A Fresh Start.

My name is Luka.  Or at least, you can call me that.  I am nineteen, in college, and have no car.  I also have no money besides the loans and scholarships that are slowly dwindling to nothing.  But, more importantly, I am like you and everyone else out there.

Why I started this blog?  Well, I actually had been authors of various blogs before, copious amounts, but all have long been deleted and discarded.  I was too afraid to write myself into a small box and send it out into the internet for people whom I have never met to read.  What if they didn't like what they read?  Found me boring? I Hell, I even found myself boring when reading back over the passages and entries; why would anyone else like it?  Well, I hope this will be different.

I promised myself that this would be it.  This would be where I was absolutely honest about everything I wrote about myself.  There would be nothing to hide, nothing to alter to make myself look better or uglier.  I want this to be real.  And if no one likes it, then fine.  At least I will.

Recently, I have been losing myself in the people around me.  I am a social person--so painstakingly so that when I am not around others, I can get insanely depressed.  I think it is has everything to do with needing instant gratification and feedback from others, since I don't rely too much on my own opinion for my self-worth.  I always thought that people were what mattered and what they saw or thought, not what is internally going on inside of me.  It didn't matter if I thought I was funny, attractive, or smart; if no one else thought so, then what I thought couldn't be true.  I hate that I do that to myself.  But can you blame me?

What has actually been eating me is the fact that I have this need to be perfect.  My routine revolves around it.  When I wake up, I have to have perfectly styled hair, perfectly white teeth and fresh breath, prefect clothing choice--perfect.  But it is all about appearance and other people.  I have to say the perfect things to others in order to seem like the perfect friend/student/girlfriend/whatever.  But the thing is, I realize and even advise others that perfection is never what matters.  Yet here I am, stuck in this loop of being and acting perfect.  I want to love my flaws and mistakes, but I just see them as ugly.  Why?  I do not know.  Maybe it can all be traced back to the media or some childhood experience that has haunted me since then, but it's there.  It is there all the time.

I used to be fat.  Not obese-fat, but fat nonetheless.  Slowly, but surely, it has taken me four and a half years to lose most of the fat and to look normal.  I still have the small love handles and, in some jeans, the muffin top, because all my weight rests not in my thighs and butt, but on my torso.  I have the lollipop figure, unfortunately (well, I guess it is more popularly known as the "apple" body type, since it isn't as drastic as a lollipop.  But I use lollipop since I have rather large breasts for my frame, which only adds to the top-heaviness).  So I now fall within the healthy and normal range.  Being a woman, I have never been happy with the way I look since puberty.  It is almost a law that no woman can like the way she looks the moment she turns thirteen--that's just how it goes.  And recently, since being at college and living on my own, I have been losing even more fat (I do not use the term "weight" because I have been the same weight for a year or so now, but my fat and muscle mass are still changing), but not necessarily in the best way possible.  At first, it was eating leafy greens and colorful vegetables instead of cake and waffles.  But I had this rule which kind of started it all: never go to bed with a full stomach.  My parents, concerned about my weight years ago, always insisted that one should wait a few hours after eating in order to fall asleep.  So I just took it as "go to bed hungry," and I learned to just live with it.  So over the years, that's just how I slept.  It became such a habit that now, I cannot sleep unless I feel my stomach growling and the hunger pangs.  Even now, as I write this, I am waiting for my stomach to growl and for me to feel that emptiness so that I can finally get some sleep before classes tomorrow.  I have been waiting for about three hours now, but because I had ice cream, it is taking unusually long for me to become hungry again.  And here's the thing: I find myself gradually increasing the time between meals to have that hungry pain I have come to rejoice as my sleeping partner.  I thought that by feeling hungry more often, I would lose more fat and look better--perfect.  I know that this is unhealthy, yet my want to slim down even more is like a steam roller and crushes my common sense.  I have never wanted anything more in my life than to be beautiful, which, these days, includes being thin as well.

I have been so afraid to write down in my journal (which is on paper and is bounded) that I like feeling hungry, that I like losing weight this way, and that I don't want to stop because what if someone found it?  What if that person was my mother, my friend, my sister?  I know that they would see me as sick and needing help.  But I need someone, somewhere to tell about the thing I think about most all day, every day: losing weight.  What better place is the internet where no one has to know who I am, where I am, or what I am doing?  All I ask of you is to listen to me--that's all.

I think this will be enough for tonight.  I am starting to feel hungry, which means I can safely go to bed soon.  Thank you for reading.  Goodnight. X