“The leap of faith is this: You have to believe, or at least pretend you
believe until you really believe it, that you are strong enough to take
life face on. Eating disorders, on any level, are a crutch. They are
also an addiction and illness, but there is no question at all that they
are quite simply a way of avoiding the banal, daily, itchy pain of
life. Eating disorders provide a little drama, they feed into the desire
for constant excitement, everything becomes life-or-death, everything
is terribly grand and crashing, very Sturm and Drang. And they are
distracting. You don't have to think about any of the nasty minutiae of
the real world, you don't get caught up in that awful boring thing
called regular life, with its bills and its breakups and its dishes and
laundry and groceries and arguments over whose turn it is to change the
litter box and bedtimes and bad sex and all that, because you are having
a real drama, not a sitcom but a GRAND EPIC, all by yourself, and why
would you bother with those foolish mortals when you could spend hours
and hours with the mirror, when you are having the most interesting
sado-machistic affair with your own image?”
I know what it's like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can't. How you hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.
How am I supposed to recover when I don't even understand my disease?
"Every day, every fucking day, you run up the steps of the house, breathing hard, swing open the cupboards, thinking: You pitiful little bitch. Fucking cow. Greedy pig. All day, your stomach pinches and spits up its bile. You sway when you walk. You begin to get cold again."
Some use (sex as) the limited pleasure it brings as a fleeting reminder that the body can, in fact, feel something, anything, other than hunger. But that, too, backfires, because the desire for sex is a hunger in and of itself.
The fear, too, is a fear of yourself: a completely dualistic and contradictory fear. On the one hand it is a fear that you do not have what it takes to make it, and on the other hand, a possibly greater fear that you DO have what it takes, and that by definition you therefore also have a responsibility to do something REALLY BIG. It's a little daunting, going out into the world with this state of mind. Most people go out with a general idea that they'll do something or other and that it will be okay. You go out with the certainty that you will be a failure from the outset, or that you will have to do something utterly stellar, which implies the potential for failure anyway. When I was growing up, I always felt there was an expectation that I would do one of two things: be Great at something, or go crazy and become a total failure. There is no middle ground where I came from. And I am only now beginning to get a sense that there is middle ground at all.
I know what it's like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can't. How you hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.
How am I supposed to recover when I don't even understand my disease?
"Every day, every fucking day, you run up the steps of the house, breathing hard, swing open the cupboards, thinking: You pitiful little bitch. Fucking cow. Greedy pig. All day, your stomach pinches and spits up its bile. You sway when you walk. You begin to get cold again."
Some use (sex as) the limited pleasure it brings as a fleeting reminder that the body can, in fact, feel something, anything, other than hunger. But that, too, backfires, because the desire for sex is a hunger in and of itself.
The fear, too, is a fear of yourself: a completely dualistic and contradictory fear. On the one hand it is a fear that you do not have what it takes to make it, and on the other hand, a possibly greater fear that you DO have what it takes, and that by definition you therefore also have a responsibility to do something REALLY BIG. It's a little daunting, going out into the world with this state of mind. Most people go out with a general idea that they'll do something or other and that it will be okay. You go out with the certainty that you will be a failure from the outset, or that you will have to do something utterly stellar, which implies the potential for failure anyway. When I was growing up, I always felt there was an expectation that I would do one of two things: be Great at something, or go crazy and become a total failure. There is no middle ground where I came from. And I am only now beginning to get a sense that there is middle ground at all.
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