The Truth of the Butterflies

Next up this week is Celeste’s candid self reflection on her struggles with an eating disorder, and how she’s been able to grow and flourish. My earliest memory of clear dissatisfaction with my body was when I was six years old, pressing my body against the horizontal wood slabs of my bed frame, examining the skin of my stomach poking between the gaps.  By 10 years old, I was methodically tightening my family’s belt collection over my entire torso, desperately wishing the leather would squish my body smaller.  “You are fat, disgusting, weird, ugly, worthless, less than.” 12 years old and these words colored my life.  My  words. Words I knew defined me because I was the taller, weirder, different younger sister of a popular, petite, pretty sister. Because I did really well in school, but was never the best. Because my mom discredited my hard work by saying school just came easy to me. My words never went away. They were with me in the morning as I grab...

I wrote this two years ago for a section on bullying in my British Literature class in high school... You’re all alone, all you have is you. You’re stuck with only the thoughts in your head You are told every single unbearable day that You “don’t belong”, “that you’re fat”, and the worst of all, “kill yourself”. Soon enough you’ll to start to believe their words. You’ve become numb, your daily routine getting pushed into lockers, your books knocked out of your hands At lunch time you hide. At the end of the day you run. Everyday you pray for “No School” or somehow everyone in school would be absent, You start to contemplate running away or even dying because you’ve convinced yourself nobody would notice anyway. You can’t wait for the moment you walk into your house, it’s the one place you feel loved, the one place you belong. You dread the moment you need to leave for school. You constantly wonder what is wrong with you and why nobody likes you. ...