Life is short.

Last semester, I met a really great guy friend.  He and I have become even more close over the last few weeks.  He knew about my cancer scare.  Last night he came up to me with tears in his eyes and hugged me and said that his cancer has come back and has spread to his heart.  He told me that he had been thinking about giving up on chemo.  He told me that seeing me face my scare with the courage I had made him want to keep fighting.  He and I are in a performance group together at school, and he dedicated the song to all of us.  He told me that he is so glad I'm not cancerous.

He's 19.  Most 19 year olds are not dealing with this.  I'm 21. I thought, how close could I have been to that being me?  Most doctors do not test you for it for no reason.  They honestly thought I had it.  But my spots that had been growing rapidly and changing shapes, shrank.  My MRI came back showing this. My blood tests came back without cancer.  I have to do treatment to get rid of the spots.

Last week I started having mini seizures.  I haven't had one since Thursday.  But the thing is, I'm okay.  I'm not dying any time soon, that I know of.   I've come close to having more a few times.  But I've been drinking water.  I have been trying to eat every two or three hours and taking it slow.  I haven't been to a class at all since the semester started since it's mostly online.  But I'm working on getting healthy.  I'm working on getting out of the mess of studying I have to do.  My friend and I made a promise to each other that no matter what happens with us this semester, that we don't just lay down and die.  We don't give up.  We keep fighting.

I have seen God do a miraculous thing with my spots.  And even though my friends cancer has come back, I have the faith that God can heal him, if that's what God wants to do.  Life is so short.  You don't know when you're going to be called home.  You don't know how much time you have left.  But you have to keep moving forward when things get hard.  You can't just give up.

Get It Right.

What have I done?
I wish I could run,
Away from this ship going under
Just trying to help
Hurt everyone else
Now I feel the weight of the world is on my shoulders

What can you do when your good isn't good enough
And all that you touch tumbles down?
'Cause my best intentions
Keep making a mess of things,
I just wanna fix it somehow
But how many times will it take?
Oh, how many times will it take for me to get it right, to get it right?

Can I start again, with my faith shaken?
'Cause I can't go back and undo this
I just have to stay and face mistakes,
But if I get stronger and wiser, I'll get through this

What can you do when you're good isn't good enough?
And all that you touch tumbles down?
'Cause my best intentions keep making a mess of things,
I just wanna fix it somehow
But how many times will it take?
Oh, how many times will it take for me to get it right?

So I throw up my fists, throw a punch in the air,
And accept the truth that sometimes life isn't fair!
Yeah, I'll send down a wish and I'll send up a prayer
And then finally someone will see how much I care

What can you do when you're good isn't good enough?
And all that you touch tumbles down?
'Cause my best intentions keep making a mess of things,
I just wanna fix it somehow
But how many times will it take?
Oh, how many times will it take for me to get it right?

I don't know what you're going through.  I know what it feels like to have your world cave in.  To have your faith seem so small.  To feel so broken and on the verge of tears at every moment.  I know what it feels like to want to die.  To wish you could change everything about yourself because you'll never be good enough.  To feel like you will never get it right.  But those feelings are a lie.  You are good enough.   You are an amazing individual.  You might have made a few mistakes, but you can always turn around.  God always takes you back. You have God with you every step of the way, for the moments when it won't stop raining.   So don't think you can't ever accomplish anything, because you can!

Hold On.

I miss your soft lips, I miss your white sheets
I miss the scratch of your unshaved face on my cheek
And this is so hard 'cuz I didn't see
That you were the love of my life and it kills me

I see your face in strangers on the street
I still say your name when I'm talking in my sleep
And in the limelight, I play it off fine
But I can't handle it when I turn off my night light

But I can't handle it when I turn off my night light

They say that true love hurts, well this could almost kill me
Young love murder, that is what this must be
I would give it all to not be sleeping alone

The life is fading from me while you watch my heart bleed
Young love murder, that is what this must be
I would give it all to not be sleeping alone

I remember the time we jumped the fence when
The Stones were playing and we were too broke to get in
You held my hand and they made me crawl
I swear to God it was the best night of my life

