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 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.

All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life—where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.

We don’t even ask for happiness, just a little less pain.

We don’t “kill ourselves”. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval, “He fought so hard.” And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.

This is the conundrum of the individual confronting masses about which he can’t help knowing more than he’d like to know: I want to be alone, but not too alone. I want to be the same but different.

I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning.

How does a human being who needs meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?

But that calm won’t last long, you know. It’s like beasts that never tire, tracking you everywhere you go. They come out at you deep in the forest. They’re tough, relentless, merciless, untiring, and they never give up.

I spread my hands out in front of me and take a good hard look at them. What am I always so tense about? Why this desperate struggle just to survive?

Addictions remove us from realities we find intolerable. They provide escape routes from the conflicts and dilemmas we find unsolvable. When we cannot bear to be in our own skins, our own bodies, where we experience both the pain and wonder of being human, our addictions throw us into a state of unconsciousness. When unconscious, we feel nothing, know nothing of our pains, struggles, confusion”.

It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going.