For me, the first sign of oncoming madness is that I’m unable to write.
I either want to be completely recovered or completely emaciated. It’s the in between that I can’t stand, the limbo of failure where you know that you haven’t done your best at one or the other: dying or living.
So many means of self-destruction, so little time.
I began to measure things in absence instead of presence.
You wake up one morning and there it is, sitting in an old plaid bathrobe in your kitchen, unpleasant and unshaved. You look at it, heart sinking. Madness is a rotten guest.
Hatred is so much closer to love than indifference.
That’s the nice thing about dreams, the way you wake up before you fall.
The anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions.
He leaned down and whispered to me: No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it’s still going to be you underneath. And he let go of my arm and walked back down the hall.
There are women in my closet, hanging on the hangers. a different woman for each suit, each dress, each pair of shoes. I hoard clothes. My makeup spills from the bathroom drawers, and there are different women for different lipsticks.
We were at another funeral party. I wasn’t sure who had died this time, but it was a suicide, and upsetting because it was completely out of season. No on killed themselves in summertime. It was rude.
I mean, we all know the dangers of starving, but bulimia? That can’t be that bad. It’s only bad when you get really thin. Who worries about bulimics? They’re just gross.
You will not stop. The pain is necessary, especially the pain of hunger. It reassures you that you are strong, can withstand anything, that you are not a slave to your body, you don’t have to give in to its whining.
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.
You will miss her sometimes. Bear in mind she’s trying to kill you. Bear in mind you have a life to live.
I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.
Falling in love happens so suddenly that it seems, all at once, that you have always been in love.
My brain sometimes departs from the agreed-upon reality, and my private reality is a very lonely place. But in the end, I’m not sure I wish I’d never gone there.
We know we need, and so we acquire and eat and eat, past the point of bodily fullness, trying to sate a greater need. Ashamed of this, we turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how to not-need.
I get absolutely shitfaced. I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old. I am having the time of my life.
The madness is there, and will always be there. But it will keep sleeping, as long as I don’t wake it up.