Or when you took me across the world
We promised that this would last forever but now I see
It was my past life, a beautiful time
Drunk off of nothing but each other 'til the sunrise

Drunk off of nothing but each other 'til the sunrise

They say that true love hurts, well this could almost kill me
Young love murder, that is what this must be
I would give it all to not be sleeping alone

The life is fading from me while you watch my heart bleed
Young love murder, that is what this must be
I would give it all to not be sleeping alone

It was a past life, a beautiful time
Drunk off of nothing but each other 'til the sunrise

They say that true love hurts, well this could almost kill me
Young love murder, that is what this must be
I would give it all to not be sleeping alone

The life is fading from me while you watch my heart bleed
Young love murder, that is what this must be
I would give it all to not be sleeping alone
-The Harold Song by Ke$ha.

The last time I was in a relationship was with my ex.  We broke up 2 years ago in June.  The last time I saw him was almost 3 years ago.  And yes, it does get a lot easier.  Most days are really good.  I wake up and I'm pretty happy.  I get out of bed.  I shower.  I get dressed.  I go to my classes.  I work.  I have my stuff together.  But there are still days when I miss him.  I wonder what he's doing.  I wonder if he misses me.  I wonder if it tears him apart.  I wonder why we can't be together.  I miss him.

It's hard to get out of bed, let alone showered and dressed.  I skip class (this is rare).  I write letters to him that he'll never read.  It still hurts on these days as badly as it did the moment he said goodbye to me.  I have dreams about him some times.  I miss him.  I hate that I miss him.  But I hold on.  These are the days that turn into long nights, tossing and turning in my sleep.  My roommate has told me I talk about him sometimes.   But I hold on.

I get out of bed the next day and try to get the light back in my eyes.  I make sure that I don't stay broken, because these days are pretty rare.  My point is this, sometimes, life is really hard.  Some times, you want to fall apart and give up.  But don't, because it does get easier.  It doesn't always suck so bad.

Hold on.

Update.

Tomorrow at 10:30 I'll be going to the doctor for all my testing.  They're going to be doing almost every test possible because they think it's cancer.  If it's not cancer, then they will be treating me for whatever is wrong with me.  I've been nauseous for the last 48 hours and I haven't been able to keep any food down.  Not fun.  But I know that if it is cancer, then I'm going to be fighting it.  And if it's not, then I'm going to be working on getting healthy.

Tonight, we are young, so let's set the world on fire, we can burn brighter than the sun.   Your life matters.  You matter.  You are amazing and strong and beautiful and you deserve to live.  You deserve to love and be loved.  You deserve so many wonderful things.

The big C word.

Today I went back to the doctor. On Monday I am being tested for cancer.  I don't know much yet.  Just please be praying because this is what killed my Grandma.  The last thing she told me was you fight like hell to live.  Don't ever lay down and die.  So if it is cancer, that's what I'm gonna be doing.

Carry Me Home.

Give me a second I,
I need to get my story straight
My friend's are in the bathroom getting higher than the empire state
My lover he is waiting for me just across the bar
My seat's been taken by some sunglasses asking about a scar, and
I know I gave it to you months ago
I know you're trying to forget
But between the drinks and subtle things
Through holes in my apologies
I'm trying hard to take it back
So if by the time the bar closes
And you feel like falling down
I'll carry you home


Tonight
We are young
So let's set the world on fire
We can burn brighter than the sun


Tonight
We are young
So let's set the world on fire
We can burn brighter than the sun


Now I know that I'm not
All that you got
I guess that I, I just thought
Maybe we could find new ways to fall apart
But our friends are back
So let's raise a cup
'Cause I found someone to carry me home


Tonight
We are young
So let's set the world on fire
We can burn brighter than the sun


Tonight
We are young
So let's set the world on fire
We can burn brighter than the sun


Carry me home tonight
Just carry me home tonight
Carry me home tonight
Just carry me home tonight 
Carry me home tonight 


The moon is on my side
I have no reason to run
Carry me home tonight 
So will someone come and carry me home tonight


The angels never arrived but I can hear the choir
Carry me home tonight
So will someone come and carry me home


Tonight
We are young
So let's set the world on fire
We can burn brighter than the sun


We are young


Tonight
We are young
So let's set the world on fire
We can burn brighter than the sun


So if by the time the bar closes
And you feel like falling down
I'll carry you home tonight

I know, I love Glee.  That's not what's important right now.   What's important is that my entire life, I have wished that someone would be there for me, to take me home when I couldn't walk.  To be there for me and to let me know how loved and cherished I am.

