Beauty

She was twelve when she picked up her imperfections. Her family, her friends - they'd always told her that she needn't worry about her appearance, that she looked fine the way she was. But that didn't satisfy her. After all, fine just wasn't good enough.

Born with blonde hair and blue eyes, she felt deep within herself that she was gifted with the potential to look, as society described, 'perfect' - so she should cherish that gift and fulfil her potential. She wanted her nose to be rounder and her lips to be thicker and her chin to be sharper. It had even occurred to her to get cheek implants. Her teachers often encouraged her to learn from her idols - she listened and took their advice earnestly. If her idol, Marilyn Monroe succeeded in captivating the world with her beauty, why couldn't she?

As time progressed, her obsession with her looks only increased. It was on her thirteenth birthday that her fixation entered a whole new plane of significance. She didn't want to be seen as just any old teenage girl - no way! She wanted to stand out. What had once seemed harmless - admiring models in magazines and sighing about the shape of her chin - soon became an uncontrollable and helpless compulsion that engulfed her mind.

One night, she trudged upstairs to her bedroom after dinner. Her state of mind was as dark, as dull and as gloomy as the sky outside, obscured by clouds with not a single star to be seen. "A glance in the mirror will cheer me up," she reassured herself. She was wrong. Standing face to face with her reflection, she saw a girl staring back at her in disgust. "What are you looking at, you hideous beast?" she snapped, "How much uglier can you be?" Her frustration melted to disappointment: she realised that the countenance she was looking at with such loathing was, in fact, her own. What she valued more than anything had merely evaporated into a disillusion. With that, she raised a fist - the fist that held together the discontent and the dissatisfaction of her heart - and struck the reflection before her. The mirror shattered; tiny shards of glass shot off the wall. Several lodged themselves right in the eyes that had beheld the sight which prompted her violence. "Mum, Mum!" she bellowed in horror, both hands covering her identity, her shame and the face which had been her downfall.

For weeks and weeks she stayed in hospital, surrounded by nothing but pitch-black. Her eyes had been so badly damaged by the shards that the doctors told her that her blindness - which she'd thought would lift with time - was permanent. What hurt most, though, was her heart, as she began to perceive that she would never see again... If there was any silver lining to be found in the tragedy, it was that her compulsion to strive for perfection, and the self-hatred that had accompanied it, was brought to a close.

Even now, after twenty years, as I bring my ineffaceable reminiscence to the front of my mind, I can still dredge the pain I felt once up from the deepest depths of my heart. Perhaps perfection is never meant to be achieved - rather, a moving target that exists outside of reality's reach.

Beauty, on the other hand, is different. It can be found inside our true selves and is something that we can all be proud of. Miss Monroe once said, "Imperfection is beauty." Now that I come to think of it, I'm sure she was right. My life could have been anything I'd wanted it to be, had I not chosen to ignore those words before it was too late.