On The Pursuit of Happiness

Just focus on one girl, a girl who is in middle school, she seems normal from your point of view, she’s nothing special really, but what you don’t know is how unhappy she really is. Some nights, she just lays in her bed and cries, counts all her flaws from head to toe right after and she doesn’t let anyone know about those nights. The worst part is, she’s one of the farthest from happy and she’s probably the one that needs it most. Everyone deserves happiness; sadly however, teenage girls often fail to see the beauty in themselves and in their lives causing depression, eating disorders and urges to cut themselves, and those are only some of the worst.


Being depressed could be feeling blue, down in the dumps or just plain miserable for a few days, clinical depression on the other hand is feeling like that weeks at a time, many teenage girls suffer with this kind of depression. Imagine the worst point of your life, for weeks and months at a time, ‘depression is a strong mood involving sadness, discouragement, despair, or hopelessness that lasts for weeks, months, or even longer.’ If you’ve ever felt an ounce of sadness, you’d know a tiny bit what so many teenage girls feel like but not nearly as painful. With feeling discouraged, some of these girls could be bullied or not see how truly beautiful they are and feel worthless instead. Imagine having lost every tiny bit of hope you might still hold on to and just falling into more sadness and depression, it would make you so much more discouraged than you were in the first place. A lot of girls feel like that, and that’s something that needs to change. Some people are so sad, they seem to want to end it all, ‘At its most severe, depression can lead to suicide and is responsible for 850,000 deaths every year.’ (Science Daily) With depression claiming so many people, it makes their lives a morbid place to be that they would rather not be living than going through with what life brings. Imagine being sad enough there is nothing joyful enough in life to want you to stay, imagine thinking no one loves you enough to care if you died. That’s what 850,000 people think in a year and who knows, one of those people could end up being your daughter, your spouse or your best friend. As a result of unhappiness in people’s lives, they turn depressed and can’t bring themselves to fight back and get better.


A large factor of girls’ depression at this very moment is their size, they think that the fact they are large makes them ugly and accordingly some of them resort to eating disorders to lose weight. So many of these girls think that being skinny is being flawless, ‘I’ve always believed if I were thin, my life would be perfect.’ (Tumblr) Since a lot of these girls have been teased about their weight, if they were skinny they don’t think they’d be teased anymore. Then without being teased, their lives could get better and ultimately happier, providing, ‘my life would be perfect’. A lot of girls aren’t comfortable with their weight and go to extremes to fix it, ‘People with anorexia nervosa have intense fears of becoming fat and see themselves as fat even when they are very slender.’ (WebMD) A lot of times when girls are insecure, their weight is a large part of it, they can tolerate their hair and face but when the get to their size, it all goes downhill. They think that if they were skinnier, they would be good enough so they result in starving themselves. Feeling like they aren’t good enough, so many teenage girls turn to eating disorders to be thinner.


The worthlessness that engulfs so many teenagers in this day and age can result in some finding a need to cope with their sadness in an astoundingly, depressing way. A lot of girls are in the midst of so much suffering that they need to get away from it somehow, ‘cutting is a way some people try to cope with the pain of strong emotions.’ (Kid’s Health) There’s three ways cutting helps tame the emotional pain in people’s lives; to be so focused on the blood dripping down their skin that they forget all their troubles, to get revenge on themselves for not being good enough and seeing the blood rolling down their skin makes them feel like a real person. With self-harming comes a flow of freedom in a way, it’s like everything you want to express or forget about get accomplished in that .01 of a second and even though life just goes back to normal afterwards, that split second helps. In the case of a self-harming, 13 year old girl, all of the painful things in her life pile up and that short span of time where the razor digs into her skin, she has relief, that everything might be okay, that she’s good enough. To find a way to get the same satisfaction of seeing the blood drip down your skin, there’s a website where you can cut your screen by dragging your cursor across a blank, white page to make it look like cuts, fatal to the flesh. There’s so many cases in this day and age where girls are struggling to find a replacement for self-harm. In an effort to replace cutting, some will go to this website instead of cutting their own skin. If you think about it, the fact that there is enough girls in the world that need a replacement for self-harm and that there has to be a website for that is depressing enough to want to go and find all of the self-harming girls in the world and hug them. If some of these girls are specifically hateful towards their size, they will go to different extremes to be ‘okay’.


With so many people unhappy, so many people are worthy of happiness; teenage girls often are the ones that deserve happiness and this results in depression, eating disorders and an urge to self harm. Tonight when you go to bed, I assure you there will be countless numbers of girls crying themselves to sleep just to get away from the pain. These damaging nights could continue for months and months longer but not if you proceed to do something. If you know anyone who is suffering with depression, an eating disorder or self harm, make sure you reach out to them and bring happiness back into their lives.