Disordered

"And so I went through the looking glass, stepped into the netherworld, where up is down and food is greed, where convex mirrors cover the walls, where death is honor and flesh is weak. It is ever so easy to go. Harder to find your way back."-Marya Hornbacher 

I do not doubt that desire is powerful.  People tell me all the time that I have to just want recovery bad enough and it will happen.  They tell me I can choose to eat, choose to not purge.  They tell me I can control the thoughts in my head that call me weak/fat/whore and choose to ignore them.  They tell me that if I want to live badly enough, that if I desire it enough, that I will choose to live.  And I believe them.  However, the question becomes: how do I decide that I want to live? 


Remy

Maddness

"Passion and death are implicit, one in the other. Past the border of a fiery life lies the netherworld. I can trace this road, which took me through places so hot the very air burned the lungs. I did not turn back. I pressed on, and eventually passed over the border, beyond which lies a place that is wordless and cold, so cold that it, like mercury, burns a freezing blue flame." 
— Marya Hornbacher


I want to kill the me underneath my skin.  The me that whines with her incessant needs.  The girl who lurks beneath the surface, aching for touch, for warmth. This fact haunts my days and nights. Because when you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behavior for many years, your brain can’t quite deal with it. So my brain, as will yours, will try very hard to avoid that realization; it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you. This is, I believe, different from the suicidal wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief, different from the suicide I've often thought of attempting, trying to escape that pain. This is a wish to murder yourself; the connotation of kill is too mild. This is a belief that you deserve slow torture, violent death.  And an eating disorder is a perfect way for me to do that.  

But here's the kicker: I want to recover.  While I'm not sure I want to live, I'm fairly certain I don't want to die and the only way to avoid this fate is to recover.  But now for the paradox.  How do I manage to gain control over a disease that began as a bid for control?  How do I take back power from the thing that was supposed to give me power?  How do I manage to begin to ween off this anesthetic that's been my drug of choice for so long that I don't remember ever being sober?  


And thus onto my endless quest for answers.  Until tomorrow, 


Remy

Pathos

I was reading today and learned that in ancient Greece the word ethos was used to mean one's drive for life while pathos represented one's self destructive nature.  And while everyone is believed to have both in them, the goal of life is presumably to feed your ethos, and let your pathos be overtaken by it.  I'm not sure why I went and did the opposite.  Hell, I'm not sure why any of us did.

I feel like I've forgotten what it means to live.  I don't remember ever feeling alright, all I remember is feeling like shit and I don't remember what it was like before.  People take the feeling of satiation for granted.  They take for granted the fact that they can wholly fulfill their need to consume without the assistance of a feeding tube.  They take for granted the feeling of steadiness, of a head that does not spin every time you stand up to quickly.  They take for granted their throats which aren't torn and raw with bile and their stomachs that don't ache and protrude with hollowed emptiness.  They take for granted that they are able to just be, without it being a question.

I ache for the girl who came before this.

Remy