Thursday, January 20, 2005
wasted / marya hornbacher
"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." (42)
"Nothing was so bad, I kept telling myself. Nothing that losing weight couldn't cure.
But I became less afraid, and there's the rub. One really ought to be afraid of self-torture. But it tempted me. It begged."(59)
" '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, because 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 that she's dying? Hell, no." (81)
"You begin to forget what it means to live. You forget what it means to feel all right because you feel like shit all of the time, and you can't remember what it was like before.
...You begin to rely on the feeling of hunger, your body's raucous rebellion at the small tortures of your own hands. When you eventually begin to get well, health will feel wrong, it will make you dizzy, it will confuse you, you will get sick again because sick is what you know." (111)
"...we turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how to not-need." (119)
"Through the looking glass I went, and things turned upside down, inside out. Words turned themselves around, and I heard things in reverse. Inside the looking glass, you become the center of the universe. All things are reduced to their relationship to you. You bang on the glass--people turn and see you, smile, and wave. Your mouth moves in soundless shapes. You lose a dimention, turn into a paper doll figure with painted eyes." (123)
"You've made a decision: 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.
In truth, you like the pain. You like it because you believe you deserve it, and the fact that you're putting yourself through pain means you are doing what you, by all rights, ought to do. You're doing something right... Your ability to withstand pain is your claim to fame. It is ascetic, holy. It is self-control. It is masochism, and masochism is 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, be both a top and a bottom, and 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." (124)
"The sickness occupies your every thought, breathes like a lover at your ear; the sickness stands at your shoulder in the mirror, absorbed with your body, every 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." (125)
"At the opposite pole of my brain there was a desire to throw in the towel at an early age. Turn over the survival instinct and you will find its wet white belly, the instinct that tends toward death. I felt no anger toward this instinct and, curiously, had little fear of it--not yet--and I turned into an ally in my little war." (134)
"I said, I'm not blaming you, I'm just saying I might have picked up some habits--
She said, Sweetheart, you didn't pick anything up. You just came this way.
...I had just come like this, with a peculiar tendency to self-destruct." (156)
"Think back to the fact that children, in their early years, teach themselves how to regulate moods, slow the careening train of anxiety as it clatters through the brain. It's not so uncommon for a person to simply teach themselves the wrong thing. Like me." (193)
"They held up a mirror and made me look.
I didn't want to look. The very simple fact that I'd been avoiding all along became, in the quiet hours, in the patient presence of people who bewilderingly cared for me, unavoidable: I hated myself and did not believe that I deserved to live.
...I did not know what lay beneath ths skin I wore. I didn't want to know. I suspected it was something horrible, something soft and weak and worthless and stupid and childish and tearful and needy and fat.
...I didn't want it to be me underneath. 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 a 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. Without being entirely aware of it, I had settled on starvation as my torture of choice. When people think about killing themselves, they usually think about killing themselves with the least amount of pain, the briefest period of suffering. This is different." (204-205)
"In the mirror, my ribs thrust themselves forward through the skin, proud. In the mirror, my hands play them, a hollow instrument. My hands make their way to the sway of my back, snake down to press the twin knobs at the base. My hands, shy as hands meeting up with an old lover, tough lightly, in that breathless disbelief: Are you really there? Have you come back to me at last?" (243)
"It did not occur to me that I was too thin. After all, what is too thin? After all, you can never be too rich or too thin. But I stood in front of the mirror, saying, Maybe. Maybe thin enough.
This was a miracle. The absolute truism of eating disorders is that you never believe you are thin enough. Whereas most people set out to lose a few pounds--say five, ten, fifteen--and stop when they get there, the anoretic sets out to lose ten pounds and then says, well, maybe fifteen. She loses the fifteen, says twenty, loses the twenty, says thirty, loses thirty, says forty, loses the forty and dies. Oops. She hadn't really meant to die. She just wanted to see what would happen. Wanted to see how far she could go. And then she couldn't quite bring herself to break the fall." (245)
"In her presence, I was reminded again of why I was an anoretic: fear. Of my needs, for food, for sleep, for touch, for simple conversation, for human contact, for love. I was anoretic because I was afraid of being human. Implicit in human contact is the exposure of the self, the interaction of selves. The self I'd had, once upon a time, was too much. Now there was no self at all. I was a blank." (266)
"It does not hit you until later. The fact that you were essentially dead does not register until you begin to come alive. Frostbite does not hurt until it starts to thaw. First it is numb. Then a shock of pain rips through the body. And then, every winter after, it aches.
And every season since is winter, and I still do ache." (276)
"There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose.
...The experts say, What did you do before your eating disorder? What were you like before? And you simply stare at them because you can remember no before, and the word you means nothing at all." (279)
"Eating disorders provide a little private drama, they feed into the desire for constant excitement, everything becomes life-or-death, everything is terribly grand and crashing, very Sturm und Drang. And they are distracting. You don't have to think about any of the nasty minutiae of the real world...because you are having a real drama, not a sitcom but a GRAND EPIC, all by yourself, and why would you bother with those foolish mortals when you could spend hours and hours with the mirror, when you are having the most interesting sadomasochistic affair with your own image?" (281)
"Never, never underestimate the power of desire." (283)
"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." (285)
*
[ from self-injury.net self-injury.net ]
~
we turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need
~
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
~
there is a self-perpetuating belief that one simply cannot help it, and this is very dangerous. it becomes an identity in and of itself. it becomes its own religion, and you wait for salvation, and you wait, and wait, and wait, and do not save yourself. if you saved yourself, and did not wait for salvation, you'd be self-sufficient. how dull
~
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
~
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 to 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 inexpelicable sobs
~
the anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions
~
"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 princple, 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, because who, with a pulse of 43 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
~
the girl gets up each day and creates herself out of cloth and paint. she writes at night about men who looked, and boys who touched, and weight. she writes of the great weakness that drove her to the cupboard and made her eat. the writing is never enough. confession is insufficient. absolution never comes in the articulation, only in the penance. she thinks of the saints: their flagellums, their bed of nails, their centuries-late apologies for eve who doomed all women to the pains of the flesh by giving in to the pleasures of the flesh. they lacerate their own flesh in penance for eve, for the sins of the world wihich they shoulder as their own. they wear hair shirts, or razors next to their skin.
~
she reads books on the saints. the sainted anoretics, who, in thier holy ascetiscism, insisted that god was telling them to starve. she considers god. she determines he, if they were on speaking terms, would tell her to starve for general sins. the hair shirt is her own skin, rasping on the rawness of what lies beneath. she wills herself to rise above the flesh: not food, not sex, not touch, not sleep...the insomnia gives rise to mania, a racing of thoughts and sadistically vivid images flashing in the brain..the thoughts spiral upward, whitling shrill as a teakettle screaming inside the brain.
~
collective unconscious. our perpetual search for something that will be big enough to fill us has led us to a strange idolatry of at once consumption and starvation. we execute complicated vacillations...between self-worship and self-degradation, the pendulum swinging back and forth, missing the point of balance every time...
we turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how to not-need
~
an eating disorder is not usually a phase, and it is not necessarily indicitive 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
~
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.
~
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 assocation, 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.
~
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.
~
i didn't particularly want to live much longer than [twenty]. life seemed rather daunting. it seems so to me even now. life seemed like too long a time to have to stick around, a huge span of years through which one would be required to tap - dance and smile and be great! and be happy! and be amazing! and be precocious! 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. go to a heaven where there was nothing but bathtubs and books.
~
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.
~
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.
~
it is not a sudden leap from sick to well. it is a slow, strange meadner from sick to mostly well. the misconception that eating disorders are a medical disease in the traditional sense is not helpful here. there is not "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.
~
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.
~
malnutrition precipates 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.
~
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.
~
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.
~
run into the bathroom, turn on the fans, the shower, the tap in the sink, click up the toilet seat, swig both sodas, vomit. and vomit some more until your knees are too weak. when you stand up, they'll buckle, and you'll swing to the edge of the sink, holding on for dear life. dear life my ass. 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.
~
"while i waited i counted my bones. they were all still there. then i thought, my god. i straightened up, held the cold brick wall while the dizziness came in waves and washed away. i walked very slowly inside, placing my feet carefully on the floor. i went to the desk and signed myself in."
~
"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."
~
"if i eat this apple sandwich in precisely twenty bites, no more no less, then i will be happy."
A lie and a farce and a fake;
x 11:35 PM
|
"
