1. BEGIN (You are beautiful .... )

The book that captivated my heart and mind as a child was Harriet.the.Spy. Harriet ignited the curiosity in me, as well as my inner writer.

But Harriet actually ignited something else. She ignited the seeker and the dis-coverer in me, and those parts of my personality are, ultimately, what led me on my journey to find myself.

Soon after reading about Harriet’s many notebooks, I began keeping my own stream-of-consciousness journals filled with bad poetry, dramatic musings, and hyperbolic dreams.

By the time I reached high school, journaling was my lifeline. My journals were where I confided what I was feeling, how I was dealing with things, what I was planning. I also found that my journals kept me honest. It was outside my character to write one thing and do another. So what I wrote, I did.Through journaling, I had the opportunity to get to know myself at a relatively young age.

Many people, especially teens, live on the surface, operating at break neck speeds and never exploring the depths within them. We’re too busy to listen to what is going on inside of us because we are manipulating, reacting, adjusting to the world outside of us.

To really know my self, my stories, and my voice, I had to have silence, an entryway, a slowing down.

Journaling provided me that and more.With journaling, you see the patterns of your life; you claim—or reclaim—who you really are; you coach yourself into becoming the some-one you imagined; you arrive at a sense of balance, of yourself, of whole-ness.

You can discover productive patterns and nonproductive patterns in your life, and you can choose to embrace the ones that move you for-ward.

A significant part of the Beautiful.You experience will be accomplished through journaling. Buy yourself a journal and use its as a Beautiful.You journal.

You will use it for exercises recommended in each daily practice, but I also encourage you to use it for your own lists, confessional laments, stream-of-consciousness ideas, and dreams.

There is no right way to journal. There is only this: the desire to record what you think and feel so that you can become better acquainted with yourself, so that you are better in touch with your own brilliance.

The most important thing is that you give yourself time and room to write—and thus, to get to know yourself and grow.

Today:

• Open your Beautiful.You journal and consider these questions.

• What are your hopes—personally and for the world—with regard to body image and beauty perception?

• How can you begin to live your hopes today?

• Thinking about what you want most for yourself and for the world allows you to act on that information.

#teens