Profound melancholia is a day-in, day-out, night-in, night-out, almost arterial level of agony. It is a pitiless unrelenting pain that affords no window of hope, no alternative to a grim and brackish existence, and no respite from the cold undercurrents of thought and feeling that dominate the horribly restless nights of despair.
+ kay jamison + an unquiet mind + depression + despair + melancholy + low + bipolar + agony + existence + restless + unrelenting + hopeless + eating disorders + trapped
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.
+ depression + loneliness + lonely + alone + isolated + detatched + eating disorders + anorexia + bulimia + eating disorder + fight + enough + good enough + struggle + recovery
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.
+ eating disorders + gaining + aimee liu + order + relationships + anorexia + bulimia + strength + outside + internal + anxious + supported + fearful
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”.
+ gaining + aimee liu + eating disorders + anorexia + bulimia + recovery + escape + anxiety + depression + fear + purge + body + obsessive + world + contained + control + safe + survival mechanism
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.
+ relationships + eating disorders + closeness + dsyfunctional + intimacy + loneliness + withdrawal + isolation + close + anorexia + bulimia
Most people are upset by feeling too out of control; many never take risks voluntarily. Their lives are devoted to maintaining the safety of the status quo. This adherence to the familiar is often a reaction to a tumultuous or unpredictable early life, perhaps from an emotionally unstable family. Chaos is terrifying for children, so they respond by trying to control whatever they can their own emotions, their bodies, their surroundings
+ control + eating disorders + childhood + past + emotions + feeling + familiar + safe + life + unpredictable + tumultuous + risk + body + respond + terrified
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.
+ guilt + shame + pervasive + terminal + action + end + rejection + self-worth + unworthy + clings + reassurance + anxiety + depression + eating disorders + cause + effect + ashamed + hide
I perpetually wound myself emotionally to burn my will to overcome. Instead of attempting to fully cure myself, I will my own biological self-destruction.
+ will + cure + self-destruct + eating disorders + depression + recovery + suicide + relapse + philosophy + suicide note + repair + damage + mitchell heisman + wound + emotion + overcome
I carry silence with me
the way others carry snapshots
of loved ones. I offer it
and wait for a response.
+ silence + response + words + photo + depression + anxiety + empty + aching + understand + eating disorders
For many people, food is a means to communicate thoughts and feelings they don’t know how to communicate directly. Then we become like “one-trick ponies” doing the same one thing over and over again to get love, to cope with emotional stress, to communicate our anger, to bear our sadness.
+ eating in the light of the moon + eating disorders + communicate + express + food + cope + stress + anger + sadness + feelings
For those who feel a pervasive sense of loneliness and emptiness, food can serve as a constant companion. Eating becomes something to do, a way of filling up the empty space in their lives by creating a sense of fullness in their stomachs. Others may starve themselves so they won’t notice their loneliness. That way they won’t have to take the risk of meeting new people or getting too close to others they fear might reject them.
+ eating in the light of the moon + eating + eating disorders + anorexia + bulimia + starve + purge + binge + full + loneliness + emptiness + companion + reject + close
She is plagued with a vague, uneasy sense of emptiness, so she tries to fill herself up. Since she is no longer clear about what she longs for she assumes her hunger is a physical one. And so she either eats compulsively or becomes horrified at her seemingly insatiable appetite and proceeds to starve herself. She then continues through life with the assumption that something is very wrong with her. Her struggle with food confirms that indeed, there is something wrong with her and this becomes her focus, her obsession: if she only could fix this problem, then everything else would be okay.
+ eating disorders + eating in the light of the moon + anorexia + bulimia + binge + purge + starve + emptiness + fill + hunger + compulsively + appetite + wrong + obsession + focus + problem
Somewhere in the back of my brain there exists this certainty: The body is no more than a costume, and can be changed at will. That the changing of bodies, like costumes, would make me into a different character, a character who might, finally, be all right.
+ accepted + alright + anorexia + body + bulimia + change + character + costume + eating disorders + wasted + marya hornbacher
One minute everything is fine, and the next, you are wondering how you managed to tear everything apart. Actions force things forward, and the grip you have on things is lost, and all at once. What you think you own, and order, and manipulate, is suddenly out of your hands.
+ control + thin + eating disorders + order + lost + actions + powerless + own
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 dramatic, very intense, and they see it as an affection, 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.
+ wasted + eating disorders + anorexia + bulimia + diametrical + all or nothing + dramatic + intense + think