That's when I realized that I have that.  I have God.  God loves me and God always will carry me when I can't walk.  I have friends.  I have amazing love and support and help and friends and people who are there for me no matter what I do.

Yes, I've been used, especially recently, but that doesn't mean that I'm not loved.  That doesn't mean that God isn't there to carry me home.  To make sure I'm okay.  To love me and take me back when I'm messing up.  To me, this song isn't about getting drunk or high and having someone carry you home from a party.  It's about making mistakes, but learning from them.  About never giving up.  About finding those people who will always be there.  About finding strength you didn't know you posses. 

Carry me home.

Wasted: What it's like to have an E.D

One of my favorite books of all time is Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia by Marya Hornbacher.  Yes, the book is extremely triggering if you are not in a good place, but it gives you such an amazing look at what it is like to have both anorexia and bulimia, and explains to you why it's not an option for the rest of your life.  I am forever kicking myself that someone stole my copy.

“You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.”
“There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose.”
“There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.”
“We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.”
“I wanted to kill the me underneath. That fact haunted my days and nights. When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behavior for many years, your brain can’t quite deal with it. It will try very hard to avoid that realization; it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you. This is, I believe, different from the suicidal wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief, different from the suicide I would later attempt, trying to escape that pain. This is a wish to murder yourself; the connotation of kill is too mild. This is a belief that you deserve slow torture, violent death.”
“You begin to forget what it means to live. You forget things. You forget that you used to feel all right. You forget what it means to feel all right because you feel like shit all the time, and you can't remember what it was like before. People take the feeling of full for granted. They take for granted the feeling of steadiness, of hands that do not shake, heads that do not ache, throats not raw with bile and small rips of fingernails forced in haste to the gag spot. Stomachs that do not begin to wake up in the night, calves and thighs knotting in muscles that are beginning to eat away at themselves. they may or may not be awakened at night by their own inexplicable sobs.”
“Bear in mind, people with eating disorders tend to be both competitive and intelligent. We are incredibly perfectionistic. We often excel in school,athletics,artistic pursuits. We also tend to quit without warning. Refuse to go to school,drop out,quit jobs,leave lovers,move,lose all our money. We get sick of being impressive. Rather,we tire of having to seem impressive. As a rule,most of us never really believed we were any good in the first place.”
“I began to measure things in absence instead of presence.”
“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.”
“That’s the nice thing about dreams, the way you wake up before you fall.”
“When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.”
“Never, never underestimate the power of desire. If you want to live badly enough, you can live. The great question, at least for me, was: How do I decide I want to live?”
“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.”
“Hatred is so much closer to love than indifference."
“This is the weird aftermath, when it is not exactly over, and yet you have given it up. You go back and forth in your head, often, about giving it up. It’s hard to understand, when you are sitting there in your chair, having breakfast or whatever, that giving it up is stronger than holding on, that “letting yourself go” could mean you have succeeded rather than failed. You eat your goddamn Cheerios and bicker with the bitch in your head that keeps telling you you’re fat and weak: Shut up, you say, I’m busy, leave me alone. When she leaves you alone, there’s a silence and a solitude that will take some getting used to. You will miss her sometimes...There is, in the end, the letting go.”
“I do not remember very many things from the inside out. I do not remember what it felt like to touch things, or how bathwater traveled over my skin. I did not like to be touched, but it was a strange dislike. I did not like to be touched because I craved it too much. I wanted to be held very tight so I would not break. Even now, when people lean down to touch me, or hug me, or put a hand on my shoulder, I hold my breath. I turn my face. I want to cry.”
“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.”
“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.”
“This is the very boring part of eating disorders, the aftermath. When you eat and hate that you eat. And yet of course you must eat. You don’t really entertain the notion of going back. You, with some startling new level of clarity, realize that going back would be far worse than simply being as you are. This is obvious to anyone without an eating disorder. This is not always obvious to you.”
“But in some ways, the most significant choices one makes in life are done for reasons that are not all that dramatic, not earth-shaking at all; often enough, the choices we make are, for better or for worse, made by default.”
“There is, in the end, the letting go.”
“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.”
“I was perpetually grief-stricken when I finished a book, and would slide down from my sitting position on the bed, put my cheek on the pillow and sigh for a long time. It seemed there would never be another book. It was all over, the book was dead. It lay in its bent cover by my hand. What was the use? Why bother dragging the weight of my small body down to dinner? Why move? Why breathe? The book had left me, and there was no reason to go on.”
“By November, you wish you were dead. You want nothing more. Every day, every fucking day, you run up the steps of the house, breathing hard, swing open the cupboards, thinking: You pitiful little bitch. Fucking cow. Greedy pig. All day, your stomach pinches and spits up its bile. You sway when you walk. You begin to get cold again.”
“I didn't particularly want to live much longer than that. Life seemed rather daunting. It seems so to me even now. Life seemed too long a time to have to stick around, a huge span of years through which one would be require to tap-dance and smile and be Great! and be Happy! and be Amazing! and be Precious! I was tired of my life by the time I was sixteen. I was tired of being too much, too intense, too manic. I was tired of people, and I was incredibly tired of myself. I wanted to do whatever Amazing Thing I was expected to do— it might be pointed out that these were my expectations, mine alone— and be done with it. Go to sleep.”
“I was used to sleeping with people because I endlessly found myself in identical situations where it was easier to just fuck them than to say no.”
“The anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions.”
“The idea of my future simultaneously thrilled and terrified me, like standing at the lip of a very sheer cliff- I could fly, or fall. I didn't know how to fly, and I didn't want to fall. So I backed away from the cliff and went in search of something that had a clear, solid trajectory for me to follow, like hopscotch.”
“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.”
“The bragging was the worst. I hear this in schools all over the country, in cafés and restaurants, in bars, on the Internet, for Pete's sake, on buses, on sidewalks: Women yammering about how little they eat. Oh, I'm Starving, I haven't eaten all day, I think I'll have a great big piece of lettuce, I'm not hungry, I don't like to eat in the morning (in the afternoon, in the evening, on Tuesdays, when my nails aren't painted, when my shin hurts, when it's raining, when it's sunny, on national holidays, after or before 2 A.M.). I heard it in the hospital, that terrible ironic whine from the chapped lips of women starving to death, But I'm not hun-greeee. To hear women tell it, we're never hungry. We live on little Ms. Pac-Man power pellets. Food makes us queasy, food makes us itchy, food is too messy, all I really like to eat is celery. To hear women tell it we're ethereal beings who eat with the greatest distaste, scraping scraps of food between our teeth with our upper lips curled. For your edification, it's bullshit.”
“Something had been confirmed: I was worth giving a shit about; I was getting to be a successful sick person. Sick is when they say something. Of course, I had been sick for five years. But now, now maybe I was really sick. Maybe I was getting good at this, good enough to scare people. Maybe I would almost die, and balance just there, at the edge of the cliff, wavering while they gasped and clutched one another's arms, and win acclaim for my death-defying stunts. ”
“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.”
“For a long time I believed the opposite of passion was death. I was wrong. Passion and death are implicit, one in the other. Past the border of a fiery life lies the netherworld. I can trace this road, which took me through places so hot the very air burned the lungs. I did not turn back. I pressed on, and eventually passed over the border, beyond which lies a place that is wordless and cold, so cold that it, like mercury, burns a freezing blue flame.”
"Eating disorders are addictions. You become addicted to a number of their effects. The two most basic and important: the pure adrenaline that kicks in when you're starving—you're high as a kite, sleepless, full of a frenetic, unstable energy—and the heightened intensity of experience that eating disorders initially induce. At first, everything tastes and smells intense, tactile experience is intense, your own drive and energy themselves are intense and focused. Your sense of power is very, very intense. You are not aware, however, that you are quickly becoming addicted.”
“Death is a fascinating thing. The human mind continually returns and returns to death, to mortality, immortality, damnation, salvation. Some fear death, some seek it, but it is in our human nature to wonder at the limits of human life, at least. When you are sick like this you begin to wonder too much. Death is at your shoulder, death is your shadow, your scent, your waking and dreaming companion. You cannot help, when sleep begins to touch your eyes, but to wonder: What if? What if? And in that question, there is a longing, too much like the longing of a young girl in love. The sickness occupies your every thought, breathe like a lover at your ear; the sickness stands at your shoulder in the mirror, absorbed with your body, each inch of skin and flesh, and you let it work you over, touch you with rough hands that thrill.
Nothing will ever be so close to you again. You will never find a lover so careful, so attentive, so unconditionally present and concerned only with you.
Some of us use the body to convey the things for which we cannot find words. Some of us decide to take a shortcut, decide the world is too much or too little, death is so easy, so smiling, so simple; and death is dramatic, a final fuck-you to the world.”
