Michael Stipe Quotes

In Paris on a chilling evening late in October of 1985 I first became fully aware that the struggle with the disorder in my mind - a struggle which had engaged me for several months - might have a fatal outcome.

I used the diabetes as my weapon. Of course, I was only hurting myself and making myself sicker, but I guess it was something I had to go through. I never went overboard so much that I really hurt myself, but my early teenage years were very tough.

I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else.

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

My soul is dark with stormy riot: directly traced over to diet.

I'm a former bulimic myself and it's a horrible, horrible addiction.

By my mid-20s, I was a total mess.

From January to December of 2019, I crumbled, to be real, and I think by the end of 2019 I had beaten myself up in every possible way to the point where I wasn't even a person. I was fully at rock bottom.

I was a mess my freshman year of college. I still had so much pain in my heart.

I had a lot of frustrations, and I was drinking far too much, and I was just trying to survive and this is what came out of it.

There were times I felt so anxious, almost like I was crawling out of my skin, that if I didn't do something physical to match the way I felt inside, I would explode. I cut myself to take my mind off that. I just didn't care what happened. I had no fear.

I am a cutter, you see. Also a snipper, a slicer, a carver, a jabber. I am a very special case. I have a purpose. My skin, you see, screams. It's covered with words - cook, cupcake, kitty, curls - as if a knife-wielding first-grader learned to write on my flesh. I sometimes, but only sometimes, laugh. Getting out of the bath and seeing, out of the corner of my eye, down the side of a leg: baby-doll. Pulling on a sweater, and in a flash of my wrist: harmful. Why these words?

Cutting pain was a different flavor of hurt. It made it easier not to think about having my body and my family and my life stolen, made it easier not to care... -Wintergirls

Its so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That's above and beyond everything else, and it's not a mental complaint-it's a physical thing, like it's physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don't come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people's words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.

Most self-laceration is more noisy than painful.

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.

...grief can derange even the strongest and most disciplined of minds.

I feel very troubled in the head and heart.

I can't stop thinking about cutting myself up. Visual bruises can be covered with make-up, but down to the core, I'm all bruises.

My bulimia was my addiction. Hurting myself was my addiction... The music is what saved me. That's the only thing I can trust.

I was an emotional basket case.

My fears and anxieties throughout my whole life have been slowly squeezing my voice.

I kinda went through a semi-depression. Honestly. Like, I lost myself.

Music helped me to get out of a rough period in my life when I really struggled to see any future for myself and was terrified about what was happening to the people around me.

I have a tremendous battle with melancholy and depression.