I wish my brother would be nice to me. I can't remember the last time he was nice to me. He always yells at me no matter what I say or do. I just want to be locked in a room by myself.

I want to have good friends. I want to have a normal life. I want a true family. I want to smile for real. I want help. I want to lose weight. I want way too many things. I am stupid and ugly and fat and I don't deserve to live any more. Does anybody understand me? I can only wish that somebody would understand me. I wish death upon myself. - Kasey, 15 yr. old female.

Thanks for your note to FEMINIST.COM. Reading your note made me so sad and it also brought me back to my own childhood. Though I never wished death upon myself, I constantly had feelings of inadequacies, and I always felt so lucky that other people wanted to be my friend, though I never understood why. And, I also thought that I had a weird/unusual family (I have a single mother and I don't know my father and we lived with my grandfather)--and that everyone judged me badly because of this. In fact, everyone has their own weird family. In other words, I felt like I was the odd one and the lucky one and everyone else was just normal and great.

However, later in life (I'm now 29), I realized that those feelings weren't unique to me. In fact, many people harbored those same feelings. I am not trying to underestimate your feelings and/or devalue your experiences--but I think life is funny, weird, ironic, in the way that it makes us think that we are all alone and our experience is so unique when in fact, each life is a unique one and each person struggles with their own issues. The one consistency is that we keep them inside and rarely expose them until later in life. I say this all as a way of trying to comfort you by showing you that I'm sure other friends might think that you don't like them or your brother might think that you are mean to him in other ways. It's weird how ideas just exacerbate themselves in our heads.

It's interesting because I work with alot of organizations that work with girls--and each consistently talks about how troubling the time between 9 and 15 is for girls. This is older women talking--and when I talk to younger women, women my age, we all talk about how hard our later teen years--each feeling awkward and alone, and alienated from life. I don't know if there is a way to engage your friends about this--maybe not head on, but maybe your school could implement a "conversation" every Tuesday afternoon--or something like that--the purpose being everyone to check in about something in their life. We did this in my high school and it worked--but I went to boarding school, so people came because they were trying to get out of study hall, but usually left realizing that they needed it for other reasons. What it exposed, what that while some people struggled with their looks--even though everyone thought they were pretty, others struggled with their intelligence--even though everyone thought that they were the smartest. Life plays tricks on us in that way, too--the thing we think we are the most deficient in, turns out to be what other people perceive as our strength.

I don't know if I have helped at all. I hope so. And I want you to promise me that if I didn't help, you'll give me another chance. Write back whenever you need to--and mostly take care of yourself

—Amy