Reflection of Beauty

I am beautiful. Through years of struggle, strife and anger, I have realized this. I was not forged by fire, I was not bloodied by some ferocious battle. The battle I fought to become who I am today was quiet; it was brutal, and it was worth it. I never had a personality growing up; I didn’t have time for a personality. There was only time for strategy against a foe that had no face and no name. A war that was fought when the day was done and the night washed in the terrors of the dark, the voices like smoke seducing me into a lull, gently smothering me. When I was seven I had my first panic attack. It felt a pressure in my chest, like someone had placed an anchor in my stomach that was going to drag me down into the dark and the cold. My mother told me that I was being pathetic, that all of this was in my mind, and if I didn’t stop crying she’d give me something to cry about. I believed her, but the panic and the pain wouldn’t go away, and for once I didn’t want them to. I wanted them to stay, I wanted to feel this for as long as I could, it had been so long, so long since I had felt… anything.
     I am beautiful. Though I did not notice, I became stronger as the battle continued, with the darkness adding another foe to his army, one that was not dark but instead a bright, bright, too bright red that flickered and moved and struck at a pace that made my head spin. There were times when I felt everything and it was too much to focus on, too much to bear, and then there were the times when I felt nothing at all. The two extremes of emotion were all that I could have, and everything was wrong. Mother was angry constantly, and Papa wasn’t ever home to help us, so my brothers and I sought protection from one another. We were never hit, never “truly abused”, but there was a fear that sank into our very bones, that permeated everything in the house until none of us wanted to go home. We would try our very hardest to be good for Mother and have the house tidied and clean and dinner on the table, piping hot for when she came home. However, we were only children, and children are meant to play, to make mistakes with only small reprimands because we were yet young and learning. She did not see it this way.
     I am beautiful. If memory serves, it was my seventh or eighth grade year that my oldest brother left to join the Army. My second oldest brother, Anthony, was in high school and had decided upon Levon’s departure that the house was of no concern to him. He went out with his friends nearly every night, leaving me alone with my mother. She had gotten slightly better over the years, but still had moments where she would rage at one of us upon our entry to our ‘home’, whether it be for grades, the cleanliness of our rooms, or whether the chores had been done to her liking. Without my brothers next to me, I felt weak. My anxiety grew stronger, and my depression threatened total control. It wasn’t long after Levon left that I gave up the fight against my anxiety and my depression and let them consume me.  My grades dropped, my appetite decreased, and my friends left. My mother became more and more agitated by smaller and smaller details, and my papa would simply come home from work and hide in their bedroom. I decided around the middle of my seventh grade year that I was done existing. That if I could not contribute positively to the world, then I was wasting our precious oxygen and I might as well remedy that. My anxiety calmed during the week that I had planned it out, and my depression felt less cold and more like the warm comfort of a parent consoling their child. Because I still felt weak, I had decided to down a cocktail of medicines when I went to sleep, overdosing and simply falling to sleep. Obviously this did not work out as planned. As I left school that Friday, I remember that someone smiled at me. Actually smiled, one of those true smiles that lifts the cheeks and makes those little crinkles around the eyes and just shines so beautifully… and it was for me! I couldn’t believe that someone would smile like that to me, and that moment of indecision saved my life that weekend.
     I am beautiful. Even with me feeling stronger than I ever had, after my failed attempt, the depression came back stronger than ever before, almost as if I had wounded it by surviving another day. With my depression came also my anxiety. Talking to people that I hadn’t known for quite some time made me so extremely nervous that it would make me sick to my stomach, and I would have a migraine for quite some time afterward. I became more and more self-deprecating and closed off and actually broke a mirror in a blind rage. I would come home from school feeling like the scum of the Earth, like I was unfit to breathe the same air as my classmates, but instead of not reacting and not feeling, like before, I reacted quite violently. I was tired of being stepped on, tired of going to school to meet sharp words and then going home to meet killing words. Tired of pretending like everything was fine when all I wanted to do was scream until my throat was bloody, rip and tear at myself until society accepted me, my mother accepted me. So I did. I would seclude myself from humanity, go out into the woods around my house that no one else went into, and I would walk until my feet would carry me no more and then I’d fall to my knees and scream. It was childish, but it was all that kept me somewhat sane. I scarred my body so much my eighth grade year. Burn after burn, cut after cut, am I beautiful, yet? Am I perfect, yet? Society never answered, only sat up there on its throne gazing down at me with judgement, and so I continued. I continued to scar my body and my mind and my soul; I continued to starve myself just so people I didn’t care about would accept me.
     I am beautiful. The day that my eyes were finally opened was a cold day, which month, I can’t recall, sometime in my sophomore year. I had come home from school and finished my homework, fixed dinner for my mother and my papa, neglecting to eat myself, and I had gone on my normal walk. I was listening to some music as I went, and when I looked up next I had come upon my glen. It was littered with bright yellow, orange, and red leaves, but for some reason I couldn’t bring my feet to carry me into it, so instead I climbed a tree on its edge. I let my head fall back and looked at the sky, remembering my day. That morning had been frustrating, but school was wonderful. My friends knew that there was something bugging me, but what it was they did not know for sure. I was just dozing off when a branch snapped somewhere near me, and I sat up looking around for the source of the noise. Out of the brush, not far from where I was, crept out two tiny fox cubs with their mother. The mother started snuffling around while the fox cubs played around, leaves flying in their wake. As ridiculous as it may sound, I started to wonder what they would do if they also had depression. To this day I don’t know where that thought came from, or why it helped me, but it did. I laughed the loudest laugh that had come from me since I first waged battle against my depression. The darkness seemed to flinch from the bell-like laugh that echoed through the glen, and the foxes bolted away, but it didn’t matter. The battle was mine for the first time in a long time, and I wasn’t going to give up my ground.
     I am beautiful. Even when my depression lost its ground, even when I was surrounded by people I loved with all my heart, I still couldn’t see myself as beautiful. I was the ordinary girl, the one that no one really needed, but the one who wanted to stay and see all of the amazing things that the world could give me. I was the one who comforted others when they felt down, I was the protector of everyone else so that nobody else would have to wage war against the darkness like I had. This year, though, was the one where I finally understood. I am not physically beautiful. I am not the beautiful that would make a stranger whirl around for a second glance as they pass me on the street. I am not the beautiful that is kindness, I still have my moments where I am crass and need to be gentler. But I am beautiful for the fact that I am me. I am me and no one can change that. I am imperfect; I am blunt; I have moments where my emotions get the best of me, but I am me. At the end of the day, the mirror reflects the person that I am. It may not reflect who I wish to be, but that journey will take some time.
In the end…. I am beautiful.