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Somaya Mahmud

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“Well-meaning people in my life have suggested I should buck up and fight it. To them I gently say, I have been fighting my body for decades now and I am beyond tired.”
― Michelle Stewart, Shell: One Woman's Final Year After a Lifelong Struggle with Anorexia and Bulimia

tags: anorexia

3 likes

“I wonder if she felt like me … like there’s someone inside that is so terrified, so alone … so confused and fucked up … death … it’s welcoming … it’s familiar. Living … that’s the hard part. Sometimes just taking a breath hurts.”
― Natasha Jennings, Beautiful Me

tags: anorexia, food-disorder

7 likes

“Behind the door was where bad things happen. No matter how many blankets I used or extra pairs of panties I wore. None of it mattered. The monster always came. His face obscured in the shadows, partially hidden behind the cloak rack. Hot breath breathing over my face as soon as I closed my eyes.”
― Hannah Baston, Alone: A shocking story of child abuse

tags: biography, child-abuse, child-abuse-memoir, non-fiction

2 likes

“What started as a longing to be loved and seen for my physical beauty digressed into the warped belief that the illness itself was what drew the attention I so craved. I towed the line between longing for perfection and longing for pity. Using my body as a signaling flag, oscillating between peacocking in times where I felt beautiful, and waving distress calls in the depths of my sickness.

I never used my words, and I didn’t know how to. I used my body.”
― Rachel Havekost, Where the River Flows: A memoir of loss, love & life with an Eating Disorder

tags: anorexia, anorexic, binge-eating-disorder, body-dysmorphia, eating-disorder, eating-disorders

4 likes

“When you have a persistent sense of heartbreak and gutwrench, the physical sensations become intolerable and we will do anything to make those feelings disappear. And that is really the origin of what happens in human pathology. People take drugs to make it disappear, and they cut themselves to make it disappear, and they starve themselves to make it disappear, and they have sex with anyone who comes along to make it disappear and once you have these horrible sensations in your body, you’ll do anything to make it go away.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk