Amanda

“How can I maintain consistent feelings towards a changing thing like that? Should I concede instead that I can't, that it's necessary instead to cleave my body – in all its hideous wilful growth and recession and blooming and withering – from myself, from me?”
― Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation

“I came from her, she made this body-thing I hate and love so much. I resent her for producing it; I'm mortified I have made such poor use of it. How dare you? I want to scream at her, on the one hand; I love you so much! I'm sorry, on the other.”
― Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation

“I had suffered, and I had made the suffering into something I could consider good. I made it so that suffering was a kind of work.”
― Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation

“When I come home now, still, I am self-conscious and defensive before her. I hate that she can see what weight I have gained. I hate to listen to what she is or isn't eating any more, what she is doing at the gym. I hate that hearing those things feels like a dare to me, or an invitation to raise the stakes. I hate that I have never found an appropriate response that all I can do is defensively eat nothing, in a rage, or eat everything, showing her that I am past that, I have transcended her petty concerns, I am mind, not body, I am better than her.”
― Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation