just some thinspiration
"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 can't remember what it was like before. People take the feeling of full for granted. They take for granted the feeling of steadiness, of hands that do not shake, heads that do not ache, throats not raw with bile and small rips of fingernails forced to haste to the gag spot. Stomachs that do not begin to wake up in the night, calves and thighs knotting in muscles that are beginning to eat away at themselves. they may or may not be awakened at night by their own inexplicable sobs."
"You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad."
"An eating disorder is not usually a phase, and it is not necessarily indicative of madness. It is quite maddening, granted, not only for the loved ones of the eating disordered person, but also for the person herself. It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of strength. A wish to prove that you need nothing, that you have no human hungers, which turns on itself and becomes a searing need for the hunger itself. It is an attempt to find an identity, but ultimately it strips you of any sense of yourself, save the sorry identity of "sick". It is a grotesque mockery of cultural standards of beauty that ends up mocking no one more than you. It is a protest against cultural stereotypes of women that in the end makes you seem the weakest, the most needy and neurotic of all women. It is the thing you believe is keeping you safe, alive, contained - and in the end, of course, you find it is doing quite the opposite. 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 confusion that an eating disorder may fester and thrive."
"And when, after fifteen years of binging, barfing, starving, needles and tubes and terror and rage, and medical crises and personal failure and loss after loss, when, after all this, you are in your early twenties and staring down a vastly abbreviated life expectancy, and the eating disorder still takes up half your body, half your brain, with its invisible eroding force, when you have spent the majority of your life sick, when you do not yet know what it means to be "well," or "normal," when you doubt that those words even have meaning anymore, there are still no answers. You will die young, and you have no way to make sense of that fact. You have this: You are thin."
"The anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions. The summer before I left for boarding school was the last time I would ever fully understand that I was a human being, and occasionally care about myself as such. I was about to become an anoretic. That is to say, I, the girl I knew as myself, was about to disappear. She was about to become no more than the blank space in the mirror where my body had once been. She was about to become no more than a very small voice. However people know things about themselves, through premonitions or suspicions or specific plans, I knew this. And I was afraid. Yet I wanted it more than anything."
"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, which took me through places so hot the very air burned the lungs. I did not turn back. I pressed on, and eventually passed over the border, beyond which lies a place that is wordless and cold, so cold that it, like mercury, burns a freezing blue flame."
"I didn't particularly want to live much longer than [twenty]. Life seemed rather daunting. It seems so to me even now. Life seemed like too long a time to have to stick around, a huge span of years through which one would be required to tap-dance and smile and be Great! and be Happy! and be Amazing! and be Precocious! I was tired of my life by the time I was sixteen. I was tired of being too much, too intense, too manic. I was tired of people, and I was incredibly tired of myself. I wanted to do whatever Amazing Thing I was expected to do -- it might be pointed out that these were my expectations, mine alone -- and be done with it. Go to sleep. Go to a heaven where there was nothing but bathtubs and books."
"I felt like I was going out of my mind. My head was never quiet. Quiet is an in-between point, implying a balance between noise and silence, between the strange blackouts I began to have -- pure silence, not sleeplike but deathlike -- and the hellish shrieking jumble of my own thoughts and the voices of the world. And the sharp hiss of one voice that started out softly, as though below layers of moss, or flesh, and gradually became so loud it drowned out everything else: Thinner, it said. You've got to get thinner. But you know, even then, that word was wrong. It is more than Thinness, per se, that you crave. It is the implication of Thin. The tacit threat of Thin. The Houdini-esque-ness of Thin, walking on hot coals without a flinch, sleeping on a bed of nails. You wish to carry Thinness on your arm, with her cool smile. You wish for that invisible, vibrating wire that hums between two lovers, implying a private touch. You wish for such a wire, humming between you and Thinness, at a party, on the street, humming softly between you and death."
"I'd read somewhere that if you made yourself a snow cave you could keep warm, the snow itself would keep out the cold of the snow, and I was so incredibly tired, willing my legs to keep walking. We were having a family outing and I didn't want to ruin it but I was so fucking cold. I wish I could find words to explain what this kind of cold is like- the cold that has somehow gotten in underneath your skin and is getting colder and colder inside you. It isn't an outside sort of cold; it's a cold that gets into your bones and into your blood and it feels like your heart itself is beating out the cold in hard bursts through your entire body, and you suddenly remember that you have a body because you can't ignore it anymore. You feel like an ice cube."
"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 here. There is no "cure". A pill will not fix it, though it may help. Ditto therapy, ditto food, ditto endless support from family and friends. You fix it yourself. It is the hardest thing that I have ever done, and I found myself stronger for doing it. Much stronger."
"It was not the first time I'd fallen. It wasn't even the first time I'd faded, slipped, and fallen, not the first time I felt my vision blur and dim. But before there had always been a few things to warn me: the knees buckle, the center of gravity dissolves and the arms feels like they've begun to float, the ears ring, the eyelids flutter. It's just like the movies. I could always see myself falling, I'd always known. This time it just went black."
"Malnutrition precipiates mania. So does speed. Both were at play here, in large doses. But so was masochism - the subjection of the self and/or body to pain and fear, ultimately resulting in a transitory sense of mastery over pain and fear. Every morning, I ran five miles, up and down this hall, touching the door at each end, the mark of an obsession. I had to touch the door or else it didn't count. You make up these rules, and if you break the rules, God help you, you have to run an extra mile to make up for it. When I was done, I'd go downstairs to the workout room and weigh myself."
"My god! people say. You have so much self-control! And later: My god. You're so, so sick. When people say this, they turn their heads, you've won your little game. You have proven your thesis that no-body-loves-me-every-body-hates-me, guess-I'll-just-eat-worms. You get to sink back into your hospital bed, shrieking with righteous indignation. See? you get to say. I knew you'd give up on me. I knew you'd leave."
"There is a self-perpetuating belief that one simply cannot help it, and this is very dangerous. It becomes an identity in and of itself. It becomes its own religion, and you wait for salvation, and you wait, and wait, and wait, and do not save yourself. If you saved yourself, and did not wait for salvation, you'd be self-sufficient. How dull."
"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 pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way."
"We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need."-"Wasted," Marya Hornbacher
"You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad."
"An eating disorder is not usually a phase, and it is not necessarily indicative of madness. It is quite maddening, granted, not only for the loved ones of the eating disordered person, but also for the person herself. It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of strength. A wish to prove that you need nothing, that you have no human hungers, which turns on itself and becomes a searing need for the hunger itself. It is an attempt to find an identity, but ultimately it strips you of any sense of yourself, save the sorry identity of "sick". It is a grotesque mockery of cultural standards of beauty that ends up mocking no one more than you. It is a protest against cultural stereotypes of women that in the end makes you seem the weakest, the most needy and neurotic of all women. It is the thing you believe is keeping you safe, alive, contained - and in the end, of course, you find it is doing quite the opposite. 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 confusion that an eating disorder may fester and thrive."
"And when, after fifteen years of binging, barfing, starving, needles and tubes and terror and rage, and medical crises and personal failure and loss after loss, when, after all this, you are in your early twenties and staring down a vastly abbreviated life expectancy, and the eating disorder still takes up half your body, half your brain, with its invisible eroding force, when you have spent the majority of your life sick, when you do not yet know what it means to be "well," or "normal," when you doubt that those words even have meaning anymore, there are still no answers. You will die young, and you have no way to make sense of that fact. You have this: You are thin."
"The anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions. The summer before I left for boarding school was the last time I would ever fully understand that I was a human being, and occasionally care about myself as such. I was about to become an anoretic. That is to say, I, the girl I knew as myself, was about to disappear. She was about to become no more than the blank space in the mirror where my body had once been. She was about to become no more than a very small voice. However people know things about themselves, through premonitions or suspicions or specific plans, I knew this. And I was afraid. Yet I wanted it more than anything."
