Eden Orta > Eden's Quotes

“It’s tempting to believe fairy tales and imagine recovery is this meteoric rise from darkness, but I think it must be stated for the sake of honesty, integrity and solidarity with others going through it, that recovery doesn’t feel at all like strength. It feels like giving up, like failing. It feels like lying in a useless lump all weekend, crying about the weight you gained. It feels like the deep shame you carry around all day because you actually can’t stop yourself eating anymore. It feels like the maddening conflict of being hungry and healthy. You gaze back at your skinny pictures wondering what happened – was that really you? It was seemingly moments ago, but now you are asking yourself what happened to the girl who would have given her life to be thin. It feels like you’re being weak and lazy and surrendering to your own worthlessness. It actually, on many days, feels like you’ve lost a battle.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and The Glory of Growing Up

“I want a different life, but I do not want to break this safe, familiar cycle. I want to be someone else, but I don’t believe I can be, and I don’t want to risk sacrificing my comforting state of thinness to try that out, only to realise that I’ve lost my armour and confirmed my worthlessness.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“To protect the dream or the disorder this will become the most difficult of choices that I will routinely have to grapple with, a choice I will have to make over and over.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and The Glory of Growing Up

“(...) in eating disorder recovery, you’re literally trying to recover a whole person, the one who was there before the eating disorder, the one you didn’t like and tried to bury, the one who fades into the background and who people stop seeing the more the anorexia intensifies. You’re trying to recover this person to the surface, this person who is slipping down and down into ever darker depths, further and further away from the sun. The deeper she slips, the harder the battle will be to recover her. But to recover that person, you have to have a very good reason to pull her back to the surface, because the battle is brutal, and you get so tired of fighting. It is sometimes just easier to give up and let her sink.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and The Glory of Growing Up

“Negativity always leads you to a dead end; you can crawl into the darkest, dankest corner, and though it is lonely and miserable, you know where the wall is, your back firmly pressed against it, and there is something wonderfully safe about that.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“If I wanted to reach a safe place where nobody could touch me, I needed only follow a negative thought down to it.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“and I can see that it must be wearing, that this incessant compulsion of mine to forensically sift through every mistake and negative thought is hard on other people too.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“You will spend your life trying to get underneath the hate, and later discover that it has entirely robbed you of joy, of pleasure, of many precious moments where you could have chosen instead to look for something beautiful.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“But the thing about meanness is that you will never actually get to the end of it, and the more you look for it, the more you will see its dark, murky residue tainting every surface.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“And maybe I will live a happier, wilder, more colourful and unpredictable life if I can finally abandon the debilitating and brutal pursuit of perfection.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“I think of butterflies gleaming tragically on their pins, and of women who waste their unfathomable depths and limitless creativity – and eventually whittle themselves away to nothing – hunting for perfection in their own bodies. And I think maybe I’m better off not spending my life pining and hankering for the transient and useless fantasy of feminine perfection.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“I think the safe path always leads to a dead end.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“To dream is to hope and to hope is to leave yourself vulnerable to being hurt in many ways.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“Some days, it does not feel worth it. Some days, I just miss the safety of getting as low as I could get, physically and emotionally. I miss the security of being my own biggest bully.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“I think they have to find a burning, beautiful dream to inspire within them the courage to leave their small, safe, dark place.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“I mean, you do always have a choice,’ she adds. ‘You can use your free will to keep anorexia going, or you can use your free will to swap it out for a higher plane, a higher you. But we’re always meant to upgrade our problems.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“If you spot it, you’ve got it, and all that – there is healing that happens when we reclaim lost parts of ourselves that we find reflected in others.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“I always feel like something of a spare part among my family. It’s nobody’s fault – I’m always included in activities and my parents make a fuss whenever I’m home, waiting eagerly for me at the airport and filling their fridge with expensive vegan cheeses, but we just have different interests and sensibilities.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“Personally, when it comes to anorexia recovery, I don’t approve of solely treating the body and turning a deaf ear to the soul crying out for help. A soul can still drown in a healthy body.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“Every day just seemed to get darker and sadder and harder to get through, and something about the repeated refusal to acknowledge the full extent of my pain really played at the edges of my sanity.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“It seems that, day by day, the older I get, the more people I meet, the more abundantly clear it is that I have nothing special, nothing exceptional, nothing that anchors me to life and love. Nothing for which anyone would want me.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“Sometimes things are just unremittingly shit and the only respectful thing to do is to stand next to the person going through it and scream along with them.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“I think dads often end up marginalised from their children’s mental health issues, confined to the peripheries of the situation, through no fault of their own. I think we’re just not socialised to trust our dads with these tender, irrational, complicated problems, and they’re not socialised to draw attention to them. So, maybe he really hadn’t had any idea what was going on.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“I splutter to her that I’ve known this all along, that I don’t have a reason for being so difficult, that it was never anything more or less than the fact that I found being alive – the simple fact of existing – quite painful, and everyone already knows there is no cure for that. I wish, with a desperate kind of longing, that I had a root issue.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“In some ways, I think the only way to be truly at peace is to turn your capacity to feel way down, to not really be fully alive.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“Oh, to be a formless fictional character and not a pathetic girl caged in flesh and quietly expiring in a wretched human body.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“At the end of the day, it didn’t matter whether my low estimation of myself was true or not; the fact was, it was holding me back.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“Who wants to recover? It took me years to get that tiny. I wasn't sick; I was strong.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“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, Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

“I didn't particularly want to live much longer than that. Life seemed rather daunting. It seems so to me even now. Life seemed too long a time to have to stick around, a huge span of years through which one would be require to tap-dance and smile and be Great! and be Happy! and be Amazing! and be Precious! I was tired of my life by the time I was sixteen. I was tired of being too much, too intense, too manic. I was tired of people, and I was incredibly tired of myself. I wanted to do whatever Amazing Thing I was expected to do— it might be pointed out that these were my expectations, mine alone— and be done with it. Go to sleep.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia