One delicious silver lining to the depression was the absence of anxiety. The all-encompassing fear that had shadowed me for years had died and left cold, wonderful numbness in its place. I had always been so sensitive, felt things so deeply and easily, and now I didn’t have to. Anxiety is wanting to live so badly everything is a threat. Depression is not wanting to live at all. They are inextricably linked, yet worlds apart.

Around this time, I began to destroy parts of myself. I deleted my social media accounts and grew paranoid about the internet, unable to deal with the filtered Instagram pictures of beautiful people with beautiful lives. I hacked off my long dark hair with kitchen scissors until it was stubby and cropped. At school I’d used it as a black curtain, something to be complimented on and therefore hide behind; when it lay heavy in the bathroom sink I felt as if a part of myself had died. I relished cutting myself, the dull sting providing the relief of distraction. I thought about killing myself incessantly—sometimes I wanted to gently drift away, other times I wanted it to hurt. Above all I wanted to crawl into the desert and die there quietly on my own where no one could bother me, no one would pressure me, where I didn’t have to be perfect all the time.

I had never felt worse about the way I looked. My medication gave me severe constipation that bloated my stomach and woke me up at 4 AM in acute pain; my once envied hair grew thinner and started falling out; acne sprung up all over my cheeks and forehead. My psychiatrist became concerned I was anaemic, I was so pale. My fingers would scrabble about my hairline praying for a tab of skin I could use to peel my face away. And yet I would say to myself, as the medication and therapy slowly began to take effect, “Once my skin clears up, I’ll be happy.” I found a cream that dissolved my acne, so I changed my obsessive reassurances: “Once my hair grows out again, I’ll be happy.” The ends of my hair once again brushed my breasts and I started to see a pattern forming. I told myself that I was Samson, that the longer my hair grew, the stronger I would be. I knew deep down it was still because I thought that if I was pretty, then people would like me.

The way I had obsessed over my appearance at school now sickened me because it represented a time when I’d denied my own feelings. As I got better, however, I could feel those same pressures and thought patterns nudging their way back in with harsh words and sharp elbows. I knew I couldn’t resist societal pressure entirely, but I desperately wanted to. I wanted to be on my own, somewhere remote, somewhere I could make my own standards. Where mirrors didn’t exist and my head was shaved and I could roam about naked, muddy, and free. My own society, with a population of one.

In the real world, I attempted resist the pressure to look “perfect.” On holiday last summer, I decided not to remove my body hair, then as family friends began to arrive I caved and shaved my legs. I found success in developing mental blocks: Every time I said something nasty to myself I would picture myself clutching a tiny version of me to my chest, who had cropped black hair and was dressed in a navy velvet dress with a white collar and bright red shoes. I didn’t want to be nasty to that girl—she had confidence, an incredible capacity for fun, and a wicked sense of humor. I would console her, and catching the harsh thoughts and labelling them “mean” reduced their impact on me. Around us, I envisioned a force field that the thoughts couldn’t penetrate—translucent and blue.

Now the idea that someone would like me simply for the way that I look makes me feel vaguely nauseous, yet I still buy into it, encourage it. Wanting to feel desirable—sexually or otherwise—can be so enormously powerful that it overtakes the impulse to be kind to yourself, replacing it with the need to meet beauty standards. And feminine beauty is such a valued form of currency that I am sometimes afraid that my looks are where my value lies, or—even if I don’t feel that way—that it’s where others believe my value lies. I’m not sure if I feel like myself when I dress up—although I don’t really know who “myself” is. I want to believe that the way that I look is not who I am, and yet it is intrinsically linked to who I am. We are all constantly reacting to other people’s reactions to us, and to our understanding of ourselves.

There were a messy multitude of reasons why I was so unhappy, why I became depressed, and why I had those initial panic attacks that started my problems with anxiety. Those reasons were not related to my struggles with my appearance. However, I do know that not once has the way that I look relieved those issues. Not once has changing the way I look—whether that be gaining weight or losing weight, being clear skinned or spotty—made me genuinely happy, (I’m defining happiness as feeling at ease with and free from societal pressure). Our society’s ideals stay ingrained within us, and we have little control over how people view us or the thoughts that occur to them when they see us. We are conscious sacks of organs and star stuff and somehow this unbelievable weight has been applied to the way that it is shaped. I often ask myself why it can’t be enough that we are breathing, that we are living?

For a while, I fooled myself into thinking that prettiness equates to freedom from mental health difficulties, that if I only had the perfect clothes or a symmetrical face the depression or the eating disorder or the feeling of inadequacy would lift, but it doesn’t work that way. Here’s what I know. Happiness is a tricky thing to chase and to define and I can’t pretend that I know how to find it, but it is not related to the way I look. Perfection, especially as defined by the society we currently live in, is impossible. Every day I attempt to love myself as I am, to stop caring about those beauty standards, but ironically it is also impossible to be perfect at that, too. What I’m trying to do is cultivate and grow my own ideas about what’s going to be important to me. And if those are counter to what I have been taught, then they are my own little acts of revolution. ♦