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...painfully curious...about how it feels to fall.

Marya Hornbacher

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Marya Hornbacher
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: April 4
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Painfully
Curious
Fall
Feels

More quotes by Marya Hornbacher

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Never, never underestimate the power of desire. If you want to live badly enough, you can live. The great question, at least for me, was: How do I decide I want to live?
Marya Hornbacher
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I mean, we all know the dangers of starving, but bulimia? That can't be that bad. It's only bad when you get really thin. Who worries about bulimics? They're just gross.
Marya Hornbacher
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I have a type of bipolar that swings up and down all day long. There are significant mood swings within a day, within a week, within a month. I go through at least four major episodes a year. That's really the definition of bipolar rapid cycle. But I have ultra-rapid, so I have tiny little episodes all day long.
Marya Hornbacher
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I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.
Marya Hornbacher
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The madness is there, and will always be there. But it will keep sleeping, as long as I don't wake it up.
Marya Hornbacher
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When I returned, everything was different. Everything was calm, and I felt very clean. Everything was in order. Everything was as it should be. I had a secret. It was a guilty secret, certainly. But it was MY secret. I had something to hold on to. It was company. It kept me calm. It filled me up and emptied me out.
Marya Hornbacher
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We think of bulimia and anorexia as either a bizarre psychosis, or as a quirky little habit, a phase, or as a thing that women just do. We forget that it is a violent act, that it bespeaks a profound level of anger toward and fear of the self.
Marya Hornbacher
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I know how this feels: the tightening of the chest, the panic, the what-have-I-done-wait-I-was-kidding. Eating disorders linger so long undetected, eroding the body in silence, and then they strike. The secret is out. You're dying.
Marya Hornbacher
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My relationships with both my mother and father are good. We spent several difficult years hashing over the problems and the past, and worked out a fairly solid middle ground. I wouldn't say my relationship with either of them - they're no longer together - is exactly typical, but that would be difficult after all we went through.
Marya Hornbacher
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In our absence, the violet early evening light pours in the bay window, filling the still room like water poured into a glass. The glass is delicate. The thin, tight surface of the liquid light trembles. But it does not break. Time does not pass. Not yet.
Marya Hornbacher
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And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.
Marya Hornbacher
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Me and my needs were driving my mother away. Me and my needs retreated to my closet, disappeared into fairy tales. I started making up a world where my needs wouldn´t exist at all.
Marya Hornbacher
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In truth, you like the pain. You like it because you believe you deserve it.
Marya Hornbacher
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But new love only lasts so long, and then you crash back into the real people you are, and from as high as we were, it's a very long fall, and we hit the ground with a thud.
Marya Hornbacher
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My brain sometimes departs from the agreed-upon reality, and my private reality is a very lonely place. But in the end, I'm not sure I wish I'd never gone there.
Marya Hornbacher
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I either want to be completely recovered or completely emaciated. It's the in between that I can't stand, the limbo of failure where you know that you haven't done your best at one or the other: dying or living.
Marya Hornbacher
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I'm a driven perfectionist, very self-critical.
Marya Hornbacher
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Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others become eating disorders.
Marya Hornbacher
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We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.
Marya Hornbacher
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When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.
Marya Hornbacher