Бјанка Бањац

“They ask me what I think of food. I tell them I don’t know, but I do. I know everything about it. I feel like I’m at war. It’s all about the battle. I am always aware of what I am doing. I watch myself watch the plate, I watch my hand lift my fork. I watch the mouth that opens like a cunt, the fork that slides in like a dick. That fucks me every time I swallow. I watch every second. I savor it all. The object, however, is to not let them know that you know this. Because if they do, they will take it away. Not the food, of course, but the knowing. Your absolute certainty that you will win. That’s the real war, not the food, but the fuck and the desire of that fuck that I can control and I can deny. That I can destroy. You destroy the hunger, you destroy the desire, you destroy the need, you destroy the girl. The Me. And once I’m gone, what’s left to fuck?”
― Jillian Medoff, Hunger Point

“In Plain Sight by Stewart Stafford

How can I show the real me?
My voice breaking as I speak,
Parched hope's cracked lips,
Delphic in this solitary chic.

Vitriol cannot reach my shore,
The purge reveals little to hide,
Or does rage fester within me?
A cannibal cheerleader inside.

No father around guiding me,
Burnt by mother's acid divide,
Cataracts of persona non grata,
A transient hat tipped in a lie.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Yep! I was twenty-six years old and an associate beauty editor at Lucky, one of the top fashion magazines in America, and that’s all that most people knew about me. But beneath the surface, I was full of secrets: I was an addict, for one. A pillhead! I was also an alcoholic-in-training who drank warm Veuve Clicquot after work, alone in my boss’s office with the door closed; a conniving uptown doctor shopper who haunted twenty-four-hour pharmacies while my coworkers were at home watching True Blood in bed with their boyfriends; a salami-and-provolone-puking bulimic who spent a hundred dollars a day on binge foods when things got bad (and they got bad often); a weepy, wobbly hallucination-prone insomniac who jumped six feet in the air à la LeBron James and gobbled Valium every time a floorboard squeaked in her apartment; a tweaky self-mutilator who sat in front of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, digging gory abscesses into her bikini line with Tweezerman Satin Edge Needle Nose Tweezers;”
― Cat Marnell, How to Murder Your Life

“Feeling of discontinuity as a person. My various selves—how do they all come together? And anxiety at moments of transition from one “role” to another. Will I make it fifteen minutes from now? Be able to step into, inhabit the person I’m supposed to be? This is felt as an infinitely hazardous leap, no matter how often it’s successfully executed.”
― Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980