This Is How by Augusten Burroughs Read Free Book Online Page A

will restore you from the madness of a bathroom scale and looking at “68.5” and thinking, “Fat, fat, fat.”
    If you can freeze that moment on the scale and examine the whole spectrum of how that number makes you feel and what that number makes you want, if you can really try and draw a picture of everything thin stands for and means, youthen have a chance to penetrate the disease at the deepest and most targeted level.
    I believe that the women and men who have successfully overcome anorexia have done so not by taking a pill, recording their daily calorie intake, or measuring their thighs, but by going hiking inside their minds. They learned who they were.
    They freed themselves.
    By seeing themselves.
    It is always safe to see yourself truthfully.
    You never have to be ashamed of yourself with yourself. All the self-hatred or criticism you may feel in your life doesn’t penetrate to the deepest level of you. For some reason, it can’t. If it could, most of us would be ruined in childhood.
    It is exceptionally rare to be a truly ruined person. Ted Bundy was a defective human. He was ruined.
    Nobody with anorexia is ruined.
    Everybody with the disease should assume control of their recovery. Take what is useful in treatment, dismiss everything else. Trust your instincts, but not the voice of the disease, posing as your instincts.
    Consider yourself.
    Let yourself think terrible things about people you love. Let yourself imagine neglecting the needs of those who depend on you.
    Do you feel terrible for causing your family so much stress and pain, all because you won’t eat? Or do you, secretly, love that you can hurt them so efficiently? Or do you love denying them what they want?
    No matter how “terrible” a feeling may seem, it’s never terrible to recognize and admit it to yourself.
    It’s the safest thing there is in the world: to think your own thoughts.
    Nobody can listen to your thoughts.
    God can’t listen to your thoughts. Maybe your religion says that God indeed can listen to your thoughts because He, after all, knows everything as the creator of everything. But if there is a God and if this God did create everything and knows everything, He would also know how everything turns out because All There Is already exists whole, within him, so everything happens because it was designed to happen. Which means that I was born to tell you that even God can’t hear your thoughts.
    So stop being afraid of them.
    It’s going to be very hard work to fix yourself, but it’s much harder work to be employed by an obsession or addiction.
    One good thing is that some research into anorexia has actually paid off already. They now believe there is a genetic component to the disease. A predisposition.
    Which explains why with all the images we see in advertisements, magazine articles, TV shows, movies—everywhere—do not make all of us anorexic. Only a very small percentage, in fact.
    “The media” is generally blamed for if not outright causing anorexia, then certainly being a contributing factor. And it may well be, but only for those with the genetic switch.
    If the media images vanished overnight, there would still be people with anorexia; it’s been reported in the medical literature since the nineteenth century. It’s most likely always existed.
    Obviously, superskinny anorexic models are not the only thing that can switch on the gene.
    I don’t think the media images matter at all, to anybody.
    If they vanished tomorrow, tomorrow night something else would act as the trigger.
    While you pursue your recovery and assume control of treatment, I suggest you pay attention if something inside you tells you, this is fucked.
    I spoke to an anorexic teenager girl who is also brilliant and extremely articulate. I was suspicious about one specific treatment, common to most programs: keeping a food diary. That is, writing a detailed record of every food ingested during the day, noting the calories, tabulating the