanted to change what I looked like more than anything I had ever wanted, but the main thing I wanted to change was my weight. One of the first days of sixth grade a boy came up to me and told me I was fat and needed to lose about 30lbs. at first I was confused because I only weighed around 85lbs. But to me people's opinions of me mattered more than anything else. So that day on I went on what I thought was a diet.

I then started to skip meals, and stay as far away from food as possible. Nothing I did seemed to be working, I decided I would try something else. I started making myself throw up every time I ate, which was very seldom considering I had not been eating. Later on I would then realize throwing up was the biggest mistake of my life. To me I was becoming what I thought was happy, but later to learn it would start to consume my life.

I lost a lot of weight, and some of my friends started to notice. I became weaker, and way too skinny. Because I was throwing up after every meal I consumed, my throat started becoming soar and my stomach started getting smaller. After a while it would only take a single bite to make me feel full, and if I was hungry or my stomach growled, I told myself I wasn't hungry. My immune system was getting weaker and I started getting sick more often. When I looked in the mirror all I saw was fat, but there was none.

This continued throughout sixth grade all the way up until ninth grade. That's when it hit me that I should tell one of my friends. The first person I told had to be someone I could trust, someone who wouldn't tell anyone else, a person I had known for a long time. I told my best friend and she was there for me, she cried with me when I told her and she held my hand as I shook. She convinced me that I needed to tell an adult and one that I was close to. I then decided to tell a women at my youth group that was like a mother to me. She helped me through it and of course cried as I told her everything. She told me that if I continued she was going to have to tell my parents because it was then to the point where it was really starting to harm me. I didn't want my parents to know so I tried to stop and of course you can't just stop over night so it took about 6 months for me to completely stop. But I did it and all because my friend, the woman at my youth group and of course God.

After this happened to me, I got the courage to stand up in front of my church camp group, adults and all and tell them all of my story. When I did that, 6 other girls came up to me and told me that if it weren't for me sharing they would never have had the courage to tell the pastor and get the help they needed. That day on I knew that if it weren't for that tragic time in my life I would never have learned the true beauty I had inside.

To this day I regret it all and wish I had only seen the true beauty others see in me. I told myself and continue to tell myself that " I am God's creation and no matter what I think of myself, Gods opinion is the only one that matters." I learned that we all have our flaw, but that makes us who we are.