By Category: Eating Disorders
“you're only popular with anorexia
so i turn myself inside out
in hope someone will see.”
-Jackie's Strength, Tori Amos
~
“One day I will be thin enough. Just the bones, no disfiguring flesh. Just the pure, clear shape of me. Bones. That is, after all, what we're made up of, and everything else is just storage, deposit, and waste. Strip it away, use it up. No deposit, no return.”
-Anonymous
~
“Hunger hurts, but starving works,
When it costs too much to love
And I went crazy again today,
Looking for a strand to climb
Looking for a little hope.”
-Paper Bag, Fiona Apple
~
“I will be thin and pure like a glass cup. Empty. Pure as light. Music. I move my hands over my body - my shoulders, my collarbone, my rib cage, my hip bones like part of an animal skull, my small thighs. In the mirror my face is pale and my eyes look bruised. My hair is pale and thin and the light comes through. I could be a lot younger than seventeen. I could be a child still, untouched.”
-The Hanged Man, Francesca Lia Block
~
“Gaining weight and pulling my head out of the toilet was the most political act I have ever committed.”
-The Body Politic, Abra Fortune Chernik
~
“'For that couple of minutes she symbolized everything that is wrong with how we perceive beauty as a society, she was the store bought ideal that drives girls to bulimia and anorexia. She was the skinny thinspiration that helps thirteen year olds put off eating for just one more day, and so I walked over and punched her.'”
-Lockpick Pornography, Joey Comeau
~
“I'm a girl
I'm only thirteen
My body rots
Cause I won't fucking eat
I'm a silent star on the b-roll
I'm a mirror fucking image of no control
Give me an award
I conquered food again
What else is better in life than to purge my pain?
If I cut, I won't look like that
If I cut, If I cut,
I won't feel like this shit.”
-Sick Of It All, The Distillers
Recommended by Gwen.
~
“Avalanche is sullen and too thin
She starves herself to rid herself of sin
And the kick is so divine when she sees bones beneath her skin
And she says:
Hey baby can you bleed like me?
C'mon baby can you bleed like me?
Chris is all dressed up and acting coy
Painted like a brand new Christmas toy
He's trying to figure out if he's a girl or he's a boy
He says:
Hey baby can you bleed like me?
C'mon baby can you bleed like me?
Doodle takes dad's scissors to her skin
And when she does relief comes setting in
While she hides the scars she's making underneath her pretty clothes
She sings:
Hey baby can you bleed like me?
C'mon baby can you bleed like me?
Therapy is Speedie's brand new drug
Dancing with the devil's past has never been too fun
It's better off than trying to take a bullet from a gun
And she cries:
Hey baby can you bleed like me?
C'mon baby can you bleed like me?”
-Bleed Like Me, Garbage
Recommended by Suggested by Libby.
~
“'Do you want to get well?' they'll ask. You'll shrug and look at the scale, wondering how off it is, whether it will lie and tell them you weigh three pounds more than you actually do. You will be obliged to correct it, on principle, to save your soul, and for your pains you will find yourself with a new address, Eating Disorders Unit, Eighth Floor, having confirmed their suspicions, be cause who, with a pulse of forty-three and a systolic pressure careening in vertical swoops, gives a flying fuck if the scale is three pounds off? An anoretic, that's who. Does she care if she's dying? Hell, no.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“...if I eat this apple sandwich in precisely twenty bites, no more no less, then I will be happy.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“A strange equation, and an altogether too-common belief: One's worth is exponentially increased with one's incremental disappearance.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“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.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“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.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“And when, after fifteen years of bingeing, 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.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“Bulimia is linked, in my life, to periods of intense passion, passion of all kinds, but most specifically emotional passion. Bulimia acknowledges the body explicitly, violently. It attacks the body, but it does not deny. It is an act of disgust and of need. This disgust and this need are about both the body and the emotions. The bulimic finds herself in excess, too emotional, too passionate. This sense of excess is pinned to the body. The body bears the blame but is not the primary problem. There is a sense of hopelessness in the bulimic, a well-fuck-it-all-then, I might as well binge. This is a dangerous statement, but the bulimic impulse is more realistic than the anorexic because, for all its horrible nihilism, it understands the body is inescapable.
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.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“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.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“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.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“In truth, you like the pain...Your ability to withstand pain is your claim to fame. It is ascetic, holy. It is self-control. It is masochism, and masochism pleasurable to many, but we don't like to think about that. We don't like to think that a person could have a twisted autoerotic life going on...experience both at once: the pleasure of beating the hell out of a body shackled at the wrists, and the pleasure of being the body and knowing we deserve each blow.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“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.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“It is the thing you believe is keeping you safe, alive, contained--and in the end, of course you find it's doing quite the opposite.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“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 all strength.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“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.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“Malnutrition precipitates 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.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“My bones are brittle, my heart weak and erratic, my esophagus and stomach riddled with ulcers, my reproductive system shot, my immune system useless... I'm not going to have a happy ending.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
~
“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.”
-Wasted, Marya Hornbacher
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