And even when you’re ready to let go. When you’re ready to break free. When you’re ready to be brand-new. Loneliness is an old friend standing beside you in the mirror, looking you in the eye, challenging you to live your life without it. You can’t find the words to fight yourself, to fight the words screaming that you’re not enough, never enough, never ever enough. Loneliness is a bitter, wretched companion. Sometimes it just won’t let go.

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.

People who develop eating disorders often live ‘out of order.’ They have difficulty trusting their instincts. Their relationships make them feel anxious instead of supported. So instead of engaging with the outer world from a position of internal strength, they end up living, in effect .. outside in.

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”.

There is nothing more devastating than having a disease that everyone around you blames you for.

The relationships of these patients to others are similar to their relationships to food - an alternating between a great eagerness for relationships and a capacity for isolation and withdrawal, with an intolerance for loneliness as well as for closeness.

Self-destructive behaviour is usually in reality a survival mechanism. It is often seen as the voice of the silenced or hidden self - a way of demonstrating in a physical way feelings which cannot be expressed emotionally. Sufferers often keep their self-inflicted injuries secret in the same way as they keep their feelings hidden - this demonstrates how wrong it is to label eating disorders, self-harm or abuse of drugs or alcohol ‘attention seeking’.

How strange it is, other people don’t have to do what I’m doing, yet they manage to like themselves enough to keep going. Why can’t I be like them? I don’t do this because I want to. I have to.

I’m convinced I am taking up too much space, eating too much, wanting food too much. I’ve often felt that I was too much emotion, too much need, too loud and demanding, too much there, if you know what I mean.

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)

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.

You do anything long enough to escape the habit of living until the escape becomes the habit.