It's really interesting to me how all of us can experience the exact same event, and yet come away with wildly disparate interpretations of what happened. We each have totally different ideas of what...
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.
Warned me that the tenuous balance that exists in my brain is easily set off kilter, but like everything else he said,
The idea began to sink in, more than it ever had, that I might be crazy, in the traditional sense of the word. That I might be, forever and ever amen, a Crazy Person. That's what we'd suspected all al...
In her presence, I was reminded again of why I was an anoretic: fear. Of my needs, for food, for sleep, for touch, for simple conversation, for human contact, for love. I was an anoretic because I was...
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 o...
They are solid, real. I am an object, useful but hollow. The absence of thought fills me up.
The anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions.
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 whi...
There was a time when I was unable to get out of bed because my body, its muscles eating themselves away, refused to sit up. There was a time when the lies rolled off my tongue with ease, when it was...
Starving is the feminine thing to do these days, the way swooning was in Victorian times.
Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others become eating disorders.
It is a visual temper tantrum. You are making an ineffective statement about this and that, a grotesque, self-defeating mockery of cultural standards of beauty, societal misogyny. It is a blow to your...
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 you...
We take a certain sick pride in the fact that we know the caloric and fat content of every possible food on the planet, and have an understandable disdain for nutritionists who attempt to tell us the...
Sitting out there on the porch, I laughed. How funny—to think of us turning our clocks this way and that, importantly telling the sun when to rise and when to set, when we would prefer it to be light...
No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it's still going to be you underneath.
I don't think people realize, when they're just getting started on an eating disorder or even when they're in the grip of one, that it is not something that you just get over. For the vast majority of...
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 differen...
So what are the spiritual principles that we want guiding us as we interact with others? I can think of a few that are, to me, indispensable: Love, agape, the Greek word that means love of all. Genero...