I used to have a problem with food. Well, I used to have a problem with life because it got in the way of me eating all the time.

I used food as both a drug to change my moods (lift me up, calm me down, stop me in my tracks) and as fuel (my tank is empty and now I can’t move or think so I better eat something before I pass out).

I used food as a reward. Hard days = a pint of Ben and Jerry’s New York Superfudge Chunk. Hard days equaled pizza, the slices folded in half to I could eat twice as fast. Hard days equaled anything that left me feeling both full and anesthetized. Hard days equaled big bowls of cereal.

Food made up for the fact that I was dissatisfied with my life. When I taught at SJSU, I used to tell my students their papers were the reason my pants were tight. I told them that reading rough drafts that were supposedly polished made me so hungry I went through bowls of cereal just to get through a stack of papers without trying to slit my wrists with a sharp pencil. I told them it was their fault I was chubby.

They were all too polite to mention the fact that it was my hand that had guided the spoon to my mouth, and I took this fact into consideration at grading time. The slow burn of despair I would feel when faced with pages of pages of writing that most of the students had hated working on made me desperate to chew on something. I was like a cow out in the field that was full essays instead of grass. I needed to eat something better than paper! And, anyway, if I had eaten the essays, I would not have been able to hand them back to the students, and so I turned to cereal, to cookies, to anything that would leave me full and have my inner and outer worlds both feeling wrong.

My eating had shifted when I was at graduate school getting my M.F.A. I was a writer at the University of Oregon, and free in a way I hadn’t felt since I was a kid. I still ate a lot, but I didn’t do it secretly anymore. Walking down the streets of Eugene eating cookies publicly was a wild act of rebellion for me. I wasn’t in my bedroom secretly eating Snickers, ashamed and afraid of my hunger. I was out parambulating with a giant chocolate chip cookie! I wasn’t thin, but I didn’t care! I had other things to focus on—I was a writer in the company of other writers. Our quirks and shortcomings were our material. If we were Barbies, we wouldn’t have much to say, but the wreckage of our desires gave us sentences, reasons to get up in the morning! Hunger was becoming an accepted part of me instead of a foreign force I had to try to control.

I gained weight in Oregon, mostly because I hung out with the group of people who talked about writing more than they actually wrote. Oh, the thick slices of toast! The scones! The pizza! The beer! The talk of Malamud. Flannery O’Connor. Chekov. The talk of character, plot, point-of-view! The talk of flash fiction! Oh, the hunger to get life on paper like Alice Munro could!

I talked more than I wrote when I was at Oregon because I still hadn’t found the the center of my voice, the line of truth that would make writing as true as my skeleton. When you exist at a slight distance from your truth, it is easy to want to fill the lack with food because, for some reason, life doesn’t seem to be doing the trick; you don’t seem to be all the way real. Something is still…wrong. Off. And there is an unease with this, a need to root, to anchor, to weigh yourself down so you don’t blow away with the next breeze.

The miracle happened when I gave up everything to finally write my book and found I couldn’t do it. I stood in the middle of the road in Edgartown and texted HBL, and my soul despaired as I listed the reasons I could not write my book. I didn’t have the talent. I didn’t actually have a story. Writing was the one thing I wanted to do with my life, and I had left home to do it and I was coming up dry. My words felt false, forced, cheap. Shallow.

It was there I found my voice, in the white flag moment of I can’t. I had to lose the effort in order to find myself. I had to lose hope. Lose the idea that I could make a story happen. You can’t sit on the toilet and force a shit when there isn’t one. You just hurt yourself. You have to relax. Wait. Let the body do its thing.

Writing isn’t all that different. And neither, I think, is life.

The ability to exist in a state of hunger or semi-hunger involves the ability to trust that you are safe. It also involves a healthy diet, because if you are living on carbohydrates and get hungry, you’re going to be dealing with low blood sugar levels and hanger and maybe even fainting spells or divorce attorneys.

The ability to tolerate hunger also, for me, has to do with how risky, in a cool way, life feels, or my attitude toward life feels when I writing on a regular basis. I feel as if with my writing I’m living on the edge of who I am, and this is interesting to me. More interesting than a hot fudge sundae. Remember when you were a little kid and you discovered ants?

The burn of interest, curiosity, obsession is the antidote to the fear that you will never be full, the fear of your own hunger.

Trying to fill ourselves with food when the real issue is that we are not fully invested in our own lives is futile. It leads to binging and purging at times because the fact is you can never, never eat enough to fill or sedate the soul when it is bored, lonely, or far from the shore of hope.

This is where writing comes in. If I were to tell you that you could dream up your future when you wrote the story of you and that whatever you would write would come true, there would be so many feelings awakened in your being! Excitement, fear, disbelief, wild joy. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t be thinking about the chocolate cake on the counter if you had two pages to write the future of your dreams.

I’m pretty sure you would be living wholeheartedly and so would not be feeling the ache of emptiness.

And this is why I am skinnier now then I was before I wrote my book: life fills me more because I’m more invested in it. I don’t eat pints of ice cream so often because I know they will dull my edges, make my head and body hurt, and it will be harder to dream and write. It’s harder to be me when I am anesthetized, and if I can’t be me, I can’t write, and writing is the way I feel closest to myself.

I take more risks with my writing these days and so I don’t need food as a reward in the same way I did before. Food used to be the way I could be “bad”, “bad” in the way that takes the edge off being predictable and people-pleasing and “good”, but now all I have to do is write “fuck” or tell a story that I’m not sure everyone will like but that I’m pretty sure most people will like a lot, and I get to walk a tightrope. I get to feel alive. I’m the bankrobber of my own bank. I’m holding myself up and asking for all the money. What fun! What wild hubris!

The irony is that I just went downstairs and sat down with my daughter at the kitchen counter, and we pulled apart a loaf of banana bread with our hands and ate half of it because it wasn’t all the way cooked and so I couldn’t bring it to my brother’s house for Thanksgiving tomorrow. We didn’t eat like ladies having tea. We ate like gorillas. It was fun. We ate more than we needed and now I feel gross but happy.

Shit happens.