When I was growing up, I always felt there was an expectation that I would do one of two things: be great at something, or go crazy and become a total failure. There is no middle ground where I come from, and I am only now beginning to get a sense that there is a middle ground at all.

Soon madness has worn you down. It’s easier to do what it says than argue. In this way, it takes over your mind. You no longer know where it ends and you begin. You believe anything it says. You do what it tells you, no matter how extreme or absurd. If it says you’re worthless, you agree. You plead for it to stop. You promise to behave. You are on your knees before it, and it laughs.

I wish I could find words to explain what this kind of cold is like- the cold that has somehow gotten in underneath your skin and is getting colder and colder inside you.

And it's California, where everything is powerfully strange. Everyone wants it to be home. Everyone left where he or she was from with dreams of transformation. Everyone runs away to California at least once, or at least all the lonely, hungry people do.

In her presence, I was reminded again of why I was an anoretic: fear. Of my needs, for food, for sleep, for touch, for simple conversation, for human contact, for love. I was an anoretic because I was afraid of being human. Implicit in human contact is the exposure of the self, the interaction of the selves. The self I'd had, once upon a time, was too much. Now there was no self at all. I was a blank.

I have not lost my fascination with death. I have not become a noticeably less intense person. I have not, nor will I ever, completely lose the longing for that something, that thing that I believe will fill an emptiness inside me. I do believe that the emptiness was made greater by the things that I did to myself.

People take the feeling of full for granted.