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...
In that six months, so much happened that death seemed, primarily, inconvenient. The trial period was extended. I seem to keep extending it. There are many things to do. There are books to write and n...
Forgive me for being chipper, but despair is desperately dull.
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...
We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.
That which stirs within, slows or quickens, goes deep or dies out. When I speak of spirit, I am not speaking of something related to or given by a force outside ourselves. I am speaking of the force t...
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 pu...
But new love only lasts so long, and then you crash back into the real people you are, and from as high as we were, it's a very long fall, and we hit the ground with a thud.
I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgement from my brain when I get my head set on something. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense pretty much.
Falling in love happens so suddenly that it seems, all at once, that you have always been in love.
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 crut...
Because I'm not, in fact, depressed, Prozac makes me manic and numb - one of the reasons I slice my arm in the first place is that I'm coked to the gills on something utterly wrong for what I have.
I am mad. The thought calms me. I don't have to try to be sane anymore. It's over. I sleep
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 yo...
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 wh...
I get absolutely shitfaced. I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old. I am having the time of my life.
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.
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 t...
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 ever...
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. The...