My students know I have a life, they know I’ve written about my life. They know some detail, probably more than they know about their physics teacher, but I would’ve told them anyway!
The biggest fear of my life is living. My second biggest fear is dying.
My parents say that even as a very, very little kid, the way that I acted was dramatically different from other little kids.
I think many people with a chronic illness would prefer not to have their chronic illness, simply because it’s high maintenance.
I know how this feels: the tightening of the chest, the panic, the what-have-I-done-wait-I-was-kidding. Eating disorders linger so long undetected, eroding the body in silence, and then they strike. The secret is out. You’re dying.
Having a normal person around me made it poingnantly clear to me that I was out of control.
Because I’m not, in fact, depressed, Prozac makes me manic and numb – one of the reasons I slice my arm in the first place is that I’m coked to the gills on something utterly wrong for what I have.
The fact that you were essentially dead does not register until you begin to come alive.
I’m a driven perfectionist, very self-critical.
You can only whine for so long. Then you need to get your life back.
I know for a fact that sickness is easier, but health is more interesting.
After a lifetime of silence, it is difficult then to speak.
I am often drawn to what appear at first to be ‘dark’ or ‘difficult’ subjects, but which, upon further examination, are always and only reflections of the ways human beings attempt, however clumsily, badly, or well, to connect with others.
Children take in more information than we’d like to believe.
People take the feeling of full for granted.
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 easy to go. Harder to find your way back.
I am feeling fine. I remember these words and recite them. These are the things you say when asked how you are. After all, it would be odd to say: I’m not feeling. Or, more to the point: I’m not, I have ceased to be. Where am I?
I had a love affair with books, with characters and their words. Books kept me company. When the voices of the book faded, as with the last long chord of a record, the back cover crinkling closed, I could swear I heard a door click shut.
I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgement from my brain when I get my head set on something. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense pretty much.
That nothing – not booze, not love, not sex, not work, not moving from state to state – will make the past disappear.