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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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Marya Hornbacher
Age: 50
Born: 1974
Born: April 4
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Long
Always
Sleeping
Madness
Wake
Sleep
Keep

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The anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions.
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My students know I have a life, they know I've written about my life. They know some detail, probably more than they know about their physics teacher, but I would've told them anyway!
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There is, in the end, the letting go.
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I think many people with a chronic illness would prefer not to have their chronic illness, simply because it's high maintenance.
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All of us have theories about the world and about ourselves. We will go to great lengths to prove ourselves right because it keeps the world in our head coherent and understandable.
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I'm a driven perfectionist, very self-critical.
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I am feeling fine. I remember these words and recite them. These are the things you say when asked how you are. After all, it would be odd to say: I'm not feeling. Or, more to the point: I'm not, I have ceased to be. Where am I?
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All of us carry around countless bags of dusty old knickknacks dated from childhood: collected resentments, long list of wounds of greater or lesser significance, glorified memories, absolute certainties that later turn out to be wrong. Humans are emotional pack rats. These bags define us.
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My bones are brittle, my heart weak and erratic, my esophagus and stomach riddled with ulcers, my reproductive system shot, my immune system useless... I'm not going to have a happy ending.
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I began to measure things in absence instead of presence.
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And it's California, where everything is powerfully strange. Everyone wants it to be home. Everyone left where he or she was from with dreams of transformation. Everyone runs away to California at least once, or at least all the lonely, hungry people do.
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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.
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You can only whine for so long. Then you need to get your life back.
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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.
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...painfully curious...about how it feels to fall.
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When you're teaching creative nonfiction, it helps to have written about your life in a very open way, because you can say, 'Look, how much are you willing to risk emotionally to write? How careful can you be with the other people you're writing about?
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Hatred is so much closer to love than indifference.
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There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose.
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And so I am feeling numb. It's a curious feeling, and I get it all the time. My attention to the world around me disappears, and something starts to hum inside my head. Far off, voices try to bump up against me, but I repel them. My ears fill up with water and I focus on the humming in my head.
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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.
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