This week’s food memory re-enactment is named “Dementors.” In my memoir, Food Memories, I name the chapter this way due to the fact that it centered on a memory I have of me sitting at a table with a bunch of young eating disorder sufferers. In this memory, I was a “staff” helping them through their meal fears, and although I did feel mostly “healed” from my struggle, my journey at that point had only begun.
At the table, one of the clients mentioned how the eating disorder felt to them like the Dementors from Harry Potter–something that sucked them empty of all desire, happiness, joy. Something that basically left them with a feeling of having no real reason to live.
I of course, being on the “good side” at the time, encouraged them to fight back against this energy, like Harry did with his Patronus conjure, seeing this other part as the enemy that they had to overcome, like I had.
But mixed into this memory was my budding confusion on the black and whiteness of the matter, that while I told these amazing kids these things, I was beginning to doubt the certainty of such statements. I had just started studying Animism, at one time called Shamanism, which held a much broader and deeper understanding on the nature of illness. That on the one hand it is something to strive for health, but on the other it is also wise to understand why the illness, or “demon,” has come. These concepts were blowing my mind and making it difficult to totally work with confidence in a system that didn’t address this complexity in some way.
In my re-enactment, I decided to make the same salad as I made for them, and myself, to eat together that day. I measured it this time like I measured it for them. Only the most advanced client would not freak out if they noticed their portions hadn’t been exactly measured. In an effort to get food into them, we made it as safe as possible.
At first I was going to tune into an online chat support group while I ate to mimic being surrounded by the clients, but the timing didn’t work out. I decided instead to turn on a video describing the “History of Dementors” while I ate. While I chewed and savored the meal, I learned of JK Rowling’s real life experience of depression and how she created these characters to embody the heavy, soul sucking feeling of going through this process (I’m much more of a Lord of The Rings fan, so that was new news to me :}).
As I listened, I thought of how this woman, instead of letting herself be swallowed by these energies, chose instead to bring them to life in her story. To give them a place, to give the darkness a place. I thought of how many countless others were affected by this depiction, how they felt seen and understood by this characterization of their experience. And I thought that, hmm, if this depression was ignored by Rowling, battled and not really spoken of, how so many people may have never had that feeling of being seen, of being given a way to let these energies “have a home” in some creative way too.
Using art to honor and allow dark energies to live outside of us has been a very helpful way for me to deal with the complexity of understanding the shadow, not just “battling” it.
JK Rowling’s choice to honor these energies and express them artistically gave them another place to be, and a “voice” in a sort of way. Even though they were depicted as evil, the very fact they were created in many ways actually honored them.
This in turn helped many people. If it weren’t for these energies, would the Dementor characters…or even the entire Harry Potter series for that fact, would it have ever been created? Do we thank these dark energies for inspiring such a character? Do we owe these dark energies for this fantastical work of creation? Hard to say, but maybe.
Today as I sit with my own inner circle of voices, self-counseling them through anxieties around this meal, I think back to how simple the black and white perspective was and how it made it easy for me to have words to help these young ones. They simply must just battle.
Today, I use much more complex words with my own inner parts, helping them be both with the complexity and yet still strive for life more than letting the Dementors consume them. I encourage them to create art, through writings like this, to give these darknesses a home. I encourage them to savor the tastes of the black bean corn salad and avocado toast whilst the Void sits next to them, always staring back, filing its fingernails.
I pick up the pen to give it, too, a place at the table.
*Thanks for reading. Please join me next week as I re-create the food memory, “The Apple.”
**If you’d like to learn more about the Food Memories book I am referencing for these posts, you can support a small bookstore by purchasing it here:
This week’s memory brings me to re-create the Medicine Walk* I went on in 2004, as a part of a group teaching by a local medicine person. On that walk, I was taught that while traditional Vision Quests* involved fasting from food and water to receive guidance from spirit, a Medicine Walk proposed the same outcome without needing to put oneself through such a harsh experience. Having struggled with Anorexia, I already had much experience of fasting (although I did not do it with purposeful sacred intention) and was glad to hear of a ceremonial way to connect with the Great Mystery that didn’t involve fasting. Trail mix was the food that I chose to sustain me, forgoing the varying tastes of different meals for the whole day as my sacrifice instead.
~~**~~
This time I chose to venture out in my local mountain town before sunrise, to sit somewhere and watch for the sun to break through. On the medicine walk of decades ago, it was suggested that we wait to eat anything until the sunrise touched our skin. Also at this point, whatever animal was around in a prominent way would be our “medicine animal” for the day, one we would learn from while out on the land in silence.
Unfortunately, the sun was not out on this morning as it was very cloudy. I was a bit perplexed in how to move forward if I couldn’t follow that guidance in the re-creation, so instead decided to sit out until the exact time of sunrise was reached. At that time I would eat my trail mix and look for what animal was around.
This made me think of how mechanical my food intake is sometimes, run by time, rather than the wisdom of my animal body. It made me think of how I add trail mix to my salads pretty regularly, and whether that is somehow an attempt to stay connected to the magic of that Medicine Walk of yore. It made me think of how much I wanted to be led by something sacred and clear and bigger than myself in my eating.
I waited for the sun, I waited for the clear signs, but they didn’t come. Crow was around, cawing, so I thanked him for showing up as my guide. But not entirely sure like I was that day, with the sun brilliant and skies clear. It was so clear back then, when I had beliefs and rights and wrongs and no idea of the complexity of reality. How interesting that “Crow Medicine*” often relates to living in the void between worlds, having no sense of time, seeing simultaneously the three Fates, Past, Present, and Future. How Crow merges light and darkness, seeing both inner and outer realities, beyond human law. How very interesting.
These days, just like that morning’s sky, I often sit, unclear about what it all means. Whether there’s something bigger that is meeting me, or if there’s really nothing listening, responding. I sit on the fence, