The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting Quotes

“It will get easier’ is probably the most offensive thing you can say to someone in the grip of pain. You are borrowing from a future that isn’t promised, a future that depends entirely on their endurance of the pain. You are taking for granted a well of strength within them that they may not possess, fast-forwarding through the ugly bits that you don’t want to watch but they must live through, nonetheless. ‘It will get easier’ is not a helpful thing to say to someone for whom only the present moment can exist, so vivid, so intense that it’s not possible to imagine a moment beyond it. The future doesn’t matter to someone enduring an unimaginable pain, so let’s not entertain that childish fantasy. All that matters is the pain that is consuming you in this moment, that you grit your teeth and try to survive it. You invalidate the pain and the damage it inflicts when you hasten to skip past it to a brighter tomorrow. Sometimes things are just unremittingly shit and the only respectful thing to do is to stand next to the person going through it and scream along with them.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and The Glory of Growing Up

“We´re afraid that if we fully surrender to our darkness, we´ll never come back from it. We´re afraid our darkness will go on and on and on, that there is no end to it and that we will get lost in it. We´re afraid that if we show these ugly, unpalatable parts of ourselves, it will be too much for others; that nobody will love and accept us, and we´ll be left alone with only the worst parts of ourselves for company.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and The Glory of Growing Up

“One of the unlikely gifts of having an eating disorder is that nobody will ever be as mean as your disorder was. There is a profound sense of safety in being your own biggest bully, your own cruellest aggressor, which is why eating disorders are so addictive and so hard to let go of. There is something so comfortable and reassuring in getting to the edges of your darkest thought, in following it all the way to its fullest expression and burying yourself beneath it, where nobody can hurl it in your unsuspecting face.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and The Glory of Growing Up

“Negativity always leads you to a dead end; you can crawl into the darkest, dankest corner, and though it is lonely and miserable, you know where the wall is, your back firmly pressed against it, and there is something wonderfully safe about that. When you choose positivity, on the other hand, you choose limitless potential, and whatever you look at with positivity grows and spreads and unfurls in a thousand different directions.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and The Glory of Growing Up

“And maybe I will live a happier, wilder, more colourful and unpredictable life if I can finally abandon the debilitating and brutal pursuit of perfection. If I can learn to love butterflies from afar, and watch them fly away.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“And I decide, now, in this moment, that I want it; I want this body. I want to inhabit her, enjoy her, care for her, and defend her in this world. And I no longer want to be yet another voice telling her she’s disgusting or embarrassing or inadequate or too much. I want to be one of those arresting voices of love and compassion, to offer her a space where she can go to restore, to feel safe, to grow.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“For me, recovery from recovery was probably the most confusing time – the most lonely, frustrating and psychologically challenging time. It did not feel heroic and it was also incredibly tedious.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and The Glory of Growing Up

“Even if you do initially start out with a keen intention to 'fight' your disorder, to fight for your health and your life, it's not a decision you make once and for all, but thousands and thousands of smaller decisions throughout the day.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and The Glory of Growing Up

“But you have to put yourself out there for these things; you have to be foolish and idealistic and take risks. You have to try.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“And where before I was just scribbling, writing, moving from the mere joy of it, now I tried to commodify my creativity. I tried to squeeze it out and make it do something worthwhile, be special be important, be good. But that's the tricky thing about art: it's never strictly good or bad, it's just expression or excretion.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and The Glory of Growing Up

“But creativity, she doesn’t fit in a box. She’s a wild, fluid, uncontrollable energy that spreads out sensuously from a curious, wide open mind in large expanses of aimless time on dreamy liminal train journeys or in subtle moments between waking and sleep. She can’t be pushed, or coughed up, or beaten into submission by a brutal and unmerciful regime. She needs light, and breath, and space and then, maybe, if the mood takes her, she’ll unfurl her wings and let her colors run into the atmosphere. And this energy, this wild, fun, unpredictable magic that I’d played with so happily as a child, that had flowed through me like it was my very life force up until this point; I didn’t understand it anymore.
Creativity was this swirling wild mysterious language, but now I lived in a colorless angular world that promised me a certainty I valued above all else. And where before, I was just scribbling, writing, moving for the mere joy of it, now I tried to commodify my creativity. I tried to squeeze it out and make it do something worthwhile, be special, be important, be good. I could no longer see the point of art if it wasn’t good.
But that’s the tricky thing about art, it’s never strictly good or bad, it’s just expression, or excretion. It couldn’t be measure by scales or charts, or contained in small manageable segments in the day. It was always, by its very nature, so imperfect. And the imperfections drove me mad. The anxiety and frustration with my creative endeavors turned into an actual fear of blank pages and pallets of paint. There was too much potential and too much room to fail so day by day, I chose perfection over creativity. I chose no more creativity, and no more mistakes.
There are things that eating disorders takes from you that are more important, much greater and more profound a loss, and much much more difficult to recover and restore completely than body fat. And that reckless urge to create, just for the pure, senseless joy of it, would become the one I missed the most.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and The Glory of Growing Up

