I don't believe anything they say. I am drunk, a sad drunk. My heart hurts. I'm afraid I will die in my sleep, but anything would be better than the pain. I speak to myself in lies to ease the pain. Nobody loves me. I am all alone. I won't bother to go to work tomorrow. I won't wake up at all. The music sighs to me, a pleasing, lilting, placidly desperate, detached melody. I sink into the shadow of death. I don't want to eat at all. It beats at my ribs, which crack brittle with each breath. Yet there is still so much solid mass connected to this body which requires diminishment. I don't want to die. But I wake up every morning with the realization that it is very close. I don't know why I am torturing myself by trying to make myself lose ten pounds before I can gain them. I thought I had regained hope again.

I lie on the carpet watching the ground spin. I have turned the blinds up so the one thing I see is the sky. I soar through it in my mind. I am in balloons, my mind floating away in pieces. No one is watching me. I can let go, step off whenever I care to. This freedom makes me peaceful but also terribly lonely. I have isolated myself from everyone I love and lied to everyone else. They think I am all right. They will probably be mildly sad when I am dead. Maybe some of them will never know at all.

Catching my reflection in the mirror to my right, seeing my face parsed into Picasso-esque pieces: cheeks and chin out of proportion, eyes pasted on at random. At long last, I was completely alone.

- Hornbacher, Wasted

I have a vague understanding of what I look like, but I am unable to get a sense of the bigger picture. I agree and disagree with various constructions of myself at various times. I know that I am thinner than most people, but some people have much smaller legs than me. Sometimes I believe that I am very thin, sometimes I think people must view me as pretty normal or naturally thin. My rule is, if I look fat from any angle, then I still have weight to lose. I still look chunky in some pictures, so I have not gotten to where I want to be. I have a picture in my mind of what 100 should have looked like, and I am not it. So many people even look healthy and beautiful at 100 and my height, but I am stuck with this unfortunate, disproportionate body, with thick, muscular legs and spindly arms. Eyes glaring out of a stony face, too tormented to spar with the mirror for very long. My arms a mass of blue veins, my hands reddened by poor circulation. I would be worried were it not me.

People seem to be staring at me all the time and it makes me feel terribly uneasy. I wish people on the street would stop eyeing me like a piece of prize meat. And I wish I could tell people, to their face, to cut the bullshit. I have this one friend who is slightly overweight, always complimenting my outfits, always making comments about how I should model. One day I am just going to turn to her and say, "I am mentally ill. The fact that you in any way envy me or find me attractive is disturbing. I would appreciate if you did not, ever, make any comments about my weight."

I used to be self-conscious because I thought I was offending people by being too fat and too ugly, and that they wished I would be put out of their sight. Now I feel guilty for possibly being emaciated, possibly being pallid beyond comparison, possibly just being a hideous creature. The one thing that remains unchanged is my belief that people are disgusted by me and want me to disappear.

I wish I could step past rational thought and lose myself in what I never was before, but I find myself on the threshold of many things, unable to cross over. I simply want to escape me, if only to observe me. I am a prisoner of my own desperate thought.

100.0, 16.1

I think that I've approached the point where I actually disgust myself. It's very bizarre because all I ever wanted was to be thin. I wanted this both out of vanity and as a deeply metaphorical being. I wanted to look the way I felt and I wanted to be better than other people at something that so many long for but fail to achieve. I never figured out precisely what I wanted to look like, I just settled on a number and am still waiting to reach it. But in the interim, I have to spend time looking at myself and even though I haven't gotten to my final goal, I am sometimes unsettled by my appearance these days. I feel shriveled and kind of freakish. I have strange proportions, so while I wouldn't call myself emaciated (although BMI-wise, apparently I have reached that threshold?), my arms often look wasted at certain angles. My hipbones definitely show all the time now because they stick out even though my stomach is still a rounded, soft lump. I suppose I still feel I have a ways to go because my legs are too big, but I don't know how much more it would take to be satisfied with them, if ever. In conclusion, some parts of me seem perfectly normal-sized but other parts of me are oddly small. I definitely feel thin, but something is still not right. I am still unfinished. That said, I have also realized that I couldn't stop even if I wanted to (and, a little afraid, perhaps I want to; but cannot). I just keep losing weight. I definitely think that I have not gone far enough to be fodder for a good story; I have to go far down, farther down, to get there where I can justify coming back up again for air.

