You know, society places a lot of heavy expectations on females. From the perspective of society, females should be kind, sweet, demure, pretty, smart but not too snart, a good listener and the list goes on. Those expectations is then enforced by your environment in some way but even if you meet the criteria, somehow it’s not enough so you should be doing more. But the cycle continues while your self esteem continues to take criticisms that you aren’t even trying, what’s wrong with you and so on. So it becomes your fault then your problem that you aren’t meeting that expectation so you keep trying and trying and trying but you can’t even see the end in sight.

You don’t feel you are enough as you are, you think that you can do better, you can be better, you can actually be pretty. You want to feel you’re pretty because maybe then people will accept you, maybe they will actually, really like you. Maybe you can even accept yourself. Maybe then you can like yourself. But that won’t ever happen as you continue the cycle of wanting to feel pretty because that comes from the acceptance of yourself. Wanting to be pretty is one thing but continuing to paint an image of yourself as ugly in your head then starving yourself is another thing.

Try and go see a specialist who can help you understand the story you are telling others and yourself about that “ugly” image in your head. See it for what it is then what you might see on the surface. People don’t punish themselves with such words just because they are bore, it’s usually because they don’t know how else to deal with themselves.

Good luck.