It is not a sudden leap from sick to well. It is a slow, strange meander from sick to mostly well. The misconception that eating disorders are a medical disease in the traditional sense is not helpful...
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...
Call it the feeling of love that connects us. Call it the creative force that drives us to transform. Call it our energy. Call it our capacity to give. Call it grace, or even divinity, something that...
Someone speaks in soft tones to me and says I am psychotic, but it's going to be all right. I put on my hat, unperturbed, and ask for some crayons.
• This seems impossible to me. It seems biologically impossible to stay the same size, although I must. It seems one must always be either bigger or smaller than they were at some arbitrary point in t...
We have few words for spiritual beyond those that refer back to a God. But not believing in a God is not opposed to a belief in an aspect of the self that can be called spiritual. The latter is experi...
Perhaps our purpose is, for the time being, to be human, to live on this earth and in this human community, to receive something from it, and to give something back.
You wake up one morning and there it is, sitting in an old plaid bathrobe in your kitchen, unpleasant and unshaved. You look at it, heart sinking. Madness is a rotten guest.
You begin to forget what it means to live. You forget things. You forget that you used to feel all right. You forget what it means to feel all right because you feel like shit all the time, and you ca...
You begin to forget what it means to live. You forget things. You forget that you used to feel all right. You forget what it means to feel all right because you feel like shit all of the time, and you...
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 always reason to care. There is always reason to give. It is what we are here to do.
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...
Self-knowledge is the foundation of a practical spirituality, a spirituality that ripples outward from the self into the world.
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,...
In our absence, the violet early evening light pours in the bay window, filling the still room like water poured into a glass. The glass is delicate. The thin, tight surface of the liquid light trembl...
I had a love affair with books, with the characters and their worlds. Books kept me company