I am very happy to post a new guest blog on Youth of a Nation from LA Sunshine . I truly think that her story will be inspiring and help others know that they are not alone. Thank you for contribution LA Sunshine!
I am LA sunshine. A lot of the time I am just LA, and sometimes just sunshine. LA comes from my first name Lee-Anne, a friend of mine came up with it and it spread fast. Sunshine comes from my naturally sunny strawberry blond hair (that is now semi-permanently died dark brown) and my happy caring demeanor. I am very social and have a lot of creative hobbies. I love singing, dancing, acting, running, biking, rapping, painting and drawing, baking, music… the list goes on. I can forever associate my name with LA, but not always with the sunshine part. That is how people usually see me on the surface, happy go lucky, carefree. While this is definitely a part of my personality, there is always a lot more underneath the surface going on that aren’t raised in most situations. Unless you spend quality time talking about life, I will just seem like the happy positive creative side of me, and the rest will go unnoticed. This has come to my attention since starting my blog. I am scared of posting my blog on Facebook to my friends because only my closest friends know about the personal and mental struggles I have been through. It is easier for me to share with complete strangers that I will never meet than my own friends, is that odd?
I have a long and complex story. It would be terribly long to try and bash out for you, so I am going to let my mind piece out what has happened for you to read, hopefully enjoy and also get some inspiration from.
I was a really happy kid. I remember having a lot of fun, and doing a lot of things. I remember being happy. Of course I got sad and hurt and cried and stuff, but I think I had a pretty normal childhood. My dad was a little hard on me but I was the first born child and looking back on it now it makes sense why my dad was always so protective and hard on me. I guess when I was a teenager was when I started to lose my spark. I remember being angry and sad a lot in high school, feeling misunderstood, arguing with my dad a lot, typical issues faced by most teens. I think I became vulnerable through my sadness and increasing lack of self-confidence and started drawing inspirations from other girls in my classes. I started becoming closer with the more ‘popular’ girls. It wasn’t because I wanted to be more popular, my year/class (whatever you want to call it) had really nice people that mostly all got along and I am very social. I started to notice that a couple of these girls I was getting closer to, though extremely pretty and seemingly doing well for themselves, all had dark secrets underneath; eating disorders. The strange thing was how easily they could talk about it with me and how open they were about what they were doing. It kind of made it seem normal to me. I was feeling less and less good about myself, mostly my body, and I think that had a lot to do with the fact that I really wanted to be with a boy who clearly liked me but didn’t want me as a girlfriend. I thought that reason was because I didn’t have a nice enough body, even though I was a pretty in shape dancer. I was 16 when all of this was going on. I was really concerned with the wrong things at this time in my life. Getting a boy who didn’t want me for me, trying to fit in the best way I knew how. It was becoming clearer and clearer to me that I had to lose weight if I wanted a better life. How that made any sense to me I cannot understand now. So many girls are left with the impression that life is easier if you are better looking, and to be the best looking, you have to be a thin version of yourself.
Hopefully this introduction has interested you, because the story hasn’t even begun. This is what I will leave you with for now, check out my personal blog (http://leeannegribbon.blogspot.de/)