 “At a certain point, an eating disorder ceases to be "about" any one thing. It stops being about your family, or your culture. Very simply, it becomes an addiction not only emotionally but also chemically. And it becomes a crusade. If you are honest with yourself, you stop believing that anyone could "make" you do such a thing— who, your parents? They want you to starve to death? Not likely. Your environment? It couldn't careless. You are also doing it for yourself. It is a shortcut to something many women without an eating disorder have gotten: respect and power. It is a visual temper tantrum. You are making an ineffective statement about this and that, a grotesque, self-defeating mockery of cultural standards of beauty, societal misogyny. It is a blow to your parents, at whom you are pissed.
And it is so very seductive. It is so reassuring, so all-consuming, so entertaining.
At first.”
“Madness is not what it seems. Time stops. All my life I've been obsessed with time, its motion and velocity, the way it works you over, the way it rushes you onward, a pebble turning in a brook. I've always been obsessed with where I'd go, and what I'd do, and how I would live. I've always harbored a desperate hope that I would make something of myself. Not then. Time stopped seeming so much like the thing that would transform me into something worthwhile and began to be inseparable from death. I spent my time merely waiting.”
  “Hospitalizations in general are blurry. The days are the same, precisely the same. Nothing changes. Life melts down to a simple progression of meals. They become a way of life fairly quickly. . . You may welcome this transition. It may seem inevitable to you. You have been removed from the world. . . It is all right, in a way, because there is nothing so sure, so safe, as routine.”
“Forgetting who you are and where you are and if you're there. Getting lost in the thought that you might be imagining everything, you might be dreaming your life. You look at your hand in front of your face, surrounded by light, and your heart thrums as you think: I'm dreaming, I'm not even here, I don't exist. It is too fascinating, the thought that you aren't. The thought that if you watch the lake long enough you might disappear into the white flames of light on the blue, which seem to be just inches from your face. It sucks you in, and you stare, only a little afraid. And then you scream, startled, when your mother comes through the door. You crash back to earth. It's dark. It's evening. You're here and your mother is looking at you asking, What?” 
"This seems impossible to me. It seems biologically impossible to stay the same size, although I must. It seems one must always be either bigger or smaller than they were at some arbitrary point in time to which all things are compared. The panties that are possibly tighter than they were. When? You can't say when. But you are absolutely positive no question that it's true.”
“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.”
“The term “starvation diet” refers to 900 calories a day. I was on one-third of a starvation diet. What do you call that? One word that comes to my mind: “suicide.”
“I have never been normal about my body. It has always seemed to me a strange and foreign entity. I don't know that there was ever a time when I was not conscious of it. As far back as I can think, I was aware of my own corporeality, my physical imposition on space.”
“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. You feel like you´re naked and have fallen through thin ice on a lake and are drowning in the ice water underneath. You can´t breathe.”
“I began to feel like I was wearing a sign on my forehead that said FUCKED UP in big neon letters.” 
“When you believe that you are not worthwhile in and of yourself, in the back of your mind you also begin to believe that life is not worthwhile in and of itself. It is only worthwhile insofar as it relates to your crusade. It is a kamikaze mission.”
“People with eating disorders tend to be very diametrical thinkers – everything is the end of the world, everything rides on this one thing, and everyone tells you you´re very dramatice, very intense, and they see it as an affectation, but it´s actually just how you think. It really seems to you that the sky will fall if you are not personally holding it up. On the one hand, this is sheer arrogance; on the other hand, this is a very real fear. And it isn´t that you ignore the potential repercussions of your actions. You don´t think there are any. Because you are not even there.”
“We take a certain sick pride in the fact that we know the caloric and fat content of every possible food on the planet, and have an understandable disdain for nutritionists who attempt to tell us the caloric content of anything, when we are the gods of caloric content and have delusions of nutritional omniscience, when said nutritionist will attempt to explain that the average woman needs a daily diet of 2,000 or more calories when we ourselves have been doing JUST FUCKING FINE on 500.” 
“It's never over. Not really. Not when you stay down there as long as I did, not when you've lived in the netherworld longer than you've lived in this material one, where things are very bright and large and make such strange noises. You never come back, not all the way. Always, there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier, thin as the glass of a mirror. You never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.
It is the distance of marred memory, of a twisted and shape-shifting past. When people talk about their childhood, their adolescence, their college days, I laugh along and try not to think: that was when I was throwing up in my elementary school bathroom, that was when I was sleeping with strangers to show off the sharp tips of my bones, that was when I lost sight of my soul and died.
And it is the distance of the present, as well - the distance that lies between people in general because of the different lives we have lived. I don't know who I would be, now, if I had not lived the life I have, and so I cannot alter my need for distance - nor can I lessen the low and omnipresent pain that that distance creates. The entirety of my life is overshadowed by one singular and near-fatal obsession.”
