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a063755
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We know we need, and so we acquire and eat and eat, past the point of bodily fullness, trying to sate a greater need. Ashamed of this, we turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how to not-need.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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44e871a
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The joy is an absurd yellow tulip, popping up in my life, contradicting all the evidence that shows it should not be there.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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46b24a5
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We were at another funeral party. I wasn't sure who had died this time, but it was a suicide, and upsetting because it was completely out of season. No on killed themselves in summertime. It was rude.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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e6b00f6
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In our absence, the violet early evening light pours in the bay window, filling the still room like water poured into a glass. The glass is delicate. The thin, tight surface of the liquid light trembles. But it does not break. Time does not pass. Not yet.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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86a0901
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You cannot explain, with the limitations of language and inexperience, why your body can cause such a sudden, fumbling response in someone else, nor can you put into exact words what you feel about your body, explain the thrum it feels in proximity to another warm-skinned form. What you feel is a tangle of contradictions: power, pleasure, fear, shame, exultation, some strange wish to make noise. You cannot say how those things knit themselv..
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marya-hornbacher
sexuality
touch
wasted
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Marya Hornbacher |
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df36a08
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My generation was weaned on subliminal advertising, stupid television, slasher movies, insipid grocery-store literature, MTV, VCRs, fast food, infomercials, glossy ads, diet aids, plastic surgery, a pop culture wherein the hyper-cool, blank-eyed supermodel was a hero. This is the intellectual and emotional equivalent of eating nothing but candy bars - you get malnourished and tired. We grew up in a world in which the surface of the thing is..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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f297dca
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You know those afternoons," he asks, drawing a shaking breath, "where you're just going along, doing fine, and then afternoon comes and it feels like you've just got the wind knocked out of you and everything is wrong?" He sighs and slowly pushes himself so he's sitting upright. His shoulders are slumped. "That's all," he says. "It's just one of those afternoons." We are silent for a minute. Then he lies back down on the couch. I should say..
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hornbacher
madness
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Marya Hornbacher |
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f08e2ac
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As winter went on, longer than long, we both freaked out. My mania grew to insane proportions. I sat in the study room at night, wildly typing out Dali-esque short stories. I sat at my desk in our room, drinking tea, flying on speed. She'd bang into the room in a fury. Or, she'd bang into the room, laughing like a maniac. Or, she'd bang into the room and sit under the desk eating Nutter-Butters. She was a sugar freak. She'd pour packets of ..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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ad497ac
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At the lip of a cliff, I look out over Lake Superior, through the bare branches of birches and the snow-covered branches of aspens and pines. A hard wind blows snow up out of a cavern and over my face. I know this place, I know its seasons - I have hiked these mountains in the summer and walked these winding pathways in the explosion of colour that is a northern fall. And now, the temperature drops well below zero and the deadly cold lake r..
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alcoholic
anorexia
bulimia
eating-disorder
mental-illness
recovery
spirituality
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Marya Hornbacher |
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1c985cf
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Somewhere in the back of my brain there exists this certainty: The body is no more than a costume, and can be changed at will. That the changing of bodies, like costumes, would make me into a different character, a character who might, finally, be all right.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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39cd75d
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Bear in mind you have a life to live. There is an incredible loss. There is a profound grief. And there is, in the end, after a long time and more work than you ever thought possible, a time when it gets easier.
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recovery
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Marya Hornbacher |
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6e95103
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We feign disinterest and laugh, and creep into the kitchen some nights, a triangle of light spilled on the floor form the fridge, shoveling cold casseroles, ice cream, jelly, cheese, into our mouths, swallowing without chewing as we listen to the steady, echoing of the clock. I have done this. Millions of people have done this. There is an empty space in many of us that gnaws at our ribs and cannot be filled by any amount of food. There i..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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16c5b99
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There are a lot of times the heart burrows deeper, goes tunnelling into itself for reasons only the heart itself seems to know.They are times of isolation, of hibernation, sometimes of desolation. There is a bareness that spreads out over the interior landscape of the self, a bareness like tundra, with no sign of life in any direction, no sign of anything beneath the frozen crust of ground, no sign that spring ever intends to come again.
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eating-disorder
god
recovery
religion
spirituality
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Marya Hornbacher |
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7faed8f
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Men are embarrassingly easy to seduce.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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c9adce3
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As I head back up the stairs, I hear the dryer make a sound of great mechanical distress, , and I pause for only a moment before I decide that if I leave, I will no longer intimidate the machine, and it will then do its job very well without me.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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c76f0dd
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I am in the zone, the perfect balance between manic and drunk, I am mellow, I'm cool, cool as cats. I've found the answer, the thing that takes the edge off, smoothes out the madness, sends me sailing, lifts me up and lets me fly.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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ab23991
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The fear, too, is a fear of yourself: a completely dualistic and contradictory fear. On the one hand, it is the fear that you do not have what it takes to make it, and on the other hand, a possibly greater fear that you do have what it takes, and that by definition you therefore also have a responsibility to do something really big.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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3ff3315
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Starving is the feminine thing to do these days, the way swooning was in Victorian times.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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38c6b2b
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At times it may seem worse - harder, at least - to live through the despair of this loss without the temporary comfort of our addictive behaviour. We cannot drown our sorrows. We must face the fact that we don't know, really, where we are, how we got here, how long the pain will last, or how to move past it. That uncertainty may be the most painful part of not knowing a God: no one is there to reassure us that a God will take the pain and c..