“In retrospect, I now see this period in the immediate aftermath of recovery as a time of grief. I see that I was grieving a huge part of me that I had not fully reconciled myself with letting go of. But it is tricky to name it as such, because you’re not meant to feel sad over something that was so destructive to you and everyone in your life.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and The Glory of Growing Up

“Why don’t you worry in the other direction?’ she demanded, nailing me with her penetrating green gaze, which lovingly refused to ever let her students off the hook. ‘Why don’t you worry that it will all work out and you’ll meet all your creative matches and you’ll be too successful and too happy and too busy with how much work you have? Why must you always anticipate the absolute worst-case scenario, when you could worry that everything will just be too wonderful? Why do you do that? Why?’ Good point, I thought. Why do I?”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“I don’t think it’s fair to say that people who died of anorexia didn’t fight their illness. I think they fought it for as long as they possibly could. There is something heroic about people who manage to get up every day and somehow stay alive with their most vicious, hateful bully living within them. I don’t think it’s fair to judge them or term their entire journey a defeat. But I don’t think they took the right path. I think they took the path of numbness, certainty and safety, and I think it was the safe choice that cost them their life. I think the safe path always leads to a dead end.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and The Glory of Growing Up

“It’s tempting to believe fairy tales and imagine recovery is this meteoric rise from darkness, but I think it must be stated for the sake of honesty, integrity and solidarity with others going through it, that recovery doesn’t feel at all like strength. It feels like giving up, like failing. It feels like lying in a useless lump all weekend, crying about the weight you gained. It feels like the deep shame you carry around all day because you actually can’t stop yourself eating anymore. It feels like the maddening conflict of being hungry and healthy. You gaze back at your skinny pictures wondering what happened – was that really you? It was seemingly moments ago, but now you are asking yourself what happened to the girl who would have given her life to be thin. It feels like you’re being weak and lazy and surrendering to your own worthlessness. It actually, on many days, feels like you’ve lost a battle.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and The Glory of Growing Up

“(...) in eating disorder recovery, you’re literally trying to recover a whole person, the one who was there before the eating disorder, the one you didn’t like and tried to bury, the one who fades into the background and who people stop seeing the more the anorexia intensifies. You’re trying to recover this person to the surface, this person who is slipping down and down into ever darker depths, further and further away from the sun. The deeper she slips, the harder the battle will be to recover her. But to recover that person, you have to have a very good reason to pull her back to the surface, because the battle is brutal, and you get so tired of fighting. It is sometimes just easier to give up and let her sink.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and The Glory of Growing Up

“I want a different life, but I do not want to break this safe, familiar cycle. I want to be someone else, but I don’t believe I can be, and I don’t want to risk sacrificing my comforting state of thinness to try that out, only to realise that I’ve lost my armour and confirmed my worthlessness.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“and for many years after, we all paid for his transgressions against God by sacrificing our Sunday mornings to the mind-numbing ritual of Mass.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“I believe sunshine is the earth’s default state and the clouds just its transient visitors rather than vice versa”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“To protect the dream or the disorder this will become the most difficult of choices that I will routinely have to grapple with, a choice I will have to make over and over.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and The Glory of Growing Up

“I wasn’t depressed or unhappy during this time; I was just completely driven and completely numb. In some ways, I was the happiest I’d ever been. Maybe not happy, but content, certain. I had achieved some previously elusive anaesthetised state of mental calm. In some ways, I think the only way to be truly at peace is to turn your capacity to feel way down, to not really be fully alive.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and The Glory of Growing Up

“At the end of the day, it didn’t matter whether my low estimation of myself was true or not; the fact was, it was holding me back.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“I think they have to find a burning, beautiful dream to inspire within them the courage to leave their small, safe, dark place.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“Personally, when it comes to anorexia recovery, I don’t approve of solely treating the body and turning a deaf ear to the soul crying out for help. A soul can still drown in a healthy body.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“Every day just seemed to get darker and sadder and harder to get through, and something about the repeated refusal to acknowledge the full extent of my pain really played at the edges of my sanity.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“Some days, it does not feel worth it. Some days, I just miss the safety of getting as low as I could get, physically and emotionally. I miss the security of being my own biggest bully.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“To dream is to hope and to hope is to leave yourself vulnerable to being hurt in many ways.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“It seems that, day by day, the older I get, the more people I meet, the more abundantly clear it is that I have nothing special, nothing exceptional, nothing that anchors me to life and love. Nothing for which anyone would want me.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“Sometimes things are just unremittingly shit and the only respectful thing to do is to stand next to the person going through it and scream along with them.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

“If you spot it, you’ve got it, and all that – there is healing that happens when we reclaim lost parts of ourselves that we find reflected in others.”
― Evanna Lynch, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up