45

Me gusta forzar controladamente los límites de la prudencia.

44

The Classical Ideal

In classical Greece, sophrosyne (" soh-froh-soo'-neh ") referred to excellence of character and soundness of mind in a well-balanced individual. This complex ideal has no direct translation into English. Its roots suggest a bringing together (syne) of the qualities of wisdom (sophia). It conveys the idea of happiness (in a proper philosophic sense) derived from:

temperance in desires -- "nothing in excess"
self awareness -- "know thyself"
modesty (self confident humility, the opposite of arrogance)
relatedness to the whole of self and society
respect for excellence
respect for human nature, its limits, its balance
self-restrained freedom
obedience to the laws of harmony and proportion
love of truth-beauty-goodness
wisdom (clear discernment based on broad knowledge, including self knowledge)
the qualities giving rise to true charm and charisma

43

The power of needing nothing.

42

I can't laugh too hard, I'm on a diet.
I'm trying to lose myself, you ought to try it.
Just starve for six days straight.
Oh, it's a riot!

Every Sunday night
I binge, and I barf
'cause I carry the scars of an eight-year-old
Whose mother applied the same rules
To her kid's body as her own.

I'll tell you what caused it if you'll handle the effects

41 {obsessed with perfection}

“How silly people were to eat. They thought they needed food for energy, but they didn't. Energy came from will, from self-control.” 

― Steven Levenkron, The Best Little Girl in the World

“If you put the wrong foods in your body, you are contaminated and dirty and your stomach swells. Then the voice says, Why did you do that? Don't you know better? Ugly and wicked, you are disgusting to me.” 

― Bethany Pierce, Feeling For Bones

“The dizzy rapture of starving. The power of needing nothing. By force of will I make myself the impossible sprite who lives on air, on water, on purity.” 

― Kathryn Harrison, The Kiss

Who wants to recover? It took me years to get that tiny. I wasn’t sick; I was strong. 

Laurie Halse Anderson

We clean our plates, yet we’re still famished—starving for something other than food. 

Kate Wicker

We are the daughters of the feminists who said, “You can be anything,” and we heard, “You have to be everything. 

Courtney Martin

The anoretic operates under the astounding illusion that she can escape the flesh, and, by association, the realm of emotions. 

Marya Hornbacher

“I began to measure things in absence instead of presence.” 

― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“• Eating disorders are addictions. You become addicted to a number of their effects. The two most basic and important: the pure adrenaline that kicks in when you're starving—you're high as a kite, sleepless, full of a frenetic, unstable energy—and the heightened intensity of experience that eating disorders initially induce. At first, everything tastes and smells intense, tactile experience is intense, your own drive and energy themselves are intense and focused. Your sense of power is very, very intense. You are not aware, however, that you are quickly becoming addicted.”

― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

Your environment? It couldn't careless. You are also doing it for yourself. It is a short-cut to something many women without an eating disorder have gotten: respect and power. It is a visual temper tantrum. You are making an ineffective statement about this and that, a grotesque, self-defeating mockery of cultural standards of beauty, societal misogyny. It is a blow to your parents, at whom you are pissed. And it is so very seductive. It is so reassuring, so all-consuming, so entertaining. At first.” 

― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“Something had been confirmed: I was worth giving a shit about; I was getting to be a successful sick person. Sick is when they say something. Of course, I had been sick for five years. But now, now maybe I was really sick. Maybe I was getting good at this, good enough to scare people. Maybe I would almost die, and balance just there, at the edge of the cliff, wavering while they gasped and clutched one another's arms, and win acclaim for my death-defying stunts. ” 

― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“I have never been normal about my body. It has always seemed to me a strange and foreign entity. I don't know that there was ever a time when I was not conscious of it. As far back as I can think, I was aware of my own corporeality, my physical imposition on space.” 

― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“Your ability to withstand pain is your claim to fame. It is ascetic, holy. It is self-control. You may change your behaviour, change your beliefs about yourself and your body, give up that particular way of coping in the world. You may learn, as I have, that you would rather be a human than a human's thin shell. You may get well. But you never forget.” 

― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

That paradox would begin to run my life: to know that what you are doing is hurting you, maybe killing you, and to be afraid of that fact--but to cling to the idea that this will save you, it will, in the end, make things okay.” 

― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“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, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“We feign disinterest and laugh, and creep into the kitchen some nights, a triangle of light spilled on the floor form the fridge, shovelling cold casseroles, ice cream, jelly, cheese, into our mouths, swallowing without chewing as we listen to the steady, echoing tisk-tisk-tisk of the clock. I have done this. Millions of people have done this. There is an empty space in many of us that gnaws at our ribs and cannot be filled by any amount of food. There is a hunger for something, and we never know quite what it is, only that it is a hunger, so we eat.” 

― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

“Somewhere in the back of my brain there exists this certainty: The body is no more than a costume, and can be changed at will. That the changing of bodies, like costumes, would make me into a different character, a character who might, finally, be all right.” 

― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

Bodies are forever poked and prodded and weighed and constantly wrong for eating too much, eating too little.

40

Count to ten then relax for a while 
Simmer down and regain control 
And one day it will be fine

Every thing that kills me makes me feel alive.
Every thing that drowns me makes me wanna fly.

39

I don't ever wanna be here
Like punching in a dream breathing life into my nightmare
If it falls apart I would surely wake it
Bright lights turn me clean
This is worse than it seems
I don't ever wanna be here
Like punching in a dream breathing life into my nightmare

They'll get through
They'll get you
In the place that you feel it the most
When you're cornered
When it's forming
In the place that you wish was a ghost

38

The mood, it changes like the wind

Hard to control when it begins

The bitter sweet between my teeth 

trying to find the in-betweens

Can't help myself but count the flaws

Claw my way out through these walls

One temporary escape

37

Give me control. Calm. Restraint.
Give me clarity. Reasons. Answers.
Give me courage. Tolerance. Wisdom.

36

'You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.' (Bukowski)

When is a monster not a monster? Oh, when you love it.

35

“The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That's the only lasting thing you can create.” 

“It's pathetic how we can't live with the things we can't understand. How we need everything labelled and explained and deconstructed.” 

“What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.” 

“I just want one person I can rescue and I want one person who needs me. Who can't live without me. I want to be a hero, but not just one time.” 

“We live and we die and anything else is just a delusion.” 

“That if you could acquire enough, accomplish enough, you’d never want to own or do another thing. That if you could eat or sleep enough, you’d never need more. That if enough people loved you, you’d stop needing love.” 

“You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel strong. You save people by letting them save you.” 

Not Good Enough’. Nothing’s ever fast enough. Nothing’s big enough. We’re never satisfied. We’re always improving…

“Without access to true chaos, we'll never have true peace. Unless everything can get worse, it won't get any better.”

“If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible.” 
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power, the same way money is power, the same way a gun is power.” 

“You have to jump into disaster with both feet.” 

“I'm living the life I love, I tell myself, and loving the life I live. I tell myself: I deserved this.
This is exactly what I wanted.” 

“Your past is just a story. And once you realize this, it has no power over you.” 

“Silence.
Give me control. Give me calm. Give me restraint.
Flash.

Give me clarity. Give me reasons. Give me answers.
Flash.

Give me courage. Give me tolerance. Give me wisdom.
Flash.” 

34

A veces también se me acaban las sonrisas para ti, a veces también se me acaban las ganas de escribirte. Pero te quiero, ojalá lo entiendas, siempre te quiero, pero a veces mis abrazos no tienen calor y mi boca no sabe que decir… Pero te quiero, siempre te quiero, cuando no te convengo, cuando no me soportas, cuando te odio, te quiero.

