This is a personal zone. Souls bared and whatnot. Read. If you don't "get it", ignore. If you are offended at all, negative comments not welcome.

Go here. For those of you who can't visit this link due to age, this goes to People magazine. There is a photo of a very attractive Tyra Banks on it, in a fire-engine-red one-piece bathing suit. The headline is "You Call This Fat?".

No. I don't.

But unfortunately, the people that girls like me listen to do.

America has this image of people that I call "The Beautiful Person". The impression--inforced by the volume of negative press around our modern-day pantheon of gods (we traded Athena for Paris Hilton. Some trade)--is that they are perfect. They have money, so they don't have to want for anything. Everyone knows who they are, so they are loved. They are talented, and they appear in the lime-light without obvious effort. And of course, they have perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect clothing and THE perfect figure. The Beautiful Person is who everyone wants to be, and the fame somehow outshines the failures, the hurt and the pain behind the shell of perfection stars create around themselves.

Sane, rational people can disprove this. All you have to do is draw names out of a hat and you can disprove this. Stars are failures just like everyone else. They're not perfect. They shine because they pay a lot of money for makeup and trainers and nutritionists and doctors. They go home, and either party or cry or sink into a fug of I-don-t-really-care. But there's the shimmering god between the reality of their lives and what we see, and the Beautiful Person can never fall. When the mask slips, sure, a photograph is caught. Ten perfect pictures usually follow.

And girls like me need their gods. Because girls like me aren't always sane.

There is a demographic that people don't like to talk about. It's called "Sensative People". I am one of them. We are thinned skinned. Fragile. Frail. Like a delicate microphone next to a maxed jet turbine, a set of night-vision goggles in a flood-lamp world. Things don't "roll off like water off a duck's back". They stick. We don't learn how not to get hurt. We just learn how to hide the pain.

Most people look at the Beautiful Person and see the perfection, hear the lie that we need to look JUST LIKE THEM (and if you say that's not true, you've never seen a weight-loss commercial. "I lost twenty pounds on THIS pill--only for serious weight loss! If you take it, you can look just like me!) and move on, recognising the impossible for what it is. Sensative people see it, hear it, and find only criticism. We don't have what we should. We should try harder. We need to try harder. Look at all the things we SHOULD do that we AREN'T doing.

It builds up. It gets to be too much. It pounds on us, grinds into us, and streaches us so tight with that day-dream of perfection that it doesn't take much to make us snap.

Someone dies.

Pet dies.

We get hurt physically.

We get hurt emotionally.

We're abused.

Our parents divorce.

Some girls use drugs and alcohol (same difference). Some girls become anorexic or bulemic, go to bed with more food in their fridge than some third-world girls will see in a year, looking like a Holocaust victim or a ww2 POW from Bataan. Some girls cut.

None of it works. NONE. OF. IT. WORKS. But we do it. And people watch girls like me on TV with their fingers down their throat or their blood dripping down their arms, wonder why we do it, and then change the channel to watch The Beautiful Person, in her perfect size-two dress, act beautiful for the camera so she can get a jump start on her modeling career. Someone that girls like me would kill to be...but that girls like me can NEVER be.

Ever.

Tyra Banks gets critized for being 162 pounds. She's still hotter than any four suns put together, but since she's no size two, she's mocked. Do you have any idea what kind of message that sends to a girl with a fraction of a fraction of her money, same weight, who doesn't even understand why the things that make other girls laugh hurts her so much? Do you wonder why girls diet to the point that a ten-year-old eats q-tips and the corners of her textbooks so that she won't get hungry? Look at the one-eyed god we all pray to every night: Skinny girl, built boy. Skinny girl. Built boy. How the hell can we have a news program on the anorexia epidemic in girls, the steroid epidemic in boys, and then cut to a commerical displaying perfect men and women celebrating a diet pill, a diet program or an excercise machine?

I am about five-seven. I weigh 140 pounds. I have been told, in a tone indicating that 140 is fat, that I do not look like I weigh 140 pounds. I have the self-esteem of a floor mat and the self-confidence of a shadow. I prefer to fade when any sort of attention is payed me. When I fail at anything, any little thing, it's like a part of me goes insane. I do not think I'm pretty. I do feel like I'm fat. I do not feel like I am a good artist by any streach of the word "good". The fact that I know just how far from reality those statements are does not change the fact that those statements are how I feel, every minute of every day.

Because I see people do better than me, seemingly with less effort, possibly with less talent, and because the people who could tell me I'm good enough pass me by every day.

Now. For the part that will piss off just about everyone who is not a practicing Christian.

The greatist hypocratsy I have seen in modern socioty is when religion--specifically, mine--is critized for being a crutch.

I believe that every man, woman and child on this earth was born with a searingly large hole in their soul. I see the evidance of this every minute of every day, starting when I look in the mirror. And everyone feels this hole. And all the hurt, all the ignorant harm done, makes that hole bigger every. single. day. Sensative people like me feel it strongly. We are told we are broken because of that, and that we need to grow a thicker skin (about as effective as telling a dwarf to grow another three to four feet). And that only makes it worse. And when our world is finally spiraling out of control, we try something, anything, to make it stop. Stop the world, I want to get off.

I was hurt very badly by someone I should have been able to trust. And when I finally understood it, and I ran away from him, I was hurt by someone else I trusted and loved. I was told things that I feared were true about me. It was the emotional equivilant of being beaten down, every single day.

I was willing to do anything to make it go away. And I did. And it didn't work.

The only thing I have ever found that made the hollowness go away for a little while was Jesus. And when the hollowness came back and swallowed me, Jesus was the only thing that pulled me out of it. It's not fashionable. It doesn't toe the line with the status quo. It pisses off people that I would dearly love to call "friend". But by God--and indeed, By God--it works.

So you want to call it a crutch? Fine. Call it a crutch. It's a crutch that doesn't require I get drunk, starve myself or sit on the edge of a bathtub with a razorblade in my hand. Jesus is a better option than a razor. It helps to know, that when the guilt of imaginary failure is about to eat me alive, I KNOW that failure, real or imaginary, doesn't mean anything. That even if it is real, Jesus forgave it. And loves me in spite of it. And it's a love that won't vanish, won't forget about me, won't retreat into a world of it's own making. It's real. And even if it doesn't always chase the hollowness away, it precludes the insanity. Precludes starvation or drugs or a razor.

I won't blame anyONE for this problem. I do blame television and the media for creating the most false god in the history of religion, worship and idols. We didn't raise up a golden cow. We invented a shimmering electric lie of perfection, and are doing NOTHING to counter the damage it does to girls like me.

And I will say, to the anger of other people, that the answer is to start with knowing that God has forgiven you for both the real failure and the imagined one that the electric goddess has thrown on you, and to build from there.

This is meant to be neither funny nor entertaining. This is dead serious. We've raised a generation, my generation, on electric lies and a spiritual diet of fast food, and now we just don't understand why girls and boys like me willingly harm themselves in the myriad ways we've found. But you know that age old parable about the house built on rock and the house built on sand? We've allowed my generation to build ourSELVES on nothing but cultural, electrical, glittering sand, and it doesn't take long for life to erode it.

The two links below are for anyone who has EVER, EVER felt the way I have. One is to a Christian site for self-injury. The other, a (presumably) secular site on eating disorders. If you need them, or even think you need them, use them. If either site is applicable to you, what you're doing won't work. It'll only make it worse.

Speaking from personal experiance.

It will only make it worse.

http://www.self-injury.org/

http://www.something-fishy.org/default.php - Chelsea Gaither