Sobbing, I dialed my Al-Anon sponsor's number. Between sniffles I told her the horrible things my husband screamed at me. "Why won't he cherish me?" I wailed. 

"I want you to look up a scripture," Jennifer said, "2 Corinthians 10:5. I want you to memorize it."

I knew better than to argue with Jennifer. Not only did she know the Bible, she lived with a raging alcoholic and, yet she was one of the most content women I knew. I flipped open my Bible and read the verse silently. "You'll have to interpret this for me," I sighed, "I have no idea what this means. I just want him to love me." 

"Christy, you've got this backwards. If you want him to cherish you, you have to cherish you. The way others see you is a reflection of how you see yourself. If you want others to see you differently, you have to see yourself differently."

In my teens, I suffered from tremendous insecurity. Now that I was an adult in an abusive marriage, things were far worse. The opinions of others dictated what I did and what I said. Too afraid of rejection to be my own self, I bended and blended-a chameleon cloned by the crowd.  

Not everybody can fade into the background. What if, despite everything you try, you just stand too far out to fit in? In the recently-released film, Precious, an illiterate and overweight African-American teen in Harlem suffers from daily ridicule and abuse. Rejected and alone, Precious creates an escape, a place where she retreats from the horror. She counteracts the cruelty by imagining...