This Is How by Augusten Burroughs Read Free Book Online

even want it.
    In anorexia, something in the brain emphasizes or strengthens the quality of obsession and transforms it into a kind of punctuated equilibrium —a biology theory that says, actually most species remain pretty much the same, they don’t turn into something else.
    So not only is the obsession with thinness exceedingly powerful, it is entirely immovable. It does not change into an obsession with youth or an obsession with career; it’s all thin all the time, food none of the time.
    It’s very difficult to learn about anorexia because it’s not as prevalent as many diseases, so it’s not nearly as well funded or understood. Which means the treatments are not based on as much science, thus understanding. It’s even difficult to name a proper prognosis. The best I could cobble together was this: about half of those diagnosed after age eleven recover. The other half either remains thin—clinically emaciated—or dies.
    Fifty-fifty?
    A coin toss?
    That tells you that this is not breast cancer. I mean, the advances in breast cancer are staggering and brilliantly hopeful.I knew a woman who lived fifteen years with stage-four breast cancer.
    When I was a kid, stage-four breast cancer meant you needed to pick out the outfit you wanted to be buried in.
    These are the dark ages of medicine’s understanding of anorexia nervosa. So if you have it, you must also cure it.
    Anorexia is an extreme. It’s like the genetically modified and exaggerated evil clone of want or need .
    Needs and wants: these are helpful things that can be focused and propel you high into your future, into satisfaction with your life.
    Need is the focused, highly fortified form of want. Need is want that has been transformed into something closer to certainty by decision and commitment. When you need air, you get it. When you need water, there’s no question about what you’re going to do: you’re going to get a drink even if that means grabbing the garden hose by the neck.
    Need can be confused with obsession, but they’re very different. Need lacks the dangerous, cycling, all-consuming quality of fixation. When you need something, you get it and move on. But when you’re obsessed with something, it’s all you can think about.
    Obsession and fixation—especially the hyper-obsession/ fixation of anorexia—are the emotions of misguidance; they will hijack your brain and destroy your life. You have to break obsession and reclaim your mind.
    You have to be like Todd Beamer, the passenger on 9/11’s hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 whose last words were, “Let’s roll.” He and some other passengers attacked the hijackers and brought down the plane, killing everybody—including themselves—onboard and thus preventing the plane fromcompleting its course, into either the Capitol building or the White House.
    To break obsession you have to chisel it into pieces. You have to understand the shade of your obsession. How does it make you feel? What is the opposite of this feeling? Did you ever feel this opposite as a kid? Why?
    What was happening?
    It’s almost like hiking, but inside your mind and without a map. I hiked mapless as a kid because we lived in the woods. It was definitely frightening a lot of the time and then it was really exciting and after years of doing it, I was never afraid to explore in a new direction.
    Learning about yourself is the same.
    Unlike hiking through the unfamiliar woods, learning about yourself is safe.
    People always freak out when they contemplate their own damage or baggage because they think understanding the source, seeing the reason, is dangerous and will make their minds explode or something. Or they think they’ll end up crazy and in a mental hospital like in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
    But truth is noncombustible.
    Yes, it can explode your marriage. If it does, well, it needed to be exploded. Truth will never explode your mind. It will never make you mad.
    It will do just the opposite. It