This interaction is the socialization of diet culture at its finest – a paradigmatic display of the way weight obsession and food fixation needles its way into the fabric of our daily conversations.

Sometimes you are going to feel an overwhelming swell of emotions. You are going to cry until your contacts come loose.

It amazes me that people wonder why I’m not-so-secretly loathe to go anywhere anymore…at least to anyplace where I’ll be too close to other humans.

I knew my life wasn’t working but I didn’t know what else to do.

The urge to deny pain, to laugh through tears, to grin and bear it, is an admirable one; but it can quickly become a tyrannical denial that we are in pain at all.

But as tiny as it was, one day, for some reason I will probably never be able to explain, I chose to believe in it, in this tiny little thing, and take on that storm inside of me head on. 

I still think about you every day. I wonder how you’re doing. I think about whether you’ve become clean as well and my heart aches for the pain you endured going through that process.

Healing takes time. Healing means hanging on when you feel as though there is nothing to hold on to. Healing means facing all of your fears and being vulnerable to all of the pain moving through your body.

Those who self-harm are often trying to cope with a deep pain they feel they don’t have the resources to cope with otherwise.

I see now my brother’s struggle began long before he ever took that first sip of alcohol.