#disorders

A well chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of medicine for the more common mental disorders, and may be used as much for prevention as cure. ↗

— Robert Graves

#chosen #common #complete #cure #disorders

Beauty' is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West is is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact. ↗

— Naomi Wolf

#beauty #body-image #eating-disorders #self-esteem #society

When you believe without knowing you believe that you are damaged at your core, you also believe that you need to hide that damage for anyone to love you. You walk around ashamed of being yourself. You try hard to make up for the way you look, walk, feel. Decisions are agonizing because if you, the person who makes the decision, is damaged, then how can you trust what you decide? You doubt your own impulses so you become masterful at looking outside yourself for comfort. You become an expert at finding experts and programs, at striving and trying hard and then harder to change yourself, but this process only reaffirms what you already believe about yourself -- that your needs and choices cannot be trusted, and left to your own devices you are out of control (p.82-83) ↗

— Geneen Roth

#eating #eating-disorders #health #change

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. ↗

— Tahar Ben Jelloun

#eating-disorder #eating-disorders #mirrors #poetry #self-esteem

Even the models we see in magazines wish they could look like their own images. ↗

— Cheri K. Erdman

#culture #diet-industry #diets #eating-disorders #self-esteem

I breathe in slowly. Food is life. I exhale, take another breath. Food is life. And that's the problem. When you're alive, people can hurt you. It's easier to crawl into a bone cage or a snowdrift of confusion. It's easier to lock everybody out. But it's a lie. ↗

— Laurie Halse Anderson

#food #food

Weight (too much or too little) is a by-product. Weight is what happens when you use food to flatten your life. Even with aching joints, it's not about food. Even with arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure. It's about your desire to flatten your life. It's about the fact that you've given up without saying so. It's about your belief that it's not possible to live any other way -- and you're using food to act that out without ever having to admit it. (p. 53) ↗

— Geneen Roth

#eating #eating-disorders #health #food

I am the space between my thighs, daylight shining through. ↗

— Laurie Halse Anderson

#space

Except you cannot outrun insanity, anymore than you can outrun your own shadow. ↗

— Alyssa Reyans

#bipolar-disorder #depression #mental-illness #mood-disorders #mental-illness

Anorexia is not an illness of the body; it is an illness of the mind. ↗

— Lynn Crilly

#eating-disorders