Using Food as a Life Raft

It’s been about four years now since the morning I woke up and let myself imagine what it was like to be born to a mother I don’t know.

This morning I woke up and let myself imagine what it would be like if I didn’t use food as either an anchor or a drug. The other day I got Gwyneth Paltrow’s cookbook The Clean Plate, and last night I had brown rice, turmeric, and spinach porridge for dinner, and this morning I woke up feeling lighter. Ten minutes later I had a migraine.

Yesterday I did three Write or Die sessions, and I was reminded, yet again, of how amazing human beings are, how perfect, and how we have the strangest habit of silencing our beauty by stuffing our own fist in our mouth. Or cake. Or drugs. Or alcohol. Or fear.

I had a dream last night where a friend was telling me how she had been hurt. I don’t want to tell you the story because making you feel bad is not my purpose here, but what i do want to tell you is that in my dream my friend was telling me what had happened to her without any emotion. It was like she was talking about something that had happened to a stranger. In my dream, I was crying, but she wasn’t. When I think about my dream, I start crying all over again. I love my friend so much, and the idea that another person would hurt her her feels like more than my brain can handle.

The problem with experiencing the trauma of loss when you are an infant is that you can’t ask for help. My mother used to love to tease me about how quickly I would drain the bottle when I was a baby. I still eat as if I was drowning, if that was something you could do—eat and drown at the same time. What I mean is I eat as if each meal was going to be my last, and I have to fill my stomach before the food disappears.

I have to eat until I feel numbed, safe. I have to eat until my stomach and guts hurt because then I feel grounded. I use food until I feel high, speedy, untouchable.

This morning my stomach feels a little lighter than it usually does. I’m so used to my abdomen feeling as if it is recovering from being kicked that I don’t know what it would be like if that part of me was pain free. Would I float off into the sky? Would I disappear? Would I erase myself if I don’t feel anxious and sick?

There is a possibility that I am a body that has never felt safe. There is the possibility that I was formed inside an anxious body, one that had not intended to get pregnant, one who was in trouble and was just waiting to give birth so she could give the baby to someone else and get back to her life. There is a possibility that my first meal was a bottle fed to me by a nurse or a social worker and that for the first ten weeks of my life, I was lost in space, ungrounded as the world worked to get me someone an agency and later a judge would decide could be called my mother.

There is the possibility I drank the milk that was sweetened with Caro corn syrup as a drowning person might, as if the possibility existed that if I drank it fast enough I could get to the other side and get to the place where my body could finally relax.

The idea that I could eat in a way that causes my body no trauma is so scary to me. I don’t know who that person is. I am anxiety. I am fear. I have been those things forever. Who am I without them?

I have a feeling that the flaming doorway of opportunity is in my guts. If I’m willing to treat them as a mother would treat a child, with love and tenderness and with a diet that is gentle and nutritious, I have the feeling that my story will change. I will be more me and less my story.

There is such a strong desire to cling to the past and to stay the same. It’s like the universe is saying to me, Here. You can either feel healthy and alive or you can feel like shit, and I nod wisely and I said, I’ll pick shit.

That’s really funny and so weird.

This is one of those one day at a time things. One meal at a time.

I hope my friend is okay. I’m going to call her when it is a decent hour on the East Coast and tell her I love her.