Quotes About Recovery

It's the little things that seal the cracks in your heart.

I wanted to cut for the cut itself, for the delicate severing of capillaries, the transgression of veins. I needed to cut the way your lungs scream for air when you swim the length of the pool underwater in one breath. It was a craving so organic it seemed to have arisen from my skin itself. Imagining the sticky-slick scarlet trails of my own blood soothed me. This

And it does, at least for a little while. It melts down the pieces of us that hurt or feel distress; it makes room for some other self to emerge, a version that's new and improved and decidedly less conflicted. And after a while it becomes central to the development of that version, as integral to forward motion as the accelerator on a car. Without the drink you are version A. With the drink, version B. And you can't get from A to B without the right equipment.

That was my favorite line: I'll drink less when things get better.

You're the nice, quiet alcoholic. The good intellectual alcoholic.

Of course, there is no simple answer. Trying to describe the process of becoming an alcoholic is like trying to describe air. It's too big and mysterious and pervasive to be defined. Alcohol is everywhere in your life, omnipresent, and you're both aware and unaware of it almost all the time; all you know is you'd die without it

Not long ago I heard a woman in her ninth month of sobriety say that before she quit drinking, she had only two emotions, anxiety and despair. "Now I have, like, too many to count," she said, "and some of them suck, but some of them are really, really good." Almost everyone in the room knew what she meant.

The knowledge that some people can have enough while you never can is the single most compelling piece of evidence for a drinker to suggest that alcoholism is, in fact, a disease, that it has powerful physiological roots, that the alcoholic's body simply responds differently to liquor than a nonalcoholic's.

a true alcoholic is someone who's turned from a cucumber into a pickle; you can try to stop a cucumber from turning into a pickle, but there's no way you can turn a pickle back into a cucumber.

is that in some deep and important personal respects you stop growing when you start drinking alcoholically. The drink stunts you, prevents you from walking through the kinds of fearful life experiences that bring you from point A to point B on the maturity scale.

When you quit drinking you stop waiting.

It happened this way: I fell in love and then, because the love was ruining everything I cared about, I had to fall out.

I don't think you can get really out of anorexia (or any addiction, for that matter) until you simply have no other choice, until the sense that your back's against the wall grows too strong and too irrefutable, until you are simply in too much pain - too desperate and deeply bored and unhappy - to go on.

The way to get free of pain is to dive down into it. To acknowledge it.

Thomas reached out and took my hand, turned it palm up, and said, "I believe that's healing very nicely." Aunt Charlotte opened the door just as he turned my hand over again and brushed a kiss across my knuckles. I experienced a nearly overpowering desire to hit him in the eye.

Many Survivors blame themselves for the abuse and continue to feel responsible and guilty for anything bad that happens to them or to other people they know. Survivors often feel bad about themselves and different from other people. They therefore isolate themselves from other people and avoid making close friendships.

When your healthy self is strong enough to deal with all that comes your way in life, your eating disorder self will no longer be useful or necessary. You

Tell me, Sarah Booth, is it your body that's hurt or your heart?" "Whatever it is, it'll mend.

Trust isn't about having a spotless record and finding someone else who does. It's about finding someone good-hearted enough not to hurt you on purpose, and knowing you'll recover and carry on when pain inevitably comes.

Remember what to do when you're at the bottom of a hole? You've got to stop digging.

The unexpected thing, the miraculous thing, is when a car that's been shattered in a crash, that's been left in the rain to rust for years at a time, can be coaxed to growl to a start and slowly begin rolling down the hill.

I wake up in that state of grief when you can tell you've been mourning even in your sleep.

Part of treatment for drugs and alcohol is you abstain from these, but with eating disorders you can't abstain from food so the treatment is longer than drugs and alcohol.

about a year after that, I was invited to go to a mental hospital. And, you know, you don't want to be rude, so you go.