Coming of Age Fiction Sad

This story contains themes or mentions of mental health issues.

Was it vanity? She didn’t know but supposed it must be, though the word didn’t seem to fit.

She could remember before. As a young girl when her hair was still fine and blonde and curled into bouncy ringlets. Before her hair curdled into limp mousey locks, before pimples, before her chest swelled into sore lumps.

That feeling of impossible confidence, unreasonable and utterly unexamined. She had loved her body, the things it allowed to her do. Loved tumbling over the grass in cartwheels and roly-polies. She could do a handstand and tip backwards into a crab.

Her favourite though was high places.

She wasn’t fearless; it occurred to her to be afraid and she stood in deviance of it at the top of the climbing frame, feeling taller than the tallest man. Taller than the tallest man on the tallest mountain!

Her body was the tool that let her run and play and tumble, that bled and hurt and healed, stretched and grew and strengthened.

She hadn’t thought of it that way then. Lana’s body and Lana’s mind had just been Lana. Complete and whole. Her identity had been indistinct, unformed, and yet entirely cohesive.

Above all, Lana remembered that she had liked the way her body looked, too.

Had felt - pretty.

Lana often sensed that something had been taken from her, stolen. That lost feeling - she deserved it. She deserved to be pretty.

She knew some girls believed they deserved nothing, needed punishment even, and that’s why they did it. To punish themselves for being so disgusting and big.

Or perhaps some desire to be so small and fragile and tiny and beautiful that you might disappear entirely.

To take up space made you so horribly visible. As if the very act of existing in flesh and fat was an invitation to be looked at, inspected, owned.

They were little birds, all of them; hollow-boned and thin-skinned and feather-light. Breakable by design.

Walking through Town, Lana would find herself distracted by beautiful women. Head turning to track their bodies as they swept past.

She knew she was staring, knew it was obvious but couldn’t help herself. She wasn’t gay, though she’d sometimes wondered, for she looked at women far more than she looked at men. Yet there was nothing sexual about it. It was obsessive, yes - compulsive even. Lana was mesmerized by them, mesmerized by they way they moved, the clothes they wore.

She imagined what it would feel like to be them, to have their skin as her skin, their face as her face. Even as she assessed and critiqued their bodies.

That was a favourite past-time, too. Lana would close her eyes and list through each of her flaws and defects.

She didn’t decide which parts were good enough and which had to go - they were simply up to scratch, or not.

Teeth - crooked.

Nose - there’s a bump, plus a little wonky.

Skin - acne. Spots on back too.

Several chicken pox marks, worst one between the eyebrows.

Stretched out pores on cheeks and nose.

Hair - flat and boring colour. Want curls.

Eyes, OK colour, but wrong shape. Should be bigger.

Lashes too short and not enough of them.

Body hair, ingrown hairs.

Lips, they’re alright but no wow factor.

Hip dips.

Stretch marks over thighs.

Feet too big, not feminine.

Too short. Models are never short.

Cheeks pudgy. No cheekbone definition.

No jaw definition.

No boobs.

No abs.

No muscle definition, need to be toned.

No flat belly.

Too much fat, everywhere.

The fantasy would continue, then, with Lana attending ‘Beauty Camp’. She pictured it like summer camp, all girls together.

They would give her teeth whiteners and surgery and makeup and make her run laps.

She would emerge a different person entirely, shedding her old identify as a snake does its skin, so utterly unrecognizable no one would know her and neither would she.

Lana drifted out of her utopia and back into herself. She lay on her bed as she often did after an hour or two of mindless scrolling, body after perfect body passing under her thumb in an endless feed.

It was late, but she was awake. Her phone was discarded beside her, within easy reach.

The window was open. She heard sirens blare past and off into the distance.

All at once she sprang to her feet and rushed to the mirror on her vanity, as if attempting to take herself by surprise. Perhaps by moving quick enough she might reach the mirror before her filter of perception snapped into place, and glimpse her true self just for that in-between moment, raw and naked.

Lana stared at herself in the gloom. Her face was so familiar to her it felt like a perfect stranger’s. She’d looked so hard and for so long she could no longer see anything at all, so lost in the details of each flaw she couldn’t piece together the whole anymore.

She longed to know the little cartwheeling girl again, as much a stranger as the woman looking back at her now.

Lana didn’t see her younger self as her, not really. That girl was as unlike her now as any other child.

Lana viewed her more as an older sister might, and odd as it sounds felt protective towards her, this girl who was fierce and was now gone.

She didn’t know how that girl could have grown and lived each day and become this, didn’t know at what point their identities had drifted so far apart as to be fully distinct.

An observer might have assumed Lana thought little of herself, but the truth was her self-esteem swung wildly between extremes.

She was fractured in two - one part of her filled with self-disgust and deep humiliation. The other part was proud and spiteful and sometimes possessed of the strongest notion that she was beautiful after all.

That feeling came to her now, and it grew and grew and bubbled over until she was shaking, sobbing, not in sorrow but in rage. Rage that she felt this way, that she was so consumed with this feeling and so inward-facing she was blind to anything else. Everything else.

Lana sensed a great wasting of time. She sensed her own self-obsession and turned from it in shame.

But still vanity did not fit. She resented the implication of the word, for she couldn’t shake the creeping feeling this desire was not born of her but impressed onto her.

She couldn’t be anything else but this. No-one had taught her how.

Posted Jul 02, 2025
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3 likes 2 comments

Olive Silirus
02:14 Jul 10, 2025

This is an amazing story. It so perfectly captures the way lots of girls feel, especially in their teenager years. I know I certainly did. This is beautiful writing, too. Thank you for this story.

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Beth Macfarlane
10:38 Jul 11, 2025

Thank you so much! I'm a new writer and it means so much to get positive feedback

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