I write constantly, trying to avoid the dull pain of gradual loss, trying not to think about the fact that I am leaving soon.
I cannot help but think that, had I lived in a culture where thinness was not regarded as a strange state of grace, I might have sought out another means of attaining that grace,
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 bitc...
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 th...
When I returned, everything was different. Everything was calm, and I felt very clean. Everything was in order. Everything was as it should be. I had a secret. It was a guilty secret, certainly. But i...
The night I shaved it off altogether, a Staff named Mark, whose take-no-prisoners approach I respected and feared, pulled me aside, looked me hard in the face, and said, Marya, your hair. I said, Yeah...
I have not lost my fascination with death. I have not become a noticeably less intense person. I have not, nor will I ever, completely lose the longing for that something, that thing that I believe wi...
I began to measure things in absence instead of presence.
Your ability to withstand pain is your claim to fame. It is ascetic, holy. It is self-control. It is masochism, and masochism pleasurable to many, but we don’t like to think about that. We don’t like...
Why must the power of the female body cancel the power of the female mind? Are we so afraid of having both?
When you believe that you are not worthwhile in and of yourself, in the back of your mind you also begin to believe that life is not worthwhile in and of itself. It is only worthwhile insofar as it re...
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...
What a child knows about transformation is very little. What an adult knows, I think, is even less. Because a child at least remembers that transformation is possible.
We are, by our very human nature, limited in what we can know or do or control or change.
Uncle Joe used to spend a fair amount of time in the loony bin. My family wasn't bothered by his regular trips to and from 'the facility'--they'd shrug and say, , and they'd put him in the car and tak...
There is no right, she says. There’s the best you can do. And that’s fine. That’s normal.
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
The side of me that feared fire and longed for ice, that cringed at noise and hungered for silence, that shied from touch and desired to numb itself into nothing.
The reward is entrance to the world of the Spirit, which is to say, entrance to this world, a place at this table, in this human life. I am not much concerned about the existence of a hereafter, a nex...
The bragging was the worst. I hear this in schools all over the country, in cafés and restaurants, in bars, on the Internet, for Pete's sake, on buses, on sidewalks: Women yammering about how little t...