Your heart beats faster in your chest as you look into the full length mirror. You want to look away - disgusting, hideous, repulsive – but you can't. Like a magnet, your eyes are completely powerless to move away from the image reflected in the glass. The force is too strong.
What happened to you to make you so disgusting? You wonder. You must have been pretty when you were younger (or, at least, you mustn't haveve been as hideously repulsive as you are now) because you didn't always feel like this. You remember being happy, once.
Or maybe you were just too innocent to care.
If it were just one thing, or two things, or three, then maybe you could live with them. It wouldn't be so hard to hide small imperfections from the world; everyone has them (except for Victoire, but she's perfect and part-Veela, so she doesn't count). If the only things wrong with you were small enough to hide, then it wouldn't matter quite as much. But your features… none of them are pretty.
You're hideous.
Well, you're not hideous exactly… you don't hate all of your body. That would make you mentally ill, and you're not that. Your arms are alright, you suppose, when you're desperate to find something likeable about yourself, and your hands look nice sometimes (especially when you paint your nails). But alright arms and nice hands can't make up for the rest of you.
Your eyes trail down your body, over your hips – they're alright, you suppose. You quickly skip your abdomen area – too fat, your mind screams – but your ghastly thighs, swollen and misshapen, as though every fatty food you've ever eaten has gone straight to them (that is, every fatty food that didn't stop at your stomach).
Why couldn't some of it have gone to your chest instead? Your breasts are tiny; so small that, when covered, they could almost pass as a boy's.
You turn away from the mirror, unable to look any longer. You know what you're going to see anyway; you've spent enough time looking at and hating yourself in this mirror. Too-large nose; too-thin lips; too many freckles; ugly round chin. You disgust yourself; it's amazing you even find the courage to go outside.
As you walk away from the mirror, you spot your wand on your bedside table.
The next thing you remember is waking up in St Mungos.
Words float through the air and swirl around your head. They hover there just out of reach, fluttering like butterflies. Your mind is hazy, but you know you want to know what they are more than anything in the world. You reach out for them, fighting the heaviness in your arms, but your fingers pass through thin air instead, and the words dissolve when you try to grab them.
You can't catch words with your hands, you realise. You have to catch them with your ears.
Now you're catching them properly, they swirl towards you and crash over you like ocean waves, drowning you in their salty spray. Body dismorphia, a strict-sounding voice says. Emotional depression says another. Perceptual discrepancy and behavioural therapy and medication and your name. Lily, the voice whispers. Lily, says yet another one – one that sounds like your mother.
You stop reaching for words, after that. You're not sure you want to hear what they have to say.