You know what it is? It's that I wish to be even thinner, but I realize that my weight and lower weights is only enviable on others; I am ugly, that is all. I am the weight that on someone else I would feel jealous but I am obviously not jealous of myself. I would rather live outside my head and watch me move around because I cannot enjoy my own life, I can only perpetually wish I were something else. As a result, I have ended up discovering that it is not as enjoyable as one would think to be thin. I have gotten so used to looking at thin people and admiring them that the voyeuristic experience is actually what I now seek. In other words, I want a body that can be a theatre for me, but I don't want to be inside that body while I am controlling it. I want to do both at once, but I can't do both at once. Hence, my appearance now has no value to me. Apparently I am rediscovering how I still cannot have my cake and eat it, no matter how severely bulimic I may have become. Dammit.

I do feel incredibly lonely in my own head, and I have realized that the "I want my body to match the way I am inside--weak, sick, and frail" quest is utterly idiotic and STUPID because I have in no way changed from who I used to be at a higher weight. I never would have believed this if I had not gotten to the place I am now, so those who are not here, please just take my word for it, it is pointless and being thin never solved anything. I find it also ironic that as I shrink, I really am more and more ignored, such that I can never tell if people are aware of me anymore, and sometimes I try to make myself noticed, but I just don't know if people are aware of me and while I seem to be vanishing in front of my very eyes, it is in no way satisfying and is in fact actually extremely disturbing. Today I was thinking to myself that I feel rather trapped in something that feels like hell, and it is like that half-realized sensation that lingers with you after you have awoken from a nightmare and you cannot shake the thought that it is continuing to go on. While my appearance is generally more tolerable to myself, as time and weight goes on I also feel like more and more of a freak and my world has become something so grotesque as to provoke mental nausea from me during those moments when my chain of thoughts has been left unguarded. I laugh at the irony that no one knows how insane I am. Why the other day I was told by someone that "You've lost weight - wow - but you were always thin - hey, you look good." Fuck you very much, you senseless culture victim. I am not going to listen to people anymore. But I do think if I do continue to listen to my own self, I will soon be dead. I think no one here believes that, certainly myself included, which is probably half or more the problem.

I feel like a balloon attached to a string.

I want to binge and purge...yet I don't really feel like eating; have no appetite...I feel completely hollow, as if I have no presence in the world whatsoever...the only way I feel like I exist is by this method of taking in the world and expelling it out of me.

Fuck. I don't even care. I feel worthless and completely suspended, untethered to existence.

Sometimes I need to hate myself to remember that I am alive.

I realized last night that I'm not getting better, I'm worse than ever. In my head I started calculating the amount of money I've been spending on food. (I put health on the back burner. Time is my secondary concern, because I waste so much of it on this, and it is depriving me of a future because I am losing time to become a good student.) I estimate that I spend $210 a week on food. Multiply that by 52, you get about $11,000 spent a year on food. If I keep this up, that is. I've spent about $2,500 on food in the last three months. I've given up clothes, drinks with friends, extraneous food that isn't as enjoyable to eat because I like my binges to be "just so," trips (think of how many flights I could take to visit friends with $2,500), little indulgences that aren't so ephemeral, that have a lasting value.

I think about all the things I've given up in order to finance my addiction. How much would you pay to be thin? Certainly some people pay thousands of dollars a year, for a personal trainer, for food delivered to their door, for liposuction.

The more I think about how ridiculous spending this amount of money is, the more I try to say, You kind of need to give this up NOW, the harder I try to hold on to it, because in realizing how important it is to let go, the more tightly I hold on and the more aware I am of how badly I need this. On a day-to-day basis, it is my relaxation, my procrastination tool, my mind-number, my guilty pleasure, my way of passing the minutes that go by so slowly when I do not immediately know how to fill them. I am frightened of having empty minutes--time that has no meaning. I cannot face that black hole of vacancy so I have found a way to obliterate it from my mind. I don't know what's going to happen when I run out of money.

It's hard to become what you want to be. I can't acknowledge the mess I am. The soft bruises all over my body, the ones on my head that look like concussion welts. The joints in my legs failing me like they used to do when I would overexercise. My skin, cracked and refusing to heal. The pains in my chest, the headaches, the damaged teeth. The hair falling out in clouds. I should be thin, but I'm not. Not enough to pass for someone worthy.

I just want people to acknowledge that I am sick, but I'm too good at faking. I cover my face in makeup and smile and laugh. I am friendly and polite. I pretend my grades are not going down the toilet. They tell me I am darling, and I flirt and weave. I wave my credit card like a flag to bolster my flagging confidence. I tidy my apartment. I wake up saying No. I go to bed saying Never again.

I know I can say no for good if I can stop being so weak. That's all it is, an effervescent inability to make the right choice. If I can just get on the right track I will do okay. I don't believe this is real, that I am in so much pain. I don't believe I am in any real danger, that my rituals will save me from injury and death. It is just me. I have gotten a little worse but nothing is really wrong. I am really doing all right. After all whose life is perfect anyway?

It feels so amazing not to be able to feel anything at all.