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...
Having a normal person around me made it poingnantly clear to me that I was out of control.
For me, the first sign of oncoming madness is that I'm unable to write.
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...
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...
At a certain point, an eating disorder ceases to be about any one thing. It stops being about your family, or your culture. Very simply, it becomes an addiction not only emotionally but also chemicall...
And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.
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...
• At 1 A.M. I'd pull on my coat, my boots. Walk down the stairway, out the door, down the long driveway to the road. Sometimes, I'd go to the stoned boy's house. We'd sit and watch TV. We'd have sex,...
When we believe ourselves to be alone, we have no responsibility to this world and are answerable to no one.
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...
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...
The term starvation diet refers to 900 calories a day. I was on one-third of a starvation diet. What do you call that? One word that comes to my mind: suicide.
Steps Six and Seven are often brushed off, especially by the nonbeliever, because they seem to assume a direct relationship with a personal God. But they really are essential, and reconceptualizing th...
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...
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...