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Anorexic Quotes

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Anorexic Quotes

“One weekend it rained for 48 hours without stopping. The rain beat like bony fingers against the window panes. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Fungus was growing on the walls. I polished off a bottle of gin sitting huddled over the two-bar electric fire and wrote a poem, one of the few that has lasted through the moves and the years. It is called 'Where Can I Go?' If this is not the place where tears are understood where do I go to cry? If this is not the place where my spirits can take wing where do I go to fly? If this is not the place where my feelings can be heard where do I go to speak? If this is not the place where you’ll accept me as I am where can I go to be me? If this is not the place where I can try and learn and grow where can I go to laugh and cry?”

“More often than not, expecting to lose weight without first losing the diet that made the weight loss necessary is like expecting a pig to be spotless after hosing it down while it was still rolling in mud.”

“Many obese people spend a significant amount of their energy on suppressing the urge to tell some of the people who are staring at them that they do not eat as much and as frequently as they seem to.”

“Culture alone cannot explain the phenomena of such high rates of eating disorders. Eating disorders are complex, but what they all seem to have in common is the ability to distract women from the memories, sensations, and experience of the sexual abuse through starving, bingeing, purging, or exercising. They keep the focus on food, body image, weight, fat, calories, diets, miles, and other factors that women focus on during the course of an eating disorder. These disorders also have the ability to numb a woman from the overwhelming emotions resulting from the sexual abuse — especially loss of control, terror, and shame about her body. Women often have a combination of eating disorders in in their history. Some women are anorexic during one period of their life, bulimic during another, and compulsive eaters at yet another stage.”

“Pierre Janet, a French professor of psychology who became prominent in the early twentieth century, attempted to fully chronicle late- Victorian hysteria in his landmark work The Major Symptoms of Hysteria. His catalogue of symptoms was staggering, and included somnambulism (not sleepwalking as we think of it today, but a sort of amnesiac condition in which the patient functioned in a trance state, or "second state," and later remembered nothing); trances or fits of sleep that could last for days, and in which the patient sometimes appeared to be dead; contractures or other disturbances in the motor functions of the limbs; paralysis of various parts of the body; unexplained loss of the use of a sense such as sight or hearing; loss of speech; and disruptions in eating that could entail eventual refusal of food altogether. Janet's profile was sufficiently descriptive of Mollie Fancher that he mentioned her by name as someone who "seems to have had all possible hysterical accidents and attacks." In the face of such strange and often intractable "attacks," many doctors who treated cases of hysteria in the 1800s developed an ill-concealed exasperation.”

“What started as a longing to be loved and seen for my physical beauty digressed into the warped belief that the illness itself was what drew the attention I so craved. I towed the line between longing for perfection and longing for pity. Using my body as a signaling flag, oscillating between peacocking in times where I felt beautiful, and waving distress calls in the depths of my sickness. I never used my words, and I didn’t know how to. I used my body.”

“The return of the voices would end in a migraine that made my whole body throb. I could do nothing except lie in a blacked-out room waiting for the voices to get infected by the pains in my head and clear off. Knowing I was different with my OCD, anorexia and the voices that no one else seemed to hear made me feel isolated, disconnected. I took everything too seriously. I analysed things to death. I turned every word, and the intonation of every word over in my mind trying to decide exactly what it meant, whether there was a subtext or an implied criticism. I tried to recall the expressions on people’s faces, how those expressions changed, what they meant, whether what they said and the look on their faces matched and were therefore genuine or whether it was a sham, the kind word touched by irony or sarcasm, the smile that means pity. When people looked at me closely could they see the little girl in my head, being abused in those pornographic clips projected behind my eyes? That is what I would often be thinking and such thoughts ate away at the façade of self-confidence I was constantly raising and repairing. (describing dissociative identity disorder/mpd symptoms)”

“And so, as if signing up for some new religion or entering into some cult, I indoctrinated myself as a member—I was and would be, Anorexic. I carried shame around this decision for a long time. As if in the choosing, I wasn’t qualified for actual sickness. That because I chose Anorexia, it was not a disease I fell ill to. That because I decided to stop eating, it was my fault, my responsibility, and a disgrace to the real people suffering from Eating Disorders that I even considered myself to be one of them. So even in my illness, I allowed myself to believe I wasn’t ill. I convinced myself it was temporary—a two-week free trial that I would cancel before getting charged. I would use and absorb the skills of Anorexic-others, then get out as soon as I’d reached my ideal weight. This, I later learned, was a lie my Eating Disorder would tell me for the rest of my life.”

“As time went on, the line between my Eating Disorder and my self became so blurred that I could not see my Eating Disorder as something separate from me. I lost touch of what it felt like or looked like to eat “normally.” I didn’t know what hunger felt like—because I only knew what hunger felt like. I didn’t know what feeling satisfied felt like, because I only knew what full beyond physical comfort felt like. I had no idea what other people ate or didn’t eat, how often or when, how much or in what combination. My body became such a confusing place to live inside, and I often didn’t recognize it as my own.”

“I think maybe they come out into the grounds in nightwear. But no, in typical anorexic stype they have read the fashion magazines literally. This is their version of thin girls in strappy clothes. The girl in the petticoat talks to me, as Emma has done on occsasion, in a rather grand style, as if she is a 'lady' of some substance and I a visiting guest. Do they chat much about clothes? I ask Emma in the car. She shakes her head. So, does she, Emma, see the difference between underwear or nightwear and 'going out' clothes? 'Yes,' she says, her voices strained again. 'But it's one of the things you don't know properly when you're ill and confused. You see these pictures and the people in the magazines are real for you.”