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d73f706
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You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.
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self-image
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Marya Hornbacher |
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c44026c
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We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.
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skeletons
thin
eating-disorders
bulimia
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Marya Hornbacher |
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5e735a0
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I wanted to kill the me underneath. That fact haunted my days and nights. When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behavior for many years, your brain can't quite deal with it. It will try very hard to avoid that realization; it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you. This is,..
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self-hatred
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Marya Hornbacher |
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6bdf9c2
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When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.
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madness
reality
manic-depression
mental-illness
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Marya Hornbacher |
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61c44e5
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There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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8a7f39f
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There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no othe..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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3debb1b
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You begin to forget what it means to live. You forget things. You forget that you used to feel all right. You forget what it means to feel all right because you feel like shit all the time, and you can't remember what it was like before. People take the feeling of full for granted. They take for granted the feeling of steadiness, of hands that do not shake, heads that do not ache, throats not raw with bile and small rips of fingernails forc..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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7701a27
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Soon madness has worn you down. It's easier to do what it says than argue. In this way, it takes over your mind. You no longer know where it ends and you begin. You believe anything it says. You do what it tells you, no matter how extreme or absurd. If it says you're worthless, you agree. You plead for it to stop. You promise to behave. You are on your knees before it, and it laughs.
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madness
surrender
worthless
eating-disorder
voice
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Marya Hornbacher |
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297b5fb
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I began to measure things in absence instead of presence.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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52ffebf
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I do not remember very many things from the inside out. I do not remember what it felt like to touch things, or how bathwater traveled over my skin. I did not like to be touched, but it was a strange dislike. I did not like to be touched because I craved it too much. I wanted to be held very tight so I would not break. Even now, when people lean down to touch me, or hug me, or put a hand on my shoulder, I hold my breath. I turn my face. I w..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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a38c26c
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Never, never underestimate the power of desire. If you want to live badly enough, you can live. The great question, at least for me, was: How do I decide I want to live?
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Marya Hornbacher |
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c65f34e
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It is not a sudden leap from sick to well. It is a slow, strange meander from sick to mostly well. The misconception that eating disorders are a medical disease in the traditional sense is not helpful here. There is no 'cure'. A pill will not fix it, though it may help. Ditto therapy, ditto food, ditto endless support from family and friends. You fix it yourself. It is the hardest thing that I have ever done, and I found myself stronger for..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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5b02663
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I didn't particularly want to live much longer than that. Life seemed rather daunting. It seems so to me even now. Life seemed too long a time to have to stick around, a huge span of years through which one would be require to tap-dance and smile and be Great! and be Happy! and be Amazing! and be Precious! I was tired of my life by the time I was sixteen. I was tired of being too much, too intense, too manic. I was tired of people, and I wa..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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a294b59
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Hatred is so much closer to love than indifference.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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51e58ef
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And so I went through the looking glass, stepped into the netherworld, where up is down and food is greed, where convex mirrors cover the walls, where death is honor and flesh is weak. It is ever so easy to go. Harder to find your way back.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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a125ff7
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This is the weird aftermath, when it is not exactly over, and yet you have given it up. You go back and forth in your head, often, about giving it up. It's hard to understand, when you are sitting there in your chair, having breakfast or whatever, that giving it up is stronger than holding on, that "letting yourself go" could mean you have succeeded rather than failed. You eat your goddamn Cheerios and bicker with the bitch in your head tha..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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9b54035
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That's the nice thing about dreams, the way you wake up before you fall.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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ea34dda
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It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all strength.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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6c05a2c
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This is the very boring part of eating disorders, the aftermath. When you eat and hate that you eat. And yet of course you must eat. You don't really entertain the notion of going back. You, with some startling new level of clarity, realize that going back would be far worse than simply being as you are. This is obvious to anyone without an eating disorder. This is not always obvious to you.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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c9712fd
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I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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778f809
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My god! people say. You have so much self-control! And later: My god. You're so, so sick. When people say this, they turn their heads, you've won your little game. You have proven your thesis that no-body-loves-me-every-body-hates-me, guess-I'll-just-eat-worms. You get to sink back into your hospital bed, shrieking with righteous indignation. See? you get to say. I knew you'd give up on me. I knew you'd leave.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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3d49f72
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You wake up one morning and there it is, sitting in an old plaid bathrobe in your kitchen, unpleasant and unshaved. You look at it, heart sinking. Madness is a rotten guest.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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2336a79
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The anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions.
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self-image
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Marya Hornbacher |
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8a54278
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I was used to sleeping with people because I endlessly found myself in identical situations where it was easier to just fuck them than to say no.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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fdeb6c4
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Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others become eating disorders.
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food
obsession
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Marya Hornbacher |
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722d0f5
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And when, after fifteen years of bingeing, barfing, starving, needles and tubes and terror and rage, and medical crises and personal failure and loss after loss - when, after all this, you are in your early twenties and staring down a vastly abbreviated life expectancy, and the eating disorder still takes up half your body, half your brain, with its invisible eroding force, when you have spent the majority of your life sick, when you do not..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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c8e89c1
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There is, in the end, the letting go.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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579a188
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But in some ways, the most significant choices one makes in life are done for reasons that are not all that dramatic, not earth-shaking at all; often enough, the choices we make are, for better or for worse, made by default.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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2c455bc
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He leaned down and whispered to me: No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it's still going to be you underneath. And he let go of my arm and walked back down the hall.
