I missed him so much that it felt like a physical pain in the area below my ribs. I opened my mouth to accommodate it. I put my hand to it. A hollow, aching, piercing place.
When you are mad, mad like this, you don’t know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else’s reality, it’s still reality to you.
Never, never underestimate the power of desire. If you want to live badly enough, you can live. The great question, at least for me, was: How do I decide I want to live?
Some people who are obsessed with food become gourmet chefs. Others become eating disorders.
I get absolutely shitfaced. I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old. I am having the time of my life.
I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgement from my brain when I get my head set on something. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense pretty much.
Because I’m not, in fact, depressed, Prozac makes me manic and numb – one of the reasons I slice my arm in the first place is that I’m coked to the gills on something utterly wrong for what I have.
Forgive me for being chipper, but despair is desperately dull.
But new love only lasts so long, and then you crash back into the real people you are, and from as high as we were, it’s a very long fall, and we hit the ground with a thud.
Falling in love happens so suddenly that it seems, all at once, that you have always been in love.
My brain sometimes departs from the agreed-upon reality, and my private reality is a very lonely place. But in the end, I’m not sure I wish I’d never gone there.
I was used to sleeping with people because I endlessly found myself in identical situations where it was easier to just fuck them than to say no.
I relish my life. It’s the one I have. It’s difficult, beautiful, painful, full of laughter, passing strange. Whatever else it is, whatever it brings – it’s mine.
I am mad. The thought calms me. I don’t have to try to be sane anymore. It’s over. I sleep
Bear in mind you have a life to live. There is an incredible loss. There is a profound grief. And there is, in the end, after a long time and more work than you ever thought possible, a time when it gets easier.
Were I to put myself on… one of those online dating things, I would not include in my profile that I’m regularly hospitalized for psychosis. But I do know that when I get really bad, there is a place for me to go where I will feel better.