She cannot avoid carrying out the act, except at the price of an unbearable anxiety, which she has to face in two different moments, when she binges and when she vomits … An act carried out for its own sake, that is from some hidden compulsion to empty oneself independently of the act of filling oneself up. Only in order to avoid exploding from anxiety.

We spend our lives building higher fences and stronger locks, when the gravest dangers are already inside.

Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology “homeostasis”, i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

It’s in the waiting
that I go quietly mad,
silently insane.

Many never feel safe enough to relax yet find in eating disorders an pervasive mode of escape. Here’s how the escape works: you flee anxiety by pulling into yourself, you purge your fear by vomiting it up, you become so obsessive about your body that nothing else in the world seems to matter. The result is that you feel you have this body- your contained world- under control”.

The sense that, when you’re at the lowest you can possibly go, it’s kind of freeing, because the very worst thing that could possibly happen has happened. So what is there left to be afraid of? You won’t be happy forever, but you won’t be sad forever either. You know, it’s like a tipping point.

I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always … so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.

She struggled with this disease for a year, for five years, for twenty-five years. Bright shining girls who should be giggling with friends in the halls of high schools and colleges, studying Latin and microbiology and dance. Girls who should have been walking through fields of light and dark, who instead fell into a shadow. They died of heart attacks in bathrooms, in beds, in hospital rooms. They died at home, at school, alone. They died with their parents crying over them, their friends confused. They died before they had a chance to live, because once the demon moves in they’re not really living. I know. Believe me, I know.

Harriet Brown, Brave Girl Eating (via onedayshedecidedtolive)

(via peanutbutter-pretzels)

It is precisely because a child’s feelings are so strong, that they cannot be repressed without serious consequences. The stronger a prisoner is, the thicker the prison walls have to be.

Guilt usually has a cause—effect pattern of beginning, middle and end, whereas shame is all—pervasive, leaving no recourse for action. When we feel ashamed of ourselves, we want to hide from the world. We even want to hide from ourselves because the self rejection is so painful. No amount of reassurance from the outside will change the internal experience of unworthiness. Shame clings like sticky sap on a tree.

People become addicts in the process of trying to feel whole instead of fragmented, connected to something instead of lost and alienated. They try to calm the torment of shame and anxiety and fill the void of inner emptiness.

She was breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the weight of beings, the insane or static life, the long anguish of living or dying. After so many years running from fear, fleeing crazily, uselessly, she was finally coming to a halt. At the same time she seemed to be recovering her roots, and the sap rose anew in her body, which was no longer trembling. Pressing her whole belly against the parapet, leaning toward the wheeling sky, she was only waiting for her pounding heart to settle down, and for the silence to form in her.

You’re cheating yourself out of today. Today is calling to you, trying to get your attention, but you’re stuck on tomorrow, and today trickles away like water down a drain. You wake up the next morning and that today you wasted is gone forever. It’s now yesterday. Some of those moments may have had wonderful things in store for you, but now you’ll never know.

I’ve given up. I can’t stand it anymore. The days drag by. I’m choked by food, the daylight that shouts at me every morning to get up. The sleep which is only dreams that chase me. Or the darkness that rustles with ghosts and memories. Has it ever occurred to you that the worse off people are, the less they complaint? In the end, they’re quite silent. They’re living creatures with nerves, eyes, and hands, vast armies of victims. The light that rises and falls heavily. The cold that comes. The darkness. The heat. The smell. They are all silent.