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self-hatred
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Marya Hornbacher |
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559e5de
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Eating disorders are addictions. You become addicted to a number of their effects. The two most basic and important: the pure adrenaline that kicks in when you're starving--you're high as a kite, sleepless, full of a frenetic, unstable energy--and the heightened intensity of experience that eating disorders initially induce. At first, everything tastes and smells intense, tactile experience is intense, your own drive and energy themselves a..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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35c892a
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The bragging was the worst. I hear this in schools all over the country, in cafes and restaurants, in bars, on the Internet, for Pete's sake, on buses, on sidewalks: Women yammering about how little they eat. Oh, I'm Starving, I haven't eaten all day, I think I'll have a great big piece of lettuce, I'm not hungry, I don't like to eat in the morning (in the afternoon, in the evening, on Tuesdays, when my nails aren't painted, when my shin hu..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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bd63b36
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The idea of my future simultaneously thrilled and terrified me, like standing at the lip of a very sheer cliff- I could fly, or fall. I didn't know how to fly, and I didn't want to fall. So I backed away from the cliff and went in search of something that had a clear, solid trajectory for me to follow, like hopscotch.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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f71a6ce
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By November, you wish you were dead. You want nothing more. Every day, every fucking day, you run up the steps of the house, breathing hard, swing open the cupboards, thinking: You pitiful little bitch. Fucking cow. Greedy pig. All day, your stomach pinches and spits up its bile. You sway when you walk. You begin to get cold again.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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2b7c6c8
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People with eating disorders tend to be very diametrical thinkers - everything is the end of the world, everything rides on this one thing, and everyone tells you you're very dramatic, very intense, and they see it as an affectation, but it's actually just how you think. It really seems to you that the sky will fall if you are not personally holding it up. On the one hand, this is sheer arrogance; on the other hand, this is a very real fear..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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4c90c11
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Death is a fascinating thing. The human mind continually returns and returns to death, to mortality, immortality, damnation, salvation. Some fear death, some seek it, but it is in our human nature to wonder at the limits of human life, at least. When you are sick like this you begin to wonder too much. Death is at your shoulder, death is your shadow, your scent, your waking and dreaming companion. You cannot help, when sleep begins to touch..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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9c896c6
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Madness is not what it seems. Time stops. All my life I've been obsessed with time, its motion and velocity, the way it works you over, the way it rushes you onward, a pebble turning in a brook. I've always been obsessed with where I'd go, and what I'd do, and how I would live. I've always harbored a desperate hope that I would make something of myself. Not then. Time stopped seeming so much like the thing that would transform me into somet..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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e4c8d3c
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At a certain point, an eating disorder ceases to be "about" any one thing. It stops being about your family, or your culture. Very simply, it becomes an addiction not only emotionally but also chemically. And it becomes a crusade. If you are honest with yourself, you stop believing that anyone could "make" you do such a thing-- who, your parents? They want you to starve to death? Not likely. Your environment? It couldn't careless. You are a..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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47610cd
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The leap of faith is this: You have to believe, or at least pretend you believe until you really believe it, that you are strong enough to take life face on. Eating disorders, on any level, are a crutch. They are also an addiction and illness, but there is no question at all that they are quite simply a way of avoiding the banal, daily, itchy pain of life. Eating disorders provide a little drama, they feed into the desire for constant excit..
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sadomasochism
drama
mirror
eating-disorders
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Marya Hornbacher |
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0d71a5f
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Madness will push you anywhere it wants. It never tells you where you're going, or why. It tells you it doesn't matter. It persuades you. It dangles something sparkly before you, shimmering like that water patch on the road up ahead. You will drive until you find it, the treasure, the thing you most desire. You will never find it. Madness may mock you so long you will die of the search. Or it will tire of you, turn its back, oblivious as yo..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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8e17de3
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Madness strips you of memory and leaves you scrabbling around on the floor of your brain for the snatches and snippets of what happened, what was said, and when.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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6a22f71
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You begin to forget what it means to live. You forget things. You forget that you used to feel all right. You forget what it means to feel all right because you feel like shit all of the time, and you can't remember what it was like before.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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5e78a4d
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And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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3532cb2
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I wish I could find words to explain what this kind of cold is like - the cold that has somehow gotten in underneath your skin and is getting colder and colder inside you. It isn't an outside sort of cold; it's a cold that gets into your bones and into your blood and it feels like your heart itself is beating out the cold in hard bursts through your entire body, and you suddenly remember that you have a body because you can't ignore it anym..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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72cf3d0
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Forgetting who you are and where you are and if you're there. Getting lost in the thought that you might be imagining everything, you might be dreaming your life. You look at your hand in front of your face, surrounded by light, and your heart thrums as you think: I'm dreaming, I'm not even here, I don't exist. It is too fascinating, the thought that you aren't. The thought that if you watch the lake long enough you might disappear into the..
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Marya Hornbacher |