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religion
spiritual
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Marya Hornbacher |
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0b8bec3
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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 one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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455e2b9
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And then the horror sets in. All that time I wasn't crazy; I was, in fact, crazy. It's hopeless. I'm hopeless. Bipolar disorder. Manic depression. I'm sick. It's true. It isn't going to go away. All my life, I've thought that if I just worked hard enough, it would. I've always thought that if I just pulled myself together, I'd be a good person, a calm person, a person like everyone
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Marya Hornbacher |
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256ba00
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Here's how you make absolutely sure that you'll keep getting crazier by the day: - Ignore everything your psychiatrist tells you. Disregard all his warnings about the way you're living your life - in fact, do absolutely everything he tells you not to. - Don't always take your pills. They're a hassle, and what if they make you dull? You don't need them. And if you're going to take the pills, take them with a glass of wine. It will make the m..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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a096a03
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I learned very early to choose my lines carefully. I still have a terrible habit, when people pause too long between words, of feeding them their line. I know my lines in advance. I dress for occasions, for personae. There are women in my closet, hanging on my hangers, a different woman for each suit, each dress, each pair of shoes. I hoard clothes. My makeup spills from the bathroom drawers, and there are different women for different lips..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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756789a
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Here's the hell of it: madness doesn't announce itself. There isn't time to prepare for its coming. It shows up without calling and sits in your kitchen ashing in your plant. You ask how long it plans to stay; it shrugs its shoulders, gets up, and starts digging through the fridge.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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819cbc3
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There are other kinds of damage, to the people in your life, to your sense of who you are and what you can do, to your future
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Marya Hornbacher |
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fee74aa
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I missed him so much that it felt like a physical pain in the area below my ribs. I opened my mouth to accommodate it. I put my hand to it. A hollow, aching, piercing place.
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pain
sad
sadness
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Marya Hornbacher |
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54414be
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We're like little kids. We are little kids, but don't tell us that--we're having a fantastic time. We have our little house, and live our little life. We are the perfect young husband and wife. We have nonstop dinner parties--the glorious food, the fabulous friends, the gallons of wine. I sometimes feel as if I've raced off a cliff and am spinning my legs in midair, like Wile E. Coyote. But I'm fine. It's fine. It's all going to be fine. Cr..
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bipolar-disorder
madness
mania
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Marya Hornbacher |
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7c6a007
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The spiritual realm is not the ethereal beyond our lived experience. It is our experience, lived fully and well.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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8d798b8
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I look back on my life the way one watches a badly scripted action flick, sitting at the edge of the seat, bursting out, "No, no, don't open that door! The bad guy is in there and he'll grab you and put his hand over your mouth and tie you up and then you'll miss the train and everything will fall apart!" Except there is no bad guy in this tale. The person who jumped through the door and grabbed me and tied me up was, unfortunately, me. My ..
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bulimia
depression
eating-disorders
mental-illness
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Marya Hornbacher |
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03e4f20
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I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgment from my brain when I get my head set on something. Everything is done at all costs. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense, pretty much.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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d131ac9
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Back in Minneapolis, I said I would go to American. I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgment from my brain when I get my head set on something. Everything is done at all costs. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense, pretty much. 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 ..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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a08a998
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Every morning I watched the sun rise and read a highly religious little meditation book and tried having a conversation with God. I waited for that sense of the presence of a Higher Power that I'd heard of. I chastised myself for not being open to real spiritual experience. It was one of the loneliest things I've ever done.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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2715378
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When we doubt, we learn to accept that we may not ever know. When we question, we learn to accept that there may be no answer. When we shout our doubt out into the universe, we learn to accept that we may be met with a silence we do not know how to read.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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e4e515e
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Being here, living now, recognizing our smallness, is a spiritual practice. It allows us to be at peace with our humanity. It humbles us and grants us permission to fumble, and not know, and fail, and also to take pleasure in the small triumphs of our days.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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343b30b
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There is always reason to care. There is always reason to give. It is what we are here to do.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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7365b0f
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I wanted to turn heads not with lecherous leers of bemusement but with awe. I wanted to become untouchable, cruel, glittery, sleek and haughty as a cat.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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7e93133
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I would disappear, only to come home reinvented. I would be unrecognizable upon my fleeting returns. This fantasy was realized, but not quite the way I had intended. In deciding to remake myself, I managed to avoid the fact that I would also, by definition, have to erase what self there was to begin with. I began to wonder, many years later, if total erasure had been my intent all along.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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dee9f62
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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. But this stage, when it is effectively Over, is h..
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Marya Hornbacher |
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ec54cb2
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I write constantly, trying to avoid the dull pain of gradual loss, trying not to think about the fact that I am leaving soon.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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4ab050a
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The last place I want to be is the hospital, but I'm not stupid. I know when it's time to go in. I am so terrified of myself and of the vast, frightening world, that the psych ward, with its safe locked doors, sounds like a relief.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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3c8280d
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These contradictions begin to split a person in two. Body and mind fall apart from each other, and it is in this fissure that an eating disorder may flourish, in the silence that surrounds this confusion that an eating disorder may fester and thrive. An eating disorder is
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Marya Hornbacher |
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1cc32a2
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Why must the power of the female body cancel the power of the female mind? Are we so afraid of having both?
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Marya Hornbacher |
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bd7be95
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But at that moment--the moment of realization that life as I'd been living it would have to end--I felt devastation unlike any I'd ever known. The barrenness was indescribable. The emptiness that opened up in me seemed to stretch on forever; I could see no end to it, could find no source of comfort in it, could not imagine any way out.
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Marya Hornbacher |
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424cbc4
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When we believe ourselves to be alone, we have no responsibility to this world and are answerable to no one.
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Marya Hornbacher |