A/N- okay, so this chapter isn’t much longer, it’s actually quite short. But it just works, maybe, I guess. The lyrics are old, Christina Aguilera actually, ha-ha, reflections.

Chapter 8

“Everyday it’s as if I play a part. Now I see if I wear a mask I can fool the world, but I cannot fool my heart.”

From the minute a person is born, they start dying. I had either been fading away, or someone else was taking over and who I used to be was left to rot. I think the problem was that Katelyn took over.

I think everyone has a Katelyn in one form or another, you know, that little voice in your head that makes you second guess yourself, question if you should be allowed to continue breathing? Yeah, that’s who I and a few other friends call Katelyn. I’m not really sure how to describe her, but my friend, Katt, does. She explained her like this:

Katelyn is so much more than a voice. She’s me, only pretty and skinny and smart and perfect. She’s as gorgeous as she is smart and perfect as perfect can get. She’s what I wish I was.

I couldn’t get rid of that part of me either. Sometimes I wasn’t sure that I wanted her gone because she was my one way road to perfection, to acceptance. Like Katt said, I wanted to be more than just a nice personality and high grades. Complete the trifecta, darling.

Katelyn is the eating disorder and the cutter in the back of my mind. The girl who was slowly killing me IS killing Katt, that worries me a lot. I really needed to find myself quickly, before Katelyn became me. I still had the mirror in my hand, though I was almost too afraid to look into the foreign piece of glass.

The image it reflected was also a stranger because I didn’t know who I was or who I was supposed to be anymore. As I looked at the picture, the glove, and the leotard; I realized those things didn’t make me who I was or who I am now. I make me who I am and to find out who that is, I had to ask the mirror. A mirror sees everything about you; all your secrets, all your lies, but it also sees the truth if you look hard enough. I figured that the truth is what you get in life and it’s up to you to build yourself up around it, not take the “easy” way out to bleed away who you are, or numb yourself to the truth with drugs. I’ve learned nothing from listening to the putdowns from other people. Every time I tried to compare myself to others, I lost and when I tried to search outside myself, I didn’t exist anymore. Peter was right.

So, here’s my opinion, that Shelby was only half way right when she said that from the moment you’re born, people start taking pieces of you and you’re lucky just to survive. People have taken a lot of pieces away from me, I don’t think I ever had a chance. But that was where she stopped her opinion. We both had more of a chance and here’s where my opinion comes in.

I didn’t have a chance until I stopped looking at the gaps and missing pieces, and started looking at what I DID have. So I guess this is what builds a person: faith and truth.

“Why must we all conceal what we think, how we feel. Must there be a secret me I’m forced to hide?”