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A soothing thought with a cool obsidian surface. If I died, I wouldn’t have to fill the remaining forty-eight hours of this weekend or Wednesday’s holiday or the weekend after that.
years. A lifetime of nothing but me, a bag of apples, and the flimsy hope that stragglers after a recovery meeting might want some company.
spent half my days obsessing about food and my body and the weird shit I did to control both, and the other half trying to outrun my loneliness with academic achievement.
Something about the way I was living made me want to stop living.
Sometimes I told myself I just wanted a boyfriend or that I was scared I would die alone.
I didn’t know then that a word existed to perfectly define my malady: lonely.
experience I had to stand on the outside of, my face pressed to the window.
“When was the last time you told someone that you weren’t ready for what they were asking you to do?”
This was my first praise for the parts of me that were ugly, irrational, petty, reckless, spiteful, and spewing. I’d never heard of such a thing. If
Resistance—to change, to pleasure, to a shorter commute—was what held us back from what we really wanted.
one had any tools to offer me then, or later when I didn’t get ballet solos, or boyfriends broke up with me, or I didn’t get into the graduate program I wanted. All I’d ever done with anger was swallow it or throw it up. Now it was pouring out, messy and loud.
Like the time I told the women’s group about my breast hatred and
each one of them offered me a story about her own tortured relationship to her breasts.
So this was how it happened. This was how you built an int...
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Word by word. Story by story. Revelation ...
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The thing that had always been wrong with me felt worse than ever.
knew things. Knowledge was power that felt like love.
“You’re sexually attracted to the prospect of being abandoned,” Dr. Rosen said.
Never once in my life did I think such a seditious thought: that I was okay just as I was, even without a plus-one, a lover, a prospect, a beloved, a partner, a family of my own, a gleaming future filled with people who truly knew me.
“Even if the Big Relationship never shows up, even if I have to adopt a child as a single woman, and even if I fail at every romance from this day forward—I’m okay. I get to live and go to work. And I get to come here.”
In addition to my policy of saying yes, I started expressing exactly what I wanted from other people as a way of making amends to myself for having been voiceless with Brandon.