Ahora te deseo y te quiero, pero no me aflige ni la distancia, ni el amor. Pasarán estos meses y estarás de nuevo a mi lado; pasarán todas las ausencias que nosesperen en la vida, y siempre estarás a mi lado, no podremos dejar de estar juntos; yo bebiendo de ti todo el amor que necesito, y tú encontrando en mí todas las fuerzas que te faltan. Somos necesarios uno al otro; eso es todo. Ambos nos damos vida; y fuera de los dos toda intención se frustra. Debemos aceptarlo así y alegrarnos de ello. Yo, de veras, me alegro. Me alegro de ti y de quererte.

— Cartas a Chepita, Jaime Sabines

33

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful ‚

The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.

Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

I am important to her. She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

32

I have done it again.

One year in every ten

I manage it——

A sort of walking miracle, my skin

Bright as a Nazi lampshade,

My right foot

A paperweight,

My face a featureless, fine

Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin

0 my enemy.

Do I terrify?——

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?

The sour breath

Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh

The grave cave ate will be

At home on me

And I a smiling woman.

I am only thirty.

And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.

What a trash

To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.

The peanut-crunching crowd

Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot

The big strip tease.

Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands

My knees.

I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.

The first time it happened I was ten.

It was an accident.

The second time I meant

To last it out and not come back at all.

I rocked shut

As a seashell.

They had to call and call

And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying

Is an art, like everything else,

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.

It's easy enough to do it and stay put.

It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day

To the same place, the same face, the same brute

Amused shout:

'A miracle!'

That knocks me out.

There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge

For the hearing of my heart——

It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge

For a word or a touch

Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

So, so, Herr Doktor.

So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,

I am your valuable,

The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.

I turn and burn.

Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash —-

You poke and stir.

Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

A cake of soap,

A wedding ring,

A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer

Beware

Beware.

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air.

{Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus}

31

Despertarás y tu boca en sequía será vocera de los sentimientos en huelga de hambre, de tu vientre insaciable, de tu necesidad a la deriva.

30

This is the onset of hunger:

you wake up vivacious,

then weakness sets in,

then boredom breaks out,

then strength loss ensues

to rid you of acumen,

then calmness advances.

But then terror takes over.

----

you wake up vivacious,
then weakness sets in,
then boredom breaks out,
then strength loss ensues,
then calmness advances.
and terror takes over.

29

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.

Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.

Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day

I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,

your hands the colour of a savage harvest,

hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,

I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,

the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,

I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,

hunting for you, for your hot heart,

like a puma in the barren of Quitratue.

Soneto XI

Tengo hambre de tu boca, de tu voz, de tu pelo 
y por las calles voy sin nutrirme, callado, 
no me sostiene el pan, el alba me desquicia, 
busco el sonido líquido de tus pies en el día. 

Estoy hambriento de tu risa resbalada, 
de tus manos color de furioso granero, 
tengo hambre de la pálida piedra de tus uñas, 
quiero comer tu piel como una intacta almendra. 

Quiero comer el rayo quemado en tu hermosura, 
la nariz soberana del arrogante rostro, 
quiero comer la sombra fugaz de tus pestañas 

y hambriento vengo y voy olfateando el crepúsculo 
buscándote, buscando tu corazón caliente 
como un puma en la soledad de Quitratúe.

28

"I’m fighting myself. I know I am. One minute I want to remember. The next minute I want to live in the land of forgetting. One minute I want to feel. The next minute I never want to feel ever again.” 

—Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Last Night I Sang to the Monster

27

“I used to dislike being sensitive. I thought it made me weak. But take away that single trait, and you take away the very essence of who I am. You take away my conscience, my ability to empathize, my intuition, my creativity, my deep appreciation of the little things, my vivid inner life, my keen awareness to others pain and my passion for it all.”

—Caitlin Japa

26

"It’s your flaws I want to taste.
Your brooked mouth.
The way you smell after being
out all day. Your knees, so eager
to bend
to whatever song is playing in
your head.
Your chest, as it rises and falls
and rises and falls
on the carpeted ground. Your
sometimes smooth chin.
Your pimpled politeness. Your
tangled hair.
Your good morning,
every morning.
I don’t want to be able to run
my fingers through you easily.
It is no fun writing about
perfections. I want to talk about you.
Flawed. Crooked.
Endlessly
interesting.
You.”

