For me, the first sign of oncoming madness is that I'm unable to write.
E così passai attraverso lo specchio, passai nel mondo a rovescio, dove il su è giù e il cibo èingordigia, dove le pareti sono rivestite di specchi convessi, dove la morte è onorevole e la carne debol...
Back in Minneapolis, I said I would go to American. I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgment from my brain when I get my head set on something. Everything is done at all costs. I have...
At first it's bliss. It's drunken, heady, intoxicating. It swallows the people we were - not particuarly wonderful people, but people who did our best, more or less - and spits out the monsters we are...
And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.
When we believe ourselves to be alone, we have no responsibility to this world and are answerable to no one.
We put an extraordinary amount of effort into how we appear, or wish to appear, trying frantically to construct a sense of self out of how we are seen from without. But who are we from within? What ma...
Waiting through doubt teaches us enormous spiritual strength. It gives us the strength to go on—through struggle, through joy, through recovery, through our daily lives—even though we do not know how...
This is the weird aftermath, when it is not exactly over, and yet you have given it up. You go back and forth in your head, often, about giving it up. It’s hard to understand, when you are sitting the...
There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose.
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.
The spiritual realm is not the ethereal beyond our lived experience. It is our experience, lived fully and well.
The physical food transubstantiates in our minds into something more ethereal, of human and emotional nurturance, a sense that our hungers are being sated. Even if you are just stuffing handfuls of fr...
The last place I want to be is the hospital, but I'm not stupid. I know when it's time to go in. I am so terrified of myself and of the vast, frightening world, that the psych ward, with its safe lock...
That’s the nice thing about dreams, the way you wake up before you fall.
Never, never underestimate the power of desire. If you want to live badly enough, you can live. The great question, at least for me, was: How do I decide I want to live?
My mother insulted me, I insulted her, Jeanne, the stepgrandmother, insulted everything in a skirt, and my grandfather just kept right on drinking. We picked at our food, competing for who could eat t...
My brain sometimes departs from the agreed-upon reality, and my private reality is a very lonely place. But in the end, I'm not sure I wish I'd never gone there.
Madness will push you anywhere it wants. It never tells you where you're going, or why. It tells you it doesn't matter. It persuades you. It dangles something sparkly before you, shimmering like that...
It has been argued that food and eating have replaced sex as our foremost cultural taboo.7 To some extent I agree with this but would point out that the taboo is not against food, or sex, or flesh, bu...