twicr:

When you get right down to it, pie is just another word for love. And because robots will never understand true love, they will never understand pie. Only pi. Happy Pi Day.

twicr:

Robot love songs will be the requiem for humankind.

No wonder the lady spurns its suit!

(Source: culturalmarxist)

ecantwell:

hg-:

In the Spring of 2003, I went to Claire’s and bought myself a piece-of-shit red bracelet.  My parents, who looked at me and had other things to worry about, probably never noticed that I was wearing it, and anyone in town who noticed it dangling upon my wrist was probably more concerned about the wrist itself (or they thought I was really into Kabbalah. It was 2003.)

I don’t know who suggested the bracelets—not sure if it was just our site, or a worldwide sick persons phenomenon—but someone had brought them up on the site I’d spent most of that year lost on, a site that, to most people who have never had an eating disorder, could be classified as “pro-ana.”

I do not believe that there is such a thing as “pro-anorexia.”  Nobody on this earth—despite what they may tell you,  despite the pictures they post and the shit they talk and the horrifying, bullshit slogans that they type in flowing fonts—is “pro-anorexia.”  What they are—what I am, though I’m going on 9 years of recovery—is mentally ill. 

It is difficult to explain eating disorders to people who do not have them.  I once tried to explain it to someone by saying that it’s sort of like having a really bitchy, humorless Joan Rivers standing on the red carpet of your brain, telling you what a fat, ugly, stupid, worthless bitch you are.  In recovery, we call this the “ED voice.”  And the ED voice is strong, and loud, and when you are very ill, it drowns out all other noises, even the voice in your head that you’ve had forever, the one that tries so hard to help you remember what you sounded like before calorie counts and exercise plans and scales came into play.

The ED voice has one goal: to make you forget yourself.  To convince you that all of the things you’re doing are the right things, even when you know, somewhere inside that they’re killing you.  The ED voice wants you to know that you are worthless, but maybe…maybe you could be worth something, if you just lost those X more pounds.  The ED voice wants you dead.  What a fucking bitch.

At my sickest I became an incredible liar—the disease is one of isolation, of secrecy, of promises that you desperately want to make and then immediately break, because the ED voice is too strong, and you can’t shut it up.  I wanted desperately to find some kind of normalcy, some sign that I wasn’t completely batshit, and I happened upon a site for women who were also looking for that sign (along with, it must be said, tips and tricks).  The conversations on this site were split into two groups: what we talked about, and what our ED voices talked about.

Here is what our ED voices talked about: weight, worthlessness, ugliness, death.

Here is what we talked about: how to stop; how some of the people on the site seemed to be eating disorder “tourists,” who just stopped by to get some quick weight loss tips, and talk about “thinspiration,” and how we hated them, both for showing up and for being able to leave; if recovery might work; how lonely we were; how worried we were about our pulses;  how to deal with the hair growing on our faces; how sad we were; how sad we’d probably always be; how we just wanted to get to X, and then we’d be fine, wouldn’t we?  We’d be fine, once we got to X, right?  We’d be okay?  We could stop and then everything would be perfect, right?

We were trying to make a normal thing out of abnormal psychology, you dig?  We were trying to convince each other that maybe we weren’t sick, that maybe everybody else was sick, and we were doing things properly.  We veered between keeping each other alive and keeping each other sick.  That is the split mind: the ED voice roars, and the quiet voice, the one who still believes in something before and after anorexia, just wants someone to make a joke about lanugo with.  We wore red bracelets.  We thought we belonged to something.  Our ED voices told us so.

I stayed with these people for a year, or so, until something in me broke: I was ready to get better.  I had to leave. My red bracelet went in the trash.

On my first day at the hospital, I sat in a room with twenty women who struggled and sighed, just like me, who moved between clinging to the illness and desperately trying to let it go.  But this room was different from any of the rooms I’d entered on my screen.  This was a room where the ED voice received a Julia Sugarbaker-esque smackdown anytime it tried to speak.  This was a room for recovery. 

It takes some people longer than others to get to that room.  Some people never make it.  And some people, like me, hover in the sick spaces for a while because they do not know where else to go.  Do I think *~thinspiration*~ blogs are sad and terrible and awful?  Yes, I do.  I am glad that they are gone because they break my heart.  But guess what?  You can’t ban mental illness. And you certainly can’t assume that if a person is searching for an eating disorder related tag that they’re looking for tips, and not support, or stories, or perhaps a little bit of hope.

Here is a little bit of hope: recovery is possible, lovely.  It is. It is. It is. 

There’s your PSA.

This is so many kinds of yes. 

To all the girls who struggle, you can overcome!