This exercise will help you become more aware of your individuality and understand that who you are inside is the real you.

Every day, we are bombarded with television, radio, and magazine ads that focus on plastic surgery, dieting, clothes, and make-up. The media focus on appearance is so strong that many of us fall into the trap of identifying our outside appearances as the “real” us and forgetting who we really are on the inside.

So how do you focus more on who you are inside? How are you different from everyone else? How do you find the real you? One way is to remember that you are more than your appearance.

focus

What you’ll need: Colored pencils or thin markers, Two large sheets of drawing paper

Using only lines, shapes, and colors, draw an abstract portrait of yourself. Do not include your eyes, hair, legs, arms, or other parts of your body. Instead, your drawing should represent who you are on the inside—how you feel, what you think, what you are made up of—but not what you look like. Fill up the entire page. On a second sheet of paper, draw another abstract self-portrait. This time, draw what you want to be like inside. Remember, this is not a drawing of your body or your face.

Then answer the following questions:

• What do you like about your first drawing?
• What did you find hardest about drawing yourself abstractly?
• What colors did you use most often in your first drawing?
• What do you think those colors mean?
• How do you feel about your second drawing?
• How do the shapes, lines, and colors differ in both drawings? Why are they different?
• What would you have to change about yourself to get from the first drawing to the second?
• What do you think these drawings have to do with your eating issues?

follow-up

If you drew an abstract self-portrait every day, what do you think you would see? Whom can you share your drawings with?

more to think about

How does this drawing help you more clearly identify who you are as a person?.. If you were to draw another abstract self-portrait in a few hours, it would be different. What does that tell you about the nature of who you really are?

Excerpt from What's Eating You?: A Workbook for Teens with Anorexia, Bulimia, and other Eating Disorders by Tammy Nelson MS