“Psychotic Rabbit”
Hornbacher cites an allegorical ‘psychotic rabbit’ to accentuate her advancement in recuperating from eating disorders: “I am neither delusional nor an invalid. Contrary to the charts that slated me for imminent expiration, I have not, to the best of my knowledge, expired. I no longer perform surgery on the smallest of muffins, splicing it into infinitesimal bits and nibbling at it like a psychotic rabbit. I no longer leap from my chair at the end of the meal and bolt for the bathroom. I live in a house, not a hospital. I am able to live day to day regardless of whether or not, on a given morning, I feel that my butt has magically expanded overnight.” The figurative psychotic rabbit befits the depiction of anorexia; the superfluous surgery presages the concentrated yearning to deter the ingestion of the muffin. Hornbacher’s capability to transcend the bearings of a ‘psychotic rabbit’ affirms that she is overpowering Anorexia’s magnetism.
Hell
Hornbacher recounts: “My first memory is of running away from home for no particular reason when I was three. I remember walking along Walnut Boulevard, in Walnut Creek, California, picking roses from other peoples' front yards. My father, furious and worried, caught me. I remember being carted home by the arm and spanked, for the first and last time in my life. I hollered like hell that he was mean and rotten, and then hid in the clothes hamper in my mother's closet. I remember being delighted that I was precisely the right size to fit in the clothes hamper so I could stay there forever and ever.” The allegorical hell alludes to the electrifying, injurious emotions that administered Hornbacher’s shrieking. Hornbacher’s bawling infers that she did not grant that her wayward behavior was a necessitated castigation.
Superhuman
Hornbacher illuminates, “I was beginning to harbor that delusion myself, that I was super-human. When you coast without eating for a significant amount of time, and you are still alive, you begin to scoff at those fools who believe they must eat to live. It seems blatantly obvious to you that this is not true. You get up in the morning, you do your work, you run, you do not eat, you live. You begin to forget what it means to live. You forget things. You forget that you used to feel all right. You forget what it means to feel all right because you feel like shit all of the time, and you can't remember what it was like before. People take the feeling of full for granted.” The sensation of super-humanity is a misapprehension that emboldens Anorexic propensities. An individual who contemplates that he/she has capacity to weather hunger or to endure without food is gullible; thus, would circumvent food often to bear the phenomenal responsiveness.
“Hell and Back”
Hornbacher explicates, “People who've Been to Hell and Back develop a certain sort of self-righteousness. There is a tendency to say: I have an addictive personality, I am terribly sensitive, I'm touched with fire, I have Scars. There is a self-perpetuating belief that one simply cannot help it, and this is very dangerous. It becomes an identity in and of itself. It becomes its own religion, and you wait for salvation, and you wait, and wait, and wait, and do not save yourself. If you saved yourself and did not wait for salvation, you'd be self-sufficient. How dull.” The figurative ‘hell and back’ alludes to precarious developments that endangered an individual’s fortitude. Voyaging ‘through hell and back’ can transmute into a dogma that heartens one to indulge in hazardous affinities such as ‘Anorexia and Bulimia.’
