Not Food

I’ve had new thinks about eating today. I’m building a story about what my life must have been like when I was first abandoned to feed myself, at age 3 or so. A story that fits how I could have actually been eating at the time and how I saw Mother stop feed the Kids, one at a time. A story that fits how I know Mother fed themselves. A story that fits into the endless and capricious food rules that existed in my life.

And I think I’ve got one. At some point around age 3 Mother lost the infant-as-narcy-self bond with me and went from being fed as a baby to fending for myself. There was a transition from milk to some sort of baby food for a couple of years, but when Alex came I lost access to “baby” food and had to make due with what I could access from Mother’s food. Sometimes this meant she fed me and sometimes it meant I made/got food for her and was allowed to have some and sometimes it meant I didn’t eat. Eventually I explored food for myself, trying things available in the kitchen and deciding for myself how I liked the nutritional and social consequences (within the scope of information and planning available to a toddler.

There are many complicated consequences of a story like this, but one that I think will help me is this: under all the layers of externally-enforced rules about food and eatting, from Mother and the world, there are rules I built myself. Some foods aren’t for me, or more specifically some foods are at a different level of the survival hierarchy than I am right now. Not because someone withheld permission, but because I checked and I didn’t like how it worked out. I don’t like eggs because as a toddler they were not safe or easy to eat. I imagine that I don’t want “raw” butter because when I tried to survive on just butter I had a bad time.

There are other layers of food rules in the middle, but I think one near bottom is the set of rules I discovered during my starvation-induced unsupervised toddler kitchen adventures. I can place a couple of stories along those lines with a very young me – before I was PIC. At a time when I couldn’t have been “making” myself eat or not eat things in the way I did later. A base layer that taught me restrictive eating even when I was starving and no one was “making” me.

Which is a terrible circumstance but actually good news. PIC has always imagined that they killed the toddler that used to inhabit this body. In retrospect I think I switched to them regularly until I was 10 or so, but from the perspective of PIC that young person was gone, and I have had a very hard time finding any connection to them ¹This has been a source of frustration to my therapist, who wants to imagine that I can dial up that period in my life. But PIC cannot because they did not live it. Their life started at 5 and they’re not sure how I survived before then. It’s not too painful to recall, as the treatment framework insists, it’s someone else’s life and I … Continue reading. So having a story that includes them – and an associated genuine memory that fits the very young person in that story – is maybe a way into other feels or memories from that person.

It also gives me insight into the form of these rules, and guesses as to what they might be. They’d be about natural feedback about nutrition and other consequences over the next hours or maybe day. They’d be in the form of things I knew were food – had seen used as food – but which I as a toddler couldn’t use effectively. For example, uncooked rice or flour would be difficult to use directly. It would be about things that were food but weren’t safe raw or at room temperature or under whatever other negligent conditions were available to me. It would be rules that slot into later socially-motivated feelings about how I have to save “baby food” for the Kids, how to avoid being assigned a food, and about how there are sometimes delayed consequences (social and otherwise) to what I ate.

I also like that this is story to explain the way I have such intense and mixed feels about common household foods and ingredients, and how those feels only sort of map to the extrinsic food rules I know. It explains why eating food prepare outside the house is a whole different bag. And hopefully it suggests to me ways I can work on those fucking toddler survival rules so fucking peas and bananas aren’t so terrible.

Or maybe it will just make me feel shitty. You never know with stories.

---

I got things mailed today, got paperwork submitted for death planning (after Shanda finally, bravely decided to think about it for 6 minutes straight), got my physican moving on my insurance certification, and changed the sheets. I even got to spend most of an hour at HA4H, and fired up KiCAD to start laying out a circuit (or at least start learning how to use KiCAD).

Then it was time for more homework with CS. I feel like I made it a point to have done enough school to never do it again. I feel like I did that a long time ago. But recently my life has a lot of homework in it. I think we’re mostly done, but it’s still at least one more session.

The homework is particularly hard to take because it’s so out-of-date the parts they want to use in labs literally haven’t been made for 20 years, and the designs they ask you to devise haven’t been useful for 40. Lots of labs are shitty and old, lots of instructors are terrible and narcy and out-of-touch, lots of textbooks are lazy cash grabs. But these classes are really leaning into being the worst.

Tomorrow I’m hoping to start in earnest on a mail migration. I had sort of hoped to get my new screen up for a weekend movie, but with CS coming back for more on Saturday it’s likely that won’t work out. Shanda is off next week though, so we can do it on a weekday. The mail move will be good though. I’ll get everyone off my server and off my tech support, and get Shanda out of the middle of terrible family interactions. And it will free me up to move my own mail to the new cloud system without accommodating anyone else.

---

My therapist is doing the breakup dance again. They feel bad about… not feeling the sort of control or safety or they expect in session. They tell a story about how the procedure says to give up when this happens, and imagine that another therapist with the same training and same misunderstandings will make something different happen. It sounds like therapist propoganda to me, to support their fantasy that the current mental health care system provides comprehensive treatment. I’m not worried about that stopping or changing therapists but I also have no expectation it will improve anything, and it sounds like hassle.

ZiB

—
Sent from a phone.

• 

• 

• 

•