—Lora Mathis, Black Coffee

25

I have learned to walk: ever since, I let myself run. 

I have learned to fly: ever since, I do not want to be pushed before moving along.
Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath myself, now a god dances through me.

24 {Real Food}

What you CANNOT eat:

1. No refined grains such as white flour or white rice (items containing wheat must say WHOLE wheat…not just “wheat”)
2. No refined sweeteners such as sugar, any form of corn syrup, cane juice, or the artificial stuff like Splenda
3. Nothing out of a box, can, bag, bottle or package that has more than 5 ingredients listed on the label
4. No deep fried foods
5. No fast foods

23 {Vegetarian. June/28}

No more meat in my diet.

22

I love him who makes his virtue his addiction and his catastrophe: for his virtue's sake he wants to live on and to live no longer.

21

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.

----

I have never been normal about my body. It has always seemed to me a strange and foreign entity. I don't know that there was ever a time when I was not conscious of it. As far back as I can think, I was aware of my own corporeality, my physical imposition on space.

----

You may change your behavior, change your beliefs about yourself and your body, give up that particular way of coping in the world. You may learn, as I have, that you would rather be a human than a human's thin shell. You may get well. But you never forget.

20

"My weight was my mood, and the more effort I put into starving myself to get to an acceptable level, the more satisfaction I would feel as the restriction and denail built into an incredible sense of accomplishment."

19

Magic words: No - Enough is enough.

18 {Breaking free from BA}

Focus on actions, not outcomes.

• Stock your house with real, whole foods you enjoy
• Perform 3 strength training workouts per week and focus solely on what you can do
• Engage in a fun activity 1-3 times per week
• Focus on eating your meals slowly
• Eat slowly and savour your food
• Learn to eat your favourite foods with zero guilt
• Relearn how to identify physical hunger

• 
  

17

BUEN VIAJE

La primera vez ocurre que te miras en el espejo

y tu cara ya no es tu cara.

lo mismo sucede con las palmas

de tus manos

o con los dedos.

después, debes acercarte a tu mejor amiga

y decirle que hace tiempo que dejó de ser

tu mejor amiga.

y no esperar que llore.

también tienes que asumir que la definición

de las cosas ocultan su significado,

y que, tal vez,

tu padre se viene demasiadas veces abajo

y tu madre es feliz

pero sólo a ratos.

has de comprender que tropezar y caer

de rodillas,

no es lo mismo que arrodillarse.

que a veces,

la tragedia es la sonrisa perversa

del camino equivocado.

debes decidir si existes

y no olvidarlo.

y puede que, algún día,

con suerte

con mucha suerte

aprendas a atarte fuerte los cordones

antes de dar

el siguiente

paso.

*

Ester G. Camps (Valencia, España)

en Bukowski Club 06/08. Jam session de poesía, Ediciones Escalera, Segovia, 2008

16

"For women who are 'difficult' to love."

you are a horse running alone

and he tries to tame you

compares you to an impossible highway

to a burning house

says you are blinding him

that he could never leave you

forget you

want anything but you

you dizzy him, you are unbearable

every woman before or after you

is doused in your name

you fill his mouth

his teeth ache with memory of taste

his body just a long shadow seeking yours

but you are always too intense

frightening in the way you want him

unashamed and sacrificial

he tells you that no man can live up to the one who

lives in your head

and you tried to change, didn't you?

closed your mouth more

tried to be softer

prettier

less volatile, less awake

but even when sleeping you could feel

him travelling away from you in his dreams

so what did you want to do love

split his head open?

you can’t make homes out of human beings

someone should have already told you that

and if he wants to leave

then let him leave

you are terrifying

and strange and beautiful

something not everyone knows how to love.

― Warsan Shire

15

Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor, upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right.

14

You'd kill yourself for recognition,

you'd kill yourself to never ever stop.

You broke another mirror,

you're turning into something you are not.

13

I don't care if it hurts: I wanna have control;

I want a perfect body. I want a perfect soul.

12

Mis certezas desayunan dudas.