What restricts me
from obtaining beauty?
My size?
My clothes?
My personality?

My friends say
“You’re beautiful!”
with their skinny legs,
small arms,
and tiny waists.

Everywhere I look
I see girls like them
shaped like them;
dressed like them;
exactly like them;

Perfection.

A light bulb flickers
an idea forms
I remember it’s fluorescent rays
a streak of white
against a dark grey.

A thought so terrible it is
only heard in hushed whispers
in dark corners.
I thought “I’ll starve.”

I’ll let my stomach turn to nothingness.
No tiny pieces of food will enter.
No water will end the thirst
in my personal Sahara Desert.

I’ll become a barren land
uninhabitable to any man
where all things die.

The idea started its journey
struck my bones
vibrated all around
my brain its fertile land.

It surfaced
fresh in my mind like a spring daisy.
Its roots took over the soil
stopping the growth other plants.

My goal was to be exactly like you
not because I wanted to
because I needed too.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder?
But I am told what beauty is
I am told my body is imperfect.

Curved all wrong,
hair too short,
eyes are too large,
head too round.

Nothing inside me.
No feelings in me.
This must be what beauty
feels like.

I am now a size two,
but happiness
does not consume my thoughts.

My thoughts are hollow;
not full of treasures
like laughter or joy.

The flower’s roots
have taken over the soil
killed everything around,
but it is all fine.

Because to everyone
I am perfection;
I am beautiful.

WORDS FROM THE AUTHOR
Ally Bishop

This poem showcases the emotional distress I had about my body when I was a freshman in high school. I compared myself to magazine clippings, models, and even my friends. In my eyes, I was not beautiful because I was not the size of a twig. My beauty was nonexistent when I looked in the mirror, and all the compliment I would receive seemed like comments of pity because I did not fit the standard of beauty. I wanted to write this poem to share my experiences with anorexia, and make a statement that the idea of beauty which society promotes is unhealthy.

REVISION DECISION

My biggest revision of this poem was deleting multiple stanzas that I used to describe models in magazines. As a freshman in high school, I compared myself to models in magazines 24/7 because I believed that the only way to be beautiful was to be exactly like them. These stanzas, though very powerful, distracted from what I wanted to be the main point of the poem. I wanted the poem to focus more on society’s distorted form of beauty as a whole rather than one component.