When I was just in middle school, I began to notice some behavioral changes in my older sister. She had always had trouble making friends, even in elementary school when all the kids are supposed to be accepting and play together, but this year, things seemed to getting worse. Her one best friend was named Melissa, and for the next two years, they spiraled into an eating disorder together.
At the beginning of those two years, I would come home to find her Catholic school uniform and buckled shoes hidden in the bushes as she snuck off to run off all of the calories that she had eaten that day, and then would have to hear her lie to my mother, saying that her carpool left school late. She began leaving her dinner plate half-full, and I would find the sack lunches that my dad would pack each of us every morning carefully hidden at the bottom of the trashcan. I watched as my bright, rosy-cheeked healthy sister turned into a bitter, sallow-faced stick figure who was unable to accept her problem.
After seeing a doctor, nutritionist, and therapist three times a week, severing her destructive friendship, and with the support of her family, my sister was finally able to begin a recovery process and discover in which ways she was beautiful. Obviously, it was a difficult journey for her, but for my mother, father and me, it was a struggle to convince my intelligent, seemingly flawless sister that her worth was invested in something much greater than her perspective of beauty.
Why do I do what I do? Because everyone deserves to be told how beautiful they are. I know that at times, it seems that the people in our world are not innately good. Humans fight, kill, hurt one another for the sake of our own pride, and suffer from the consequences of our wrongful actions on a daily basis. But I have full confidence that however deep inside every person, there is something beautiful: something that has value, something that can be appreciated, and something that makes a person deserved to be loved. The least I can do is to take every opportunity I can to remind them of this.
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