Self Destruct.

I've realized I'm nothing. Bound to fail in life. Mugging my head off for disappointment. Every time. I want to self destruct. Non stop cutting for nearly 20 minutes last night. I don't dare to take my weight yet (The mirror, my eating habits-less and less and exercise habits all point to a very possible weight loss.) Yet, I do not dare take my weight. The scale-my greatest temptation and greatest fear.

“Whether the cause was malnutrition, neurosis, or an ineffable combination of the two, what changed very suddenly in that year was the way my mind worked. For as long as I had been bulimic—seven years, by that point—I had never before reached the state of complete and constant obsession that began that year at school and would characterize the years to come. A friend of mine who I’d meet later in life, one who never had an eating disorder, told me that she’d bent over the toilet once and began to throw up. But then she was suddenly gripped, she said, by a sudden sense that what she was doing was wrong. Not wrong in the sense of sinful, but wrong in a human sense—a crime against nature, the body, the soul, the self. She stopped. I think that prior to my sixteenth year, I had always understood in the back of my brain that this was true. I had a clear, haunting knowledge that my eating disorder was cruelty. We forget this. We think of bulimia and anorexia as either a bizarre psychosis, or as a quirky little habit, a phase, or as a thing that wo- men justdo. We forget that it is a violent act, that it bespeaks a pro- found level of anger toward and fear of the self. That year, the questioning, whispering voice in my head fell silent. With that voice gone, my eyes changed, and subsequently my world changed as well. Through the looking glass I went, and things turned upside down, inside out. Words turned themselves around, and I heard things in reverse. Inside the looking glass, you become the center of the universe. All things are reduced to their relationship to you. You bang on the glass—people turn and see you, smile, and wave. Your mouth moves in soundless shapes. You lose a dimension, turn into a paper doll figure with painted eyes.
You become fearless in a very twisted way. Reckless, careless, a cartoon character spinning its legs in glee as it falls from a cliff, splats flat, bounces back up. You sneeze, and your nose, cocaine torn, spatters blood. This pleases you, just as the small knives of pain please you when you run, the stabbing pain of each step, just as the worried, muted words of friends please you, just as your own voice pleases you when you say tothem, I just can’t stop. You’ve made a decision: You will not stop. The pain is necessary, especially the pain of hunger. It reassures you that you are strong, can withstand anything, that you are not a slave to your body, you don’t have to give in to its whining. In truth, you like the pain. You like it because you believe you deserve it, and the fact that you’re putting yourself through pain means you are doing what you, by all rights, ought to do. You’re doing something right. It’s hard to describe how these two things can take place in the same mind: the arrogant, self-absorbed pride in yourself for your incredible feat, and the belief that you are so evil as to deserve starvation and any other form of self-mutilation. They coexist because you’ve split yourself in two. One part is the part you’re trying to kill—the weak self, the body. One part is the part you’re trying to become—the powerful self, the mind. This is not psychosis, this splitting. It is the history of Western culture made manifest. Your ability to withstand pain is your claim to fame. It is ascetic, holy. It is self-control. It is masochism, and masochism is pleasurable to many, but we don’t like to think about that. We don’t like to think that a person could have a twisted autoerotic life going on, be both a top and a bottom, and experience both at once: the pleasure of beating the hell out of a body shackled at the wrists, and the pleasure of being the body and knowing we deserve each blow.”