I began to feel like I was wearing a sign on my forehead that said FUCKED UP in big neon letters.
Here's how you make absolutely sure that you'll keep getting crazier by the day:- Ignore everything your psychiatrist tells you. Disregard all his warnings about the way you're living your life - in f...
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...
As winter went on, longer than long, we both freaked out. My mania grew to insane proportions. I sat in the study room at night, wildly typing out Dali-esque short stories. I sat at my desk in our roo...
Am I ultimately alone? How many of us have asked that question—drunk or sober—when we’ve wondered if there was a God or when we’ve decided that there was none? And the universe reels around us, more v...
For the purposes of my own spirituality, it is far more useful to recognize the limitations of my knowledge; to humble myself, not before a deity, but simply to be humble; to surrender, again, not to...
Whether one believes that transformation is effected by the will of an outer force, or the willingness of an inner self, does not change the reality of transformation as a phenomenon of spiritual expe...
The spiritual self is the deepest, most integrated aspect of who we are.
The idea of my future simultaneously thrilled and terrified me, like standing at the lip of a very sheer cliff- I could fly, or fall. I didn't know how to fly, and I didn't want to fall. So I backed a...
Step One is, paradoxically, both a crushing end and a beginning.
I developed a deep, abiding fear of jeans, which I still have. I hold my breath and shut my eyes when I pull on a pair in the dressing room, afraid they will now, as then, get stuck at my hips and the...
Crazy isn´t always what they say it is. It´s not always the old woman wearing sneakers and a skirt and a scarf, wandering around with a shopping cart, hollering at no one, nothing, tumbling through ye...
But at that moment—the moment of realization that life as I’d been living it would have to end—I felt devastation unlike any I’d ever known. The barrenness was indescribable. The emptiness that opened...
Being here, living now, recognizing our smallness, is a spiritual practice. It allows us to be at peace with our humanity. It humbles us and grants us permission to fumble, and not know, and fail, and...
And so I went through the looking glass, stepped into the netherworld, where up is down and food is greed, where convex mirrors cover the walls, where death is honor and flesh is weak. It is ever so e...
We feign disinterest and laugh, and creep into the kitchen some nights, a triangle of light spilled on the floor form the fridge, shoveling cold casseroles, ice cream, jelly, cheese, into our mouths,...
The joy is an absurd yellow tulip, popping up in my life, contradicting all the evidence that shows it should not be there.
Madness is not what it seems. Time stops. All my life I've been obsessed with time, its motion and velocity, the way it works you over, the way it rushes you onward, a pebble turning in a brook. I've...
I learned very early to choose my lines carefully. I still have a terrible habit, when people pause too long between words, of feeding them their line. I know my lines in advance. I dress for occasion...
But in some ways, the most significant choices one makes in life are done for reasons that are not all that dramatic, not earth-shaking at all; often enough, the choices we make are, for better or for...