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 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.
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 migh...
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...
There is, in the end, the letting go.
There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and p...
There is always reason to care. There is always reason to give. It is what we are here to do.
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 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...
So rather than running from doubt, shutting down our spirits and hearts, or reaching for quick certainty, we can use doubt as a spiritual practice. We can wait. We wait for our tangled emotions to unk...
Self-knowledge is the foundation of a practical spirituality, a spirituality that ripples outward from the self into the world.
Men are embarrassingly easy to seduce.
Madness strips you of memory and leaves you scrabbling around on the floor of your brain for the snatches and snippets of what happened, what was said, and when.
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,...
It's never over. Not really. Not when you stay down there as long as I did, not when you've lived in the netherworld longer than you've lived in this material one, where things are very bright and lar...
It is easy to write off childlike faith in the universe and childlike wonder at the world as simply a lack of knowledge about how life really is. Well, how is life, really? Do we know—we who have been...
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