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But I was so unsure of how love was meant to go that I thought, Well okay, maybe, and ignored the small tug of the gut that said, Nope, not this. And I’d nearly convinced myself that it could work,
Writing became an exercise in sitting with discomfort, accepting that which is imperfect, and reveling in the almost.
which means life is always somewhere just beyond my reach.
Life is reduced to a series of lists. Of what I have eaten and what I will eat. Of what I want to eat and what I cannot. Of all that I will do once I am thin and everything I imagine I will be. Of the version of myself so different than the one who stands in front of the mirror and cannot bear to exist within her physical form.
believe in eating cherries in the summer and cheese whenever. I believe a calorie is a nearly worthless measure of a food’s value, and no one needs a scale in their bathroom. I believe in avocados when they’re in season and wine in the evenings. Cheeseburgers and pizza and hot dogs at four in the morning after a night out. Full fat lattes, always, and champagne when so inclined.
illness hijacks my every thought and every action,
The very best thing that came from grappling with an eating disorder is the ability to sit with uncomfortable feelings, to study them, to bring them out into the light.
It had been lovely and good, but hours later when he said, off-handedly, that he hadn’t worn a condom, it was I who went to the drugstore, alone, and I who pulled out my wallet to pay for that small white pill, thankful for the choice, but still sick with the shame of it.
“We are all fools in love,” Jane Austen wrote in Pride and Prejudice. I always misunderstood that line until this man. I thought it was a description of mankind—foolish and often in love. I didn’t understand that what she meant was that love makes fools of otherwise reasonable people.
when that thing is true and good and just beginning, and when both people are looking to the other for their cues, well, I now know how fragile it is. How delicate and uncertain. How it can be lost because of fear. We are all fools
heart is breaking daily for a man who does not love
are all of us guilty of telling ourselves lies to make our current realities easier. For many years I convinced myself that life would be better when I became thin. And then I got thin and nothing was easier.
But it is not my job to convince a man to love me. It cannot be my job to convince a man to love me. It’s just that he made everything easier, for a moment. And for a moment I felt hopeful. I won’t say I miss him,
is a limit to the grief we can afford when the relationship was barely a thing. And it’s not so much grief as an occasional dull ache, and I don’t know how much of that ache is him, and how much is just life. I was not in
plastic and the overwhelming terror and insatiable hunger that drove me there again and again.
direction. You have to be unrelenting in your pursuit of better and richer and fuller experiences in which pizza and white wine and Brussels sprouts play but a part—a really good part, but still just a part.
A year of heartbreak and overwhelming loneliness that felt like a Van Gogh painting in motion. All dark colors and blurred lines and movement. Very slow movement, but movement.
And as rational as I was, I was also, in the simplest of terms, unwell. And
learned about trusting my gut only after I didn’t.
More than one thing can be true at the same time.
there is almost no way to prepare for how beautiful a place becomes just before you go, made sweet by its impermanence.
Ganesh, a Hindu deity known as the remover of obstacles, the patron of arts and sciences, and the god of beginnings.
Son of Shiva
believe in the coexistence of light and dark, good and evil.
