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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #disorder
The leap of faith is this: You have to believe, or at least pretend you believe until you really believe it, that you are strong enough to take life face on. Eating disorders, on any level, are a crutch. They are also an addiction and illness, but there is no question at all that they are quite simply a way of avoiding the banal, daily, itchy pain of life. Eating disorders provide a little drama, they feed into the desire for constant excitement, everything becomes life-or-death, everything is terribly grand and crashing, very Sturm and Drang. And they are distracting. You don't have to think about any of the nasty minutiae of the real world, you don't get caught up in that awful boring thing called regular life, with its bills and its breakups and its dishes and laundry and groceries and arguments over whose turn it is to change the litter box and bedtimes and bad sex and all that, because you are having a real drama, not a sitcom but a GRAND EPIC, all by yourself, and why would you bother with those foolish mortals when you could spend hours and hours with the mirror, when you are having the most interesting sado-machistic affair with your own image? ↗
Our work is not to change what you do, but to witness what you do with enough awareness, enough curiosity, enough tenderness that the lies and old decisions upon which the compulsion is based become apparent and fall away. When you no longer believe that eating will save your life when you feel exhausted or overwhelmed or lonely, you will stop. When you believe in yourself more than you believe in food, you will stop using food as if it were your only chance at not falling apart. When the shape of your body no longer matches the shape of your beliefs, the weight disappears. (p. 80-81) ↗
Oh, there are so many ways to categorize and catalogue things. Alphabetically, numerically, by date, weight, height, color, monetary value, sentimental value, or by Orafoura’s spiritual index. For me, I order things to subdue the overwhelming feeling of chaos in life. If I can fold my underwear into tiny triangles and arrange them ROYGBIV in the top drawer of my dresser, then I feel I can make it through the day. ↗
Why couldn’t I find one action that would make the need to binge automatically disappear? Because there is no magic action to make that horrible prebinge feeling go away. The cool thing is that we are designed so that the feeling will pass through us on its own—in time. All we have to do is sit there and feel what is going on inside of us. We must experience the feelings. To help us deal with the feelings, we can call someone on our support team. We can also express the feelings by focusing on our breath or even hitting a pillow. The important thing to remember is that no matter how terrible, feelings do pass. It takes patience and trust—not food . . . ↗
I had to stop him from arresting an old lady who let her dog urinate against the fire hydrant that was in front of Burgerville headquarters. "You'll blow our cover." "But what if there is a fire?" "The fire department will come and put it out," I said. "With what?" "Water," I said. "Not from that hydrant," Monk said. "It's inoperable." "No, it's not," I said. "It can still be used." "There is urine all over it," Monk said. "no fireman would dare touch it, nor would any other human being." "Firefighters run into burning buildings," I said."They aren't going to care about some dog pee on a fire hydrant." "They would if they knew," Monk said. "We should call and warn them. Call Joe right now. He can get the word out faster than we can." "Every fire hydrant in the city has dog pee on it, Mr. Monk. It's how dogs mark their territory. I can guarantee you that every male dog that has passed that hydrant has pissed on it." He looked at me, wide eyed, "No." "It's what dogs do," I said. "The firefighters knows this." Monk swallowed hard. "And they still use the hydrants?" "Of course they do." "They are the bravest men on earth," Monk said solemnly. ↗
#canine-behavior #cleanliness #dogs #fire-fighting #fire-hydrant
Pain, too, comes from depths that cannot be revealed. We do not know whether those depths are in ourselves or elsewhere, in a graveyard, in a scarcely dug grave, only recently inhabited by withered flesh. This truth, which is banal enough, unravels time and the face, holds up a mirror to me in which I cannot see myself without being overcome by a profound sadness that undermines one's whole being. The mirror has become the route through which my body reaches that state, in which it is crushed into the ground, digs a temporary grave, and allows itself to be drawn by the living roots that swarm beneath the stones. It is flattened beneath the weight of that immense sadness which few people have the privilege of knowing. So I avoid mirrors. ↗
#eating-disorder #eating-disorders #mirrors #poetry #self-esteem
During the worst stages of my eating disorder, I was all-or-none with food—either bingeing or not eating. Much of my experience was, in fact, that if I ate anything, I would eat everything. I began to understand that this happened because I was starving myself. In starvation mode, my body literally thought I was facing a famine. It didn’t know that I was living near a grocery store and several fast-food restaurants. Thinking I was facing a real food shortage, its primal instinct was to binge on large amounts of food, conserving fat in preparation for the hard times ahead. ↗
Ironically, this physically weak feeling signifies that I’m actually getting stronger. I know from my past that I will ultimately feel strong if I just sit with the feeling and experience it. ↗
