In the True Body Project, our main goal is to express ourselves truthfully and to not sugar coat our
own feelings and circumstances to try to impress someone or hide from something. We think that this is
the foundation for better living and good art.
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Over the past two years, True Body teens like us have engaged in writing and art making exercises to
help us find our authentic, artistic voice. It is easy to imitate someone. We do that all the time. It is
far harder to be 100% authentically you. Who is that?
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Hunger.
There is more to it than meets the eye. Sometimes we fill ourselves with food or other substances or
starve ourselves NOT because we are hungry or full but because of a deeper yearning.
Take out your journal and sit down and write for five minutes
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without lifting the pen from the page, without giving much thought to what is flowing from your
mind to the pen to the paper.
What do you hunger for?
Here are some of the things we hunger for. These are our fast writes, directly from our journals.
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“I hunger for the unexpected. I feed on laughter with no conscience, on joy in being alive, on
looking at myself and looking at other people and liking what I see, for whatever reason. I hunger
for excitement and danger and the assurance that everything is real. I hunger for world domination
and the easy way out. I feed on watching my enemies trip over their feet ‘cause they don’t know how
to dance. I feed on freaking people out, and shiny things, and pointy sharp things. I hunger for a
bass beat and hands on me without strings, and a phone call in the middle of the night when I don’t
expect it, and compliments from strangers, and music and laughter and a different world spilling out
from a dark room. I hunger for fire, and for myself.”
- Susan
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“I hunger for this world to stop folding into sporadic creases of chaos. From my brother’s friend
all of a sudden having potential brain damage, to the gruesome Israel-Lebanon war, I feel as though
we’re all falling apart. Sometimes, if I think about the state of mind we’re in long enough I start
to cringe and wince and I want to shout “Take me the hell away from his all!’ but I don’t want to
leave it at all. I want to stay, see if I can’t change anything. Not that I’m a goddamn martyr or
anything, but I just want all of the ones we love to sleep peacefully in rooftop canopies, with nothing
but breezy ribbons gliding through the air. And over their foreheads.”
- Lily
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