For me, the first sign of oncoming madness is that I’m unable to write.
When we doubt, we learn to accept that we may not ever know. When we question, we learn to accept that there may be no answer. When we shout our doubt out into the universe, we learn to accept that we may be met with a silence we do not know how to read.
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. An eating disorder is.
Why must the power of the female body cancel the power of the female mind? Are we so afraid of having both?
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 up in me seemed to stretch on forever; I could see no end to it, could find no source of comfort in it, could not imagine any way out.
When we believe ourselves to be alone, we have no responsibility to this world and are answerable to no one.
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 to name or describe a power or powers greater than ourselves. And the paradox is this: to accept this not-knowing – to accept doubt, a lack of certainty – is to accept the very nature of life as it is. In accepting doubt, unanswered questions, and unknowing, we accept life on life’s terms.
It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of deadly contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of all 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.
Step One is, paradoxically, both a crushing end and a beginning.
What a child knows about transformation is very little. What an adult knows, I think, is even less. Because a child at least remembers that transformation is possible.
Self-knowledge is the foundation of a practical spirituality, a spirituality that ripples outward from the self into the world.
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 vast than we could begin to comprehend and more apparently empty. But it’s only when we overlook the fairly obvious fact that we are human beings on a planet packed with human beings that we can entertain the fairly self-indulgent idea that we are, in fact, alone.
If a woman stands in a kitchen rubbing her eyes and pouring coffee with no one there to see her, does she exist? I.
The side of me that feared fire and longed for ice, that cringed at noise and hungered for silence, that shied from touch and desired to numb itself into nothing.
There is no right,” she says. “There’s the best you can do. And that’s fine. That’s normal.
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 experience. All we need to know is that it does occur. We have proof of that; we have our living, breathing, ever-expanding spiritual selves.
I had a love affair with books, with the characters and their worlds. Books kept me company.
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 makes us who we are? If we stop for a moment and think, Of what do I consist? what is the answer we hear?
We are, by our very human nature, limited in what we can know or do or control or change.
Call it the feeling of love that connects us. Call it the creative force that drives us to transform. Call it our energy. Call it our capacity to give. Call it grace, or even divinity, something that allows for those things to exist within us as individuals and between us each time we connect.
It is easy to write off childlike faith in the universe and childlike wonder at the world as simply a lack of knowledge about “how life really is.” Well, how is life, really? Do we know – we who have been denying life, life’s beauty and its true challenges, for such a long time? Or did we know better as children, when the whole world seemed to be filled with meaning and possibility, both good and bad?