blankspaceo9 - Tumblr blog

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I feel so empty. All the time. I just want it to stop.

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"First, the body is experienced as alien, as the not-self, the not­-me. It is "fastened and glued" to me, "nailed" and "riveted" to me, as Plato describes it in the Phaedo. For Descartes, the body is the brute material envelope for the inner and essential self, the thinking thing.

Second, the body is experienced as confinement and limitation: a "prison," a "swamp," a "cage," a "fog''—all images that occur in Plato, Descartes, and Augustine—from which the soul, will, or mind struggles to escape. In the work of all three philosophers, images of the soul being "dragged" by the body are prominent. The body is "heavy, ponderous," as Plato describes it; it exerts a downward pull.

Third, the body is the enemy, as Augustine explicitly describes it time and again, and as Plato and Descartes strongly suggest in their diatribes against the body as the source of obscurity and confusion in our thinking.

And, finally, whether as an impediment to reason or as the home of the "slimy desires of the flesh" (as Augustine calls them), the body is the locus of all that threatens our attempts at control. It overtakes, it overwhelms, it erupts and disrupts. This situation, for the dualist, becomes an incitement to battle the unruly forces of the body, to show it who is boss. For, as Plato says, "Nature orders the soul to rule and govern and the body to obey and serve."

Dualism here appears as the offspring, the by­product, of the identification of the self with control, as lying at the center of Christianity's ethic of anti­sexuality. The attempt to subdue the spontaneities of the body in the interests of control only succeeds in constituting them as more alien and more powerful, and thus more needful of control. The only way to win this no­-win game is to go beyond control, to kill off the body's spontaneities entirely—that is, to cease to experience our hungers and desires.

This is what many anorectics describe as their ultimate goal. Bruch notes that this "basic delusion," as she calls it, "of not owning the body and its sensations" is a typical symptom of all eating disorders. While the body is experienced as alien and outside, the soul or will is described as being trapped or confined in this alien "jail," as one woman describes it. "I feel caught in my body," "I'm a prisoner in my body": the theme is repeated again and again.

Disdain for the body, the conception of it as an alien force and impediment to the soul, is very old in our Greco-Christian traditions (although it has usually been expressed most forcefully by male philosophers and theologians rather than adolescent women!).

But although dualism is as old as Plato, in many ways contemporary culture appears more obsessed than previous eras with the control of the unruly body."

- Unbearable Weight, Susan Bordo

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I can feel myself slowly regaining control of the external, and losing it internally once again. It’s always either/or for me.

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Is it just me or looking at your old pictures when you were at your lowest weight is the biggest trigger. Like Fuck I was really SKINNY.

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Heroin - Lana del rey

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🖤

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Have you ever looked at your life and thought that you can't do this any longer. Like you're so tired that you don't care what happens anymore.

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“It’s hard to leave when absolutely nothing’s clear”

— Lana Del Rey - Heroin

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Some people are just not meant to be in this world

🍂

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y’all ever wanna go ‘fuck it’, drop everything and just leave the city you’re in

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ENOUGH

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Life is absurd. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

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My imperfection is killing me 💔