“Remember, anoretics do eat. We have systems of eating that develop almost unconsciously. By the time we realize we´ve been running our lives with an iron system of numbers and rules, the system has begun to rule us. They are systems of Safe Foods, foods not imbued, or less imbued, with monsters and devils and dangers. These are usually “pure” foods, less likely to taint the soul with such sins as fat, or sugar, or an excess of calories. Consider the advertisements for food, the religious lexicon of eating: “sinfully rich,” intones the silky voice announcer, “indulge yourself,” she says, “guilt-free.” Not complex foods that would send the mind spinning in a tornado of possible pitfalls contained in a given food – a possible miscalculation of calories, a loss of certainty about your control over chaos, your control over self. The horrible possibility that you are taking more than you deserve.”
 “I threw up again that night, half-afraid that my eyeballs would explode. But it was, by far, more important that I get rid of dinner. Of course, by then, throwing up was the only way I knew how to deal with fear. That paradox would begin to run my life: to know that what you are doing is hurting you, maybe killing you, and to be afraid of that fact--but to cling to the idea that this will save you, it will, in the end, make things okay.”
"As winter went on, longer than long, we both freaked out. My mania grew to insane proportions. I sat in the study room at night, wildly typing out Dali-esque short stories. I sat at my desk in our room, drinking tea, flying on speed. She'd bang into the room in a fury. Or, she'd bang into the room, laughing like a maniac. Or, she'd bang into the room and sit under the desk eating Nutter-Butters. She was a sugar freak. She'd pour packets of sugar down her throat, or long Pixie-Stix. She was in constant motion. At first I wondered if she too had some food issues, subsisting mostly on sugar and peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches on Wonder Bread, but my concern (as she pointed out) was “total transference, seriously, Max. Maybe you're just hungry.” Some Saturdays, we'd go to town together, buy bags and bags of candies, Tootsie Rolls (we both liked vanilla best; she always smelled delicious and wore straight vanilla extract as perfume, which made me hungry), and gummy worms and face- twisting sour things and butterscotch. We'd lie on our backs on the beds, listening to The Who and Queen, bellowing, “I AM THE CHAMPION, YES I AM THE CHAMPION” mouths full of sticky stuff, or we'd swing from the pipes over the bed and fall shrieking to the floor.”
“Me and my needs were driving my mother away. Me and my needs retreated to my closet, disappeared into fairy tales. I started making up a world where my needs wouldn´t exist at all.”
"At 1 A.M. I'd pull on my coat, my boots. Walk down the stairway, out the door, down the long driveway to the road. Sometimes, I'd go to the stoned boy's house. We'd sit and watch TV. We'd have sex, sometimes. I remember only that the bedroom had two windows through which blue light spilled, and it smelled sticky sweet. His guitar leaned against the wall. Sometimes, I'd just walk. Down roads and up roads, through hills, through the neighborhoods, cold. Counting the small squares of lamplight in the houses where someone was still awake. I wondered who they were, and what kept them up. I went down to the little strip mall, the all-night 7-Elevena single glow beside the dark bluegrass bar, the dark deli, the dark beauty salon, Acrylic's Only $19. I bought a thirty-two-ounce cup of coffee, black. I sat outside on the bench, smoking, holding the cup in both hands.”
"Crazy isn´t always what they say it is. It´s not always the old woman wearing sneakers and a skirt and a scarf, wandering around with a shopping cart, hollering at no one, nothing, tumbling through years in her head. No. Sometimes it is a girl wearing boots and jeans and a sweater, arms crossed in front of her, shivering, wandering through the streets at night, all night, murmuring to no one, nothing, tumbling through the strange unreal dimensions in her head.”
“I have not lost my fascination with death. I have not become a noticeably less intense person. I have not, nor will I ever, completely lose the longing for that something, that thing that I believe will fill an emptiness inside me. I do believe that the emptiness was made greater by the things that I did to myself.”
“There was a time when I was unable to get out of bed because my body, its muscles eating themselves away, refused to sit up. There was a time when the lies rolled off my tongue with ease, when it was far more important to me to self-destruct than to admit I had a problem, let alone allow anyone to help.”
“Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others get eating disorders.”
“I developed a deep, abiding fear of jeans, which I still have. I hold my breath and shut my eyes when I pull on a pair in the dressing room, afraid they will now, as then, get stuck at my hips and there I will stand, absurd, staring at the excess of hips that should, if I were a good person, be 'slim.'"
“Having a normal person around me made it poignantly clear to me that I was out of control.”
“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.”
“Everything kept turning upside down and backward, the perfect little family blown apart by the slightest touch, the team splitting into multiple teams, players switching sides without warning. My father, a brilliant and severely depressed man, was by turns adoring and unstable, My mother, a brilliant and severely repressed woman, was by turns tender and icy. My childhood home may as well have been a bumper car rink. We drove wildly around, crashing into one another and bouncing off again.”

