Raise your hand if you know where I've been. The priorities of fifteen, the power in pain, the delicious chill of an empty stomach.. Spirituality through self-deprivation. Don't I see me in your eyes?

We've forgotten now, failed the entrance exam for eating disorders. But we keep those lessons somewhere. Three meals is three too many. Not even water can be trusted. Count mass, not merely calories. Our own teachers, and it makes it hard to blame society. Cause we never really wanted to, hard as we tried to. We were as sane as puberty permitted. we never quite made it.

There were, of course, those months. Every three days, a dry bagel. Fasting purified us, football games and high school hallways were less fearsome. The genuine masochists, the popular girls, smelled our aspirations and stroked our dizzy heads. Their personal heros, the broken dolls we never saw, lay in hospital beds.

But the time comes when the true martyrs must be seperated from the rebels sans causes, and we found the glory not all we had hoped. Distracted, we had missed ourselves. Sensuality, the love of tastes, slowly returned, hobbled and untrusting.

Some girls stayed in that artificial purgatory, but now we can laugh. They're not so tough, skin taut over uncomfortable protrusions, still turning to a magazine rack to find structure in the straight lines of emaciation. Some didn't make it, and now we can cry, because they weren't heros after all. We played their game and lost, but we're recovering. The strength ebbs back, in little waves. Maybe we falter, but we catch ourselves in time. We've lost the ability to be sweeter after days without glucose, we're bitter when our stomach acids turn on us. No longer willing to suffer with a smile, the thrill of crucifiction revealed to be overrated.

Now we want to be the girls who never tried, the sisters and momentarily abandoned best friends who went the opposite way and were chastised for it. They were right all along, and paid for it. It's amazing that those poor thin prom queens managed to wield two whips - one to flog themselves, one to punish the heathens. What's more, the healthy ones, the strong ones, proved themselves and never broke. The agnostics in the middle can't help but hang our heads.

Maybe the mistakes made an impression, maybe we've gained a different kind of strength, from experience. But maybe the real women knew without being told.

The paper dolls we emulated have blown away. The ones who were truly sick.. we pray for them, gently give alms of second-hand wisdom. The right answer is plain. We don't love ourselves, but we're working on it.