"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, which took me through places so hot the very air burned the lungs. I did not turn back. I pressed on, and eventually passed over the border, beyond which lies a place that is wordless and cold, so cold that it, like mercury, burns a freezing blue flame."
"I didn't particularly want to live much longer than [twenty]. Life seemed rather daunting. It seems so to me even now. Life seemed like too long a time to have to stick around, a huge span of years through which one would be required to tap-dance and smile and be Great! and be Happy! and be Amazing! and be Precocious! I was tired of my life by the time I was sixteen. I was tired of being too much, too intense, too manic. I was tired of people, and I was incredibly tired of myself. I wanted to do whatever Amazing Thing I was expected to do -- it might be pointed out that these were my expectations, mine alone -- and be done with it. Go to sleep. Go to a heaven where there was nothing but bathtubs and books."
"I felt like I was going out of my mind. My head was never quiet. Quiet is an in-between point, implying a balance between noise and silence, between the strange blackouts I began to have -- pure silence, not sleeplike but deathlike -- and the hellish shrieking jumble of my own thoughts and the voices of the world. And the sharp hiss of one voice that started out softly, as though below layers of moss, or flesh, and gradually became so loud it drowned out everything else: Thinner, it said. You've got to get thinner. But you know, even then, that word was wrong. It is more than Thinness, per se, that you crave. It is the implication of Thin. The tacit threat of Thin. The Houdini-esque-ness of Thin, walking on hot coals without a flinch, sleeping on a bed of nails. You wish to carry Thinness on your arm, with her cool smile. You wish for that invisible, vibrating wire that hums between two lovers, implying a private touch. You wish for such a wire, humming between you and Thinness, at a party, on the street, humming softly between you and death."
"I'd read somewhere that if you made yourself a snow cave you could keep warm, the snow itself would keep out the cold of the snow, and I was so incredibly tired, willing my legs to keep walking. We were having a family outing and I didn't want to ruin it but I was so fucking cold. I wish I could find words to explain what this kind of cold is like- the cold that has somehow gotten in underneath your skin and is getting colder and colder inside you. It isn't an outside sort of cold; it's a cold that gets into your bones and into your blood and it feels like your heart itself is beating out the cold in hard bursts through your entire body, and you suddenly remember that you have a body because you can't ignore it anymore. You feel like an ice cube."
"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 here. There is no "cure". A pill will not fix it, though it may help. Ditto therapy, ditto food, ditto endless support from family and friends. You fix it yourself. It is the hardest thing that I have ever done, and I found myself stronger for doing it. Much stronger."
"It was not the first time I'd fallen. It wasn't even the first time I'd faded, slipped, and fallen, not the first time I felt my vision blur and dim. But before there had always been a few things to warn me: the knees buckle, the center of gravity dissolves and the arms feels like they've begun to float, the ears ring, the eyelids flutter. It's just like the movies. I could always see myself falling, I'd always known. This time it just went black."
"Malnutrition precipiates mania. So does speed. Both were at play here, in large doses. But so was masochism - the subjection of the self and/or body to pain and fear, ultimately resulting in a transitory sense of mastery over pain and fear. Every morning, I ran five miles, up and down this hall, touching the door at each end, the mark of an obsession. I had to touch the door or else it didn't count. You make up these rules, and if you break the rules, God help you, you have to run an extra mile to make up for it. When I was done, I'd go downstairs to the workout room and weigh myself."
"My god! people say. You have so much self-control! And later: My god. You're so, so sick. When people say this, they turn their heads, you've won your little game. You have proven your thesis that no-body-loves-me-every-body-hates-me, guess-I'll-just-eat-worms. You get to sink back into your hospital bed, shrieking with righteous indignation. See? you get to say. I knew you'd give up on me. I knew you'd leave."
"There is a self-perpetuating belief that one simply cannot help it, and this is very dangerous. It becomes an identity in and of itself. It becomes its own religion, and you wait for salvation, and you wait, and wait, and wait, and do not save yourself. If you saved yourself, and did not wait for salvation, you'd be self-sufficient. How dull."
"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 pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way."
"We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need."-"Wasted," Marya Hornbacher