Animal I Have Become.

I've lost about 8 pounds in the last week.  I've been restricting.  Last week I had a health scare and the doctor told me I need to lose about 50 pounds.  To someone who has struggled with an eating disorder for almost a decade, that is not the easiest thing to hear.   When they told me that, I wanted to break down and cry.  I was already angry with myself for gaining weight from being at college.  I've had a weight problem for years.

Last night, my suite mate and I were watching Mulan.  I said, even though Belle was my favorite, I always identified so much with Mulan as a little girl.  Looking at yourself in the mirror, wondering when the image in your head would finally be what you saw in the reflection.  It wasn't vanity, either.  But I have always been hyper aware of what I look like at all times, so I can berate myself for taking up too much space.  I wanted so badly to make my parents proud of me.  The end of the movie always makes me cry because I have always wanted my Dad to say those things to me.  That he was so proud of me.  I remember realizing with Mulan that if I was to be who I truly am, it would break my family's heart. 

When I have a break up, I restrict.  When I find out that my parents are splitting up, I restrict.  I've just been too nauseated to eat and in too much pain.  I cope by not eating, or eating too much.  There's this monster in my brain and I can't control it.  I know it's potentially deadly and that I shouldn't be playing with fire.

I always return to my Eating Disorder like a long lost lover.  It makes all the noise in my life a quiet hum.  But it's not okay.  I'm not okay.