Marya Hornbacher Quotes

I don't believe you have to have eating disorders and mental illness to screw up.

Eating disorders are A) not fun at parties, and B) they're not very fun in movies.

Once upon a time there was a girl who wanted to put her fist through a mirror. She would tell everyone it was so that she could see what was on the other side, but really, it was so that she wouldn't have to look at herself. That, and because she thought she might be able to steal a piece of glass when no one was looking, and use it to carve her heart out of her chest.

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.

Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her long before, she felt, if it hadn't needed the transportation.

I was clinically depressed. I was paranoid. I was agoraphobic. I would have days at a time of not being able to even bathe or brush my teeth.

I failed eating, failed drinking, failed not cutting myself into shreds. Failed friendship. Failed sisterhood and daughterhood. Failed mirrors and scales and phone calls. Good thing I'm stable.

Going to the darkest place you can to make yourself really upset and adding that with the physicality and running around, you can work yourself into hysteria that way.

After that I couldn't show my face outside. I lost my identity and balance. I was still living with my parents, and they were my only friends. For so many people, this thing with the nurse was confirmation that I must be mad or mentally ill.

I suffered from eating disorders when I was just a kid. I did not like me or the way I looked. But back then, you could not tell anyone.

That is the real problem of depression - a condition which will affect an estimated one in five of the population at some point in their lives. It is completely unimaginable until you have been through it.

I am convinced now that virtually every destructive behavior and addiction I battled off and on for years was rooted in my (well-earned) insecurity.

It wasn't so much destroying my dancing, it was destroying me.

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

A lot of people have to deal with the feeling that their worlds are caving in.

I think sometimes what happens is that all of this feeling out of control manifests itself in trying to control your body; whether it's an eating disorder or talking about getting your nose fixed, as if that's going to be the solution to all the pressure.

Medically speaking, there is no such thing as a nervous breakdown. Which is very annoying to discover when you're right in the middle of one.

Because I have been bullied and attacked about my body, body image has always been an issue for me.

Bullying made me feel insecure, alone, ugly, powerless, and hopeless at times.

You never know what they're going through. Maybe they failed a test. Maybe they're going through a state of depression. Kids go through so much.

I curl up, make myself smaller, try to disappear entirely. Wrapped in silence, I slide my bracelet that reads 'mentally disoriented' around and around my wrist.

[I had a sense of interior panic].Always. I didn't really know what to call it for a long time, but I have a friend in Greece who used that word panic a lot, and I found myself resisting it, until I totally accepted that as a precise description of my interior condition. It was mostly panic from one moment to the next. And nothing much else was going on.

When I was younger I got bullied about the way I looked and I thought once I was older it would stop. I hated going to school, but didn't know who to talk to about it. It knocked my confidence a lot.

Would you carry a razor, in case, just in case of depression?

I open a paperclip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this. A whimper, a peep? I draw little window cracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting.