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.

Loneliness is a strange sort of thing. It creeps up on you, quiet and still, sits by your side in the dark, strokes your hair as you sleep. It wraps itself around your bones, squeezing so tight you almost can’t breathe. It leaves lies in your heart, lies next to you at night, leeches the light out from every corner. It’s a constant companion, clasping your hand only to yank you down when your struggling to stand up.

So often we wait
when it’s the brave leap forward
that would set us free.

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

People don’t really want to be cured.
What they want is relief; a cure is painful.

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.

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 knew that others did not appear to feel the way that I did and I secretly wished to share my thoughts to know for sure. I remembering watching others and wondering what made them so different from me.

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)

Any authentic struggle with addiction must involve deprivation. We have to go hungry and unsatisfied; we have to ache for something…Withdrawal symptoms are real, and one way or another, they will be experienced. If we can both accept and expect this pain, we will be much better prepared to face struggles with specific attachments.

You can never return to the place of not knowing, to the unconsciousness of earlier days. Sometimes you may wish you could return, because the journey gets painful and the old days seem simpler in your memory. But you can’t go back, and even if you could, ultimately you wouldn’t choose to. It’s like having been blind all your life, and suddenly you’re able to see….movement, colors, and shapes…more than you ever imagined. And, even if you cover your eyes, you can never forget what you’ve seen.

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.