I feel numb and dumb, and unable to lay hands on any words.
“
| — | From The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (via larmoyante) |
I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won’t.
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| — | From Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen (via decaying-organic-matter) |
From I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006) by Park-chan Wook
This film is one of the most creative, layered, magnificently directed films I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching and it’s a shame how unknown and underrated it is.
When you give up junk, you give up a way of life. I have seen junkies kick and hit the lush and wind up dead in a few years. Suicide is frequent among ex-junkies. Why does a junky quit junk of his own will? You never know the answer to that question. No conscious tabulation of the disadvantages and horrors of junk gives you the emotional drive to kick. The decision to quit junk is a cellular decision, and once you have decided to quit you cannot go back to junk permanently any more than you could stay away from it before. Like a man who has been away a long time, you see things different when you return from junk.
“
| — | From Junky by William S. Burroughs |
Death becomes a way out. Can’t live forever with an eating disorder, can’t live without it. It becomes the question we will ponder for many, many years before having a definitive answer. Do I want to live? Why? Our reasons not to live may seem mundane to someone without an eating disorder. You can not feel our emptiness or understand our loneliness. We can’t share this world of silence we have made for ourselves. It is the thing that may have saved us in the past and might kill us in the future.
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From How It Feels by K. Martel via (via abbifede) p.s. not sure of the author, if someone can confirm (or refute) the author’s name, please message me. |
I hated my younger self with an intensity that frightens me even now. Of course I resented and deeply feared anything that threatened my chances of escaping who I’d once been.
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| — | From Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher |
It was too much the sort of thing I would do: Take a sad private matter, give the facts in technicolor detail to perfect strangers, and thus relieve myself of my life. And then later, I would feel cheap and empty, deeply dissatisfied, like a verbal slut, the girl who’d give it all away to just any old anybody.
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| — | From Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel |
It has been argued that food and eating have replaced sex as our foremost cultural taboo. To some extent I agree with this but would point out that the taboo is not against food, or sex, or flesh, but against a loss of control. Our most hallowed virtue in modern society is self-control, personal “power” (also the most hallowed virtue in my own family). If you thumb through the cannon of philosophy, you find Augustine and Co. speaking of women with the same fear and virulence that we now use to speak of food, as something “sinful,” something that “tempts,” something that causes a loss of control. “The slimy desires of the flesh,” Augustine writes. Note: not the flesh itself, but its desires, arising from the flesh, dismantling our control.
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| — | From Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher |
The book said you could die of an eating disorder. That didn’t bother me. What it did not say was that if it did not kill you right away, it would live with you the rest of your life, and then kill you.
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| — | From Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher |
But, as is always the case with bulimia, it is at once tempting, seductive, and terrifying. It divides the brain in half: you take in, you reject; you need, you do not need. It is not a comfortable split, even early on. But early on, its pros seem to outweigh its cons. You have a specific focus, your thoughts do not race as much. They stay in an orderly row: go home, eat, throw up. The problem in your life is your body. It is defined and has a beginning and an end. The problem will be solved by shrinking the body. Contain yourself.
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| — | From Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher |
My neurosis surprised even me. All of a sudden, I was a mess. It’s quite possible that I had some preexisting depression and/or anxiety disorder and/or mania, and the confusion simply gave it a chance to surface. And it did surface…I developed an acute, bizarre fear of everything. I was a walking bundle of anxiety, crying easily and afraid of the dark, the kids at school, the teachers, the sun, the moon, the stars. I got it in my head that prayer would work. I began to pray constantly, frantically, as I peered around me to see if anyone was watching. I dropped to my knees, pressing my nails into the palms of my hands, praying wildly for God to forgive me, muttering manic prayers that would’ve made little sense to any god.
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| — | From Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher |
Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones-a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother’s marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered.
“
| — | From The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy |
From Promising Young Women: Heather (#19)
This wasn’t like in the movie Heathers, which had come out a few years earlier. We watched it over and over again. It was something we did. Back then, I hadn’t read Ariel. In the movie, Ariel is a punchline; Sylvia Plath is a joke. This was before I’d learned that Sylvia Plath was real, not a joke. Heathers made suicide glamorous but also made fun of the glamor. What I remember most is the way Winona Ryder said I don’t really like my friends. It was perfect: sexy and sad. It was how we all felt back then.
This Heather wasn’t a Heather, though. She wasn’t a Veronica, either.
And this Heather wasn’t Scandinavian, though when I think of her I always think of Bergman, of the grainy film in black and white. The actress. The nurse. I first watched it while visiting Dread at Sarah Lawrence. He locked me in one of the library viewing rooms. You have to see this, he said.
For the rest of my life, the men I loved or would love—it was always this way:
You must read/see/listen to/think about this.
And I would. Read or watch or listen or think. It was one way of becoming the person I wanted to be.
Heather was pretty in a simple way, what people think of when they say wholesome. Which is a word I hate. The kind of girl all the guys wanted to date in high school. Which was not me. Heather was a cheerleader and her boyfriend was a football player. Joe.
Heather didn’t talk. That was her thing. She’d been in the hospital a year and a half and hadn’t said a word.
I found her absolutely riveting.
Heather walked. There wasn’t far to go so she’d walk the halls, the corridors, up and down over and over again. Daily.
It is a way of dying, not talking. I hadn’t realized.
by Suzanne Scanlon, continuation can be found here
