We are, by our very human nature, limited in what we can know or do or control or change.
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...
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 confus...
The lesson of daily spiritual practice is not a complicated one and requires no special equipment; we are simply learning to love. That, at the end of the day, is where a spiritual practice takes us:...
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 gr...
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...
Self-knowledge is the foundation of a practical spirituality, a spirituality that ripples outward from the self into the world.
Nothing in the world scares me as much as bulimia. It was true then and it is true now. But at some point, the body will essentially eat of its own accord in order to save itself. Mine began to do tha...
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,...
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 ma...
I had a love affair with books, with the characters and their worlds. Books kept me company
I don’t remember when I stopped noticing—stopped noticing every mirror, every window, every scale, every fast-food restaurant, every diet ad, every horrifying model. And I don’t remember when I stoppe...
I do doubt she ever felt so cluttered and noisy and jangled that she put her boot through the ice. As soon as I did it, I could just hear her saying in alarm, Well. My stars! But there are days I do f...
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...
Hatred is so much closer to love than indifference.
For all its God language, the Twelve Step program isn’t actually an attempt at religious conversion. Really, it just tries to bring us to a place of new spiritual understanding that allows us to live...
For a long time I believed the opposite of passion was death. I was wrong. Passion and death are implicit, one in the other. Past the border of a fiery life lies the netherworld. I can trace this road...
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 hea...
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...
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 m...