Hello. My name is Marissa and I'm a beautiful disaster.

...She swears there's no difference between the lies and compliments,

it's all the same if everybody leaves her,

And every magazine tells her she's no good enough,

the pictures that she sees make her cry.

She would change everything, everything just ask her!

Stuck in the in between of beautiful disaster.

She just needs someone to take her home...

~Beautiful Disaster by: Jon McLaughlin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww0kqkX4vXQ

The first time I heard this song, I think my jaw dropped so far down it just about fell off my face. I had come home from school that day feeling especially unpretty (inside and out) and when I turned on JCTV to watch the latest music videos, that was about the last thing I thought I would hear. It was as if someone had taken the thoughts directly out of my head and penned them down as song lyrics. The entire song was a complete reflection of myself, and I wasn't sure I liked it. When had I started hating myself this much?

"She would change everything, everything just ask her!"

For the first time, I realized that if given the opportunity, I really would change everything about myself. (Well almost everything.) What about me was I totally happy and confident in anymore? My eyes, my nose, my weight, my smile, my height, even some of my personality, I was satisfied with none of it and that's a pretty scary thought. What had made my confidence in myself drop so much? I had never had the greatest self-esteem before but I was never one to be completely unconfident in myself. I never loved looking at pictures of me, but I had never hated seeing them as much as I did now. And never ever before did I look in the mirror and see absolutely nothing that I liked.

"And every magazine tells her she's no good enough,

the pictures that she sees make her cry."

Thinking about it, lately I had begun to compare myself to others an awful lot. I was at the point were I was flat out envious of certain girls I knew just because they were drop-dead gorgeous and had guys falling at their feet. I couldn't even look at several of the magazines I subscribed to anymore. The girls in Teen Vogue and Seventeen all looked and seemed so perfect compared to me. My friends even looked perfect compared to me. I couldn't take a facebook profile picture that looked half as good as my theirs. I began to cover up the school photos of me my mom had plastered all over the fridge. Walking the halls in school was pure torture because looking at some gorgeous girl I saw always made me feel like crap. In fact, I could see something beautiful in everyone around me except for myself.

"She never stays the same for long,

assuming that she'll get it wrong."

Listening to the song for a second time around, this line hit me with the most impact. It dawned on me that aside from unrealistically comparing myself to others, my biggest problem is that I set my self up for failure. Lately I had been telling myself not to imagine finally meeting and falling in love with that guy who would end up being "The One." After all, 'if guys aren't looking at me now in high school, why would they ever look at me?,' I attempted to reason with myself. I couldn't read novels or watch movies that contained even a hint of romance in them without reminding myself that I would probably never be as lucky in love as those girls. I was beginning to mentally fail myself at everything in life without even trying.

"Perfect only in her imperfection"

Wow. It struck a chord within me instantly, yet this is the line that took me the longest to decipher. The one thing that I had begun to forget lately was that nobody on earth is perfect. Everyone has something that they dislike about themselves. No matter how perfect they seem to make their lives appear from the outside, every person on earth has had some sort of personal disaster no matter how big or small occur within their lifetime. Reading the comments under the video on youtube I saw that I'm not alone!! I'm not the only one who has ever felt this low about herself. In fact, it almost seemed as if everyone has.

I wish I could say that I instantly changed my views and thoughts about myself after this revelation. I can't. It took time. A lot of time actually. I would stand in front of the mirror every morning and point out one thing about myself that I thought was beautiful. Slowly but surely, I found more and more things about myself that I was happy with. I also wish I could say that today I can honestly say that I love every picture that's ever been taken of me. That I'm always 100% confident in everything I do. That I never ever feel like I'm unattractive or ugly. I can't. I have my off days and moments where I forget that I cannot possibly be perfect no matter how hard I try. I think everyone has these moments. It's times like those where I have to sit down and tell myself that nobody is perfect. All of us have had our self-conscious moments where we feel as though we're the worst of the worst. Everybody has made mistakes in life. We've all been disasters inside at one point or another. And yet, even though we can't always see it, we're all both inside and out beautiful in some way, shape, or form. It's all a matter of the way we're looking at it. And when it really comes down to it, we're all beautiful disasters.