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.
+ second star to the right + eating disorder + anorexia + bulimia + compulsion + need + drive + compelled + normal + people + others + have to
Many people need desperately to receive this message: “I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.
+ need + people + message + hear + care + alone + isolated + kurt vonnegut + comforting + thought
Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever.
As if to build a fence around the fatal emptiness inside her, she had to create a sunny person that she became. But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abbys of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it. Though she tried to forget it, the nothingness would visit her periodically - on a lonely rainy afternoon, or at dawn when she woke up from a nightmare. What she needed at such times was to be held by someone, anyone.
So often we try to make other people feel better by minimizing their pain, by telling them that it will get better (which it will) or that there are worse things in the world (which there are). But that’s not what I actually needed. What I actually needed was for someone to tell me that it hurt because it mattered.
I have found this very useful to think about over the years, and I find that it is a lot easier and more bearable to be sad when you aren’t constantly berating yourself for being sad.
+ john green + minimize + pain + worse + world + need + hurt + matters + berating + self + bearable + sad + get better
That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it.
+ fear + lost + something + important + empty + find + need + yearning + incomplete + essential + john green + want + desire + depression + anxiety
A person with an eating disorder believes her needs are illegitimate, and therefore finds it difficult to seek care or engage with any care she does manage to seek. But because her needs are yearning and pressing she must find some way to express them: she puts into body what she cannot put into words. Her eating disorder serves as her voice, her attempt to express her needs and desires without directly asking for anything”.
+ sensing the self + bulimia + needs + expressing + food + yearning + engage + voice + need
A bulimic person’s shame may lead her to try not only to hide her eating- disordered behaviors but also her basic needs and yearnings. She may wish that her needs and desires did not exist and may try to act as if she does not need or want anyone or anything. when that attempt inevitably fails, she may wish others could magically read her mind and respond to her needs and wants without having to ask for anything. To avoid shame of expressing her needs and desires, she turns to food rather than relationships, for comfort. Instant gratification, that you can’t find in other places.
+ sensing the self + bulimia + needs + yearnings + shame + eating disorder + hide + need + want + desires + food + relationships + avoid + expressing
