Human Food

Wednesday was a slow recovery day, which went well. Shanda had several appointments but all things you were happy to do, and without any rush. I had therapy, and we were both done by like 6 PM. We did another round of paint pours [fig 1,2] and I cleaned up the house from our adventures on Tuesday. I cooked like 3 pounds of chicken legs; we had some with risotto and asparagus last night and I think more with cream sauce and pasta tonight. Got a life jacket for Dog and some tips for my soldering iron and an automatic soap dispenser for the kitchen and a big purple hat. Watched an episode of Broad City with a big yellow hat. Planned a play date for Saturday with soccer and lunch, though I still need to plan transportation. Finally moved my DNS hosting to someplace sane (and only screwed it up a little). I had intended to do face colors but felt pressed for time before therapy. I want to get that back on my list though, so I can see the new lip color in context.

I had a trigger moment with food on Tuesday. I was eating a spicy chicken pasta salad and bit into a chunk of blue cheese, and suddenly I was back to my childhood, eating trash food. I know some of you will imagine that blue cheese is always bad food, but I don’t mean “a flavor I dislike” I mean “rotting food from the trash”. The strong flavor of the cheese put me back in a time when I needed my food to not have flavor, because having flavor meant it had gone bad. When liking a food meant being able to swallow it without worrying that I would risk vomiting later, and favor was dangerous because it might indicate or conceal a toxin. When I would have murdered my dog to steal a piece of rotten food from him. I know I’ve said I’m ashamed to be hungry, but I had the deeper feel today, the one where I’m not entitled to human food, and where scavaging was a shameful thing I did because I couldn’t control myself. Where I ate disgusting things that weren’t really food because not eating them would be worse. I used to imagine that being hungry didn’t count as long as I thought that eventually I would have access to food again. I still do, when I’m busy – I repress hunger by imagining that some future food plan means my current state is irrelevant.

Not feeling entitled to human food relates to the way I understand rules. The way I know that I’m on the outside of every division that has ever been proposed. If there’s a line between people food and trash food, I’m eating trash. If there’s a line between people who can live inside and people who must live outside, I’m living outside. If there’s a line with an ingroup and and outgroup I am always in the outgroup. I have to be. I know that when things are real tough I will make survival decisions that hurt people. I know that I will do almost anything to stay alive, including break all the rules. And so I know that if people have a rule to protect themselves I am the reason that rule exists. I am the thing they need protection from. It’s why I can’t have your food or your housing or your attention. I was taught in so many ways that I should be happy with what I already had, that I should never want anything. That the existence of better things didn’t mean I could have them. That the pain of not having things was always something I could avoid, if I had planned better and tried harder. Because that version isn’t for me ¹This can be real hard, when Shanda tells Dog that something isn’t for him. It pushes right against the bits that tell me food and housing and everything else is not for me.. That version is for real humans, and I should be happy with what they’re letting me have instead.

As I got older I didn’t have to eat as much bad food, if I was willing to not eat at all instead. The proposition from Mother was alway that if I was actually hungry and not just faking I would eat X, where X was something that was no longer (may never have been) safe and edible food. When I was young I tried all these things and I ate rancid and moldy and non-food things all the time. It’s part of how I learned to not vomit. But as I got older I just declined to eat when this was the choice, knowing that eventually I would be able to eat something else. The threat was still there though, that if I wanted reliable access to food I needed to pay the cost first. And it was never because we didn’t have food, it was always because I wasn’t allowed the specific foods we did have. Differential access to food was one of the ways Mother tried to keep us from cooperating. It was extra work for her so it didn’t apply to everything, but it applied most of the time.

So part of what’s happening is that I am remembering my childhood. I remember leaving it. I’m so sad and resentful that I had to give up my whole life to get better. I feel terrible about fleeing because it was a terrible survival decision. It was what I needed to do, but it required me to amputate my arm. I didn’t panic and year away I pulled out my 1″ knife and slowly remove all the soft tissue so I could pop out the ball joint and get away. And it hurt. It still hurts. I learned to do it without looking so I could keep making it happen, and I learned to repress the pain so it felt like a thing I could do. But it happened and I hate it. I hate that I had to do it. I hate I became a person who could do it. I hate that no one helped me with it, before or after. And I’m disgusted with myself for having done it. For knowing I’d do it again if I needed to.

Pete told me when I was in my first year of undergrad that the part of my life in WI was over, and that I should stop looking back to it. I think he just meant that his life was better when Mother didn’t think of me. Which is definitely true. She attached a lot of her anxiety and resentment and indecision and whatnot to me, which is why she always wanted to send me away. When I finally left things did get better in the household. But it turns out he was right in a much broader sense – I couldn’t really be better until I gave all of it up. I should have done it much earlier. I wish I didn’t have to. But even moreso I wish someone had taught me what that looked like, so I knew it was possible to build something different instead I’d just giving everything up.

I have really mixed feels about abandoning my siblings. It was, in many ways, the right thing to do. The only thing. It did make life better in their household in many ways. It didn’t fix the underlying problems but it reframed them and cleared 20 years of resentment. Also losing my household management force changes to the structure – without me to provide transportation or food or money or cooking or whatever practical parts shifted and got better. Also Pete got extra rich around then, which means that Mother’s allowance got bigger and so cash flow was less of a barrier to daily life. But things also got worse, because I couldn’t protect them. Couldn’t redirect Mother’s emotions or control when she let them out. And so they suffered when I left. The thing in life I am most afriad of is abandonment and it’s also a thing I have done and would do again. I don’t know yet how to be okay with that.

I also realized that Pete always wanted me to make sacrifices to make his life better. When things got bad he would absorb Mother’s rant and then lay it back on me to resolve. He would indicate that he thought Mother was being unreasonable, but that it was my responsibility to comply anyway. He would imply that it might be okay for me to break the rule to accomplish what I needed, but he wouldn’t offer any support, before or after. The first time he ever talked to me about having enough food was when I was maybe 14 – he told me that Mother detected me “stealing” food from the freezer, and that it was unacceptable. He suggested that maybe I could hide food in the basement and he wouldn’t tatle on me, but it was up to me to obtain said food and to avoid it being detected by anyone else. If I got caught he wasn’t going to get involved. It’s still the main way he interacts with me – asking me to fix some emotional issue for him by giving something up. By cutting off my toe and smiling about it. Because otherwise he would have to think about another human being for 12 seconds and he wasn’t up for that.

I see another reason why I have always believed I was fat. It’s a thing Mother told me for as long as I’ve been eating human food. She felt fat and so told me I was. She also put me on diets about how she felt fat, changing what I was allowed to eat when I was very young (like 4 or 5) to match her fad diet plan. Later she would force me to write down everything I ate and then shame me for each item. Between that and the way I don’t feel entitled to human food I eventually started clandestine eating whenever I could, so that all the times when I couldn’t would be more tolerable. I still often feel like I need to eat in secret, so I don’t bother anyone else.

We decided to move. Not far, but somewhere. I’ve been trying to get Shanda to talk about moving for the better part of a decade, but it has always been too scary for you to even discuss. I think we’re gonna do it though. Move to someplace smaller and that better fits our no-car plan. It’s hard work to move but it would be nice to have the extra money and to stop living in someplace old that the landlord can’t be bothered about. Someplace with 2 bedrooms and good access to bus routes and fast Internet and a grocery store I can walk to. The idea of moving will also help revitalize my plans for home automation, which have felt very stuck while we can’t talk about housing.

I need to be better at sending these when I get them “half” done.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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