Fridays with ED

 Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.
To deliberately hurt yourself is too counterintuitive. It’s not as if I’ve never been self-destructive before, but it was always in the context of trying to make life more bearable, to make living through some sad moment more tolerable. But a deliberate overdose is not part of a night out or a party: It is self-destruction for its own sake, and it is consequently the purest and most deliberate act of hatred I have ever committed.

When I’m done, after this big huge buildup, then there’s an overwhelming feeling of calmness, an overwhelming sense of peace.


It definitely feels like a compulsion, definitely feels like, “Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it.” And I am like, “No, no, no, no—yes!” This is not the kind of thing that you can just call anybody up and say, “I’m thinking about hurting myself,” because one of two things will happen: they will think that you are bananas and will not be able to deal with you, or think you arid trying to commit suicide, which is a very different thing, and will call the police. So you have to be very picky.

This is a coping mechanism for me. Will I return to it? I certainly hope not. But I have not experienced the greatest tragedies of life. I’ve certainly experienced some of the really nasty ones, but who knows what’s out there waiting for me, for any of us. And as long as I know that this coping mechanism does make me feel better in the short term, it’s technically on the table, and I’d like for it not to be on the table.
And you know what? It felt so good. It made me feel light, free. ... I suppose I should feel ashamed, or disappointed in myself. It’s like a relapse into old, familiar, self-destructive blackness. I had been doing so well, and now I’m back to where I started from.

I would never kill myself intentionally. I couldn’t do that to my family, my friends … But to have fate step in and give me a shove, that’s a different matter. Then I have the exit, without the guilt. I am ashamed of myself for thinking like this. But more than anything, I am frightened that it makes me feel so much better to think about it. Sometimes it eases the terror, the sense that I am condemned eternally to this hell.
Feeling hopeless and full of despair is just a slower way of being dead.

You know that things aren’t going well for you when you can’t even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they’ll presume you’re asking them to feel sorry for you. I suppose it’s why you feel so far away from everyone, in the end; anything you can think of to tell them just ends up making them feel terrible.


Sorrow prepares you for joy.
It violently sweeps everything
out of your house, so that new
joy can find space to enter.
It shakes the yellow leaves
from the bough of your heart,
so that fresh, green leaves can
grown in their place.
It pulls up rotten roots,
so that new roots hidden
beneath have room to grow.
Whatever sorrow shakes from
your heart, far better things
will take their place.



Most of the people who come to believe in Control-of-Life-and-Death-by-Weight. They are convinced that loves and losses can be titrated in pounds. That if only they were thin or thinner, everyone who didn’t love them would love them. Life would be magical, easy, illuminated. In other words, they believe what many of us believe: If we control what we put in our mouths (and the size of our bodies), then we can control everything else. So we spend our lives focused on losing weight, believing that thinness will provide invincible protection from rejection, grief, and sorrow.
I don't know if this is true or not.
I only know, I hate my body, myself and she needs to do better, always better. We are failing. We feel alone.

Loneliness is like starvation: you don’t realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
That terrible thing that happened to you is always going to have happened to you. There’s no self help book that’s going to fix that. There is no fixing it. You can’t fix having been born human, either. And every day you have to eat. Every minute of that day, you have to keep breathing. No choice. But you can breathe and walk at the same time. You can breathe and make friends, and go to parties and fall in love. Once in a while, you can even take a quick break from breathing to eat all the cookies, oh my goodness! Pain is like that too.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter how loud you scream—nobody’s coming. The only one who can save you is you.
Illness is not something a person has. It’s another way of being.

It’s always dark in the beginning.
… Perhaps someone, somewhere will create something so beautiful and moving it will change the world.
      Perhaps that somewhere is here.
      Perhaps that someone is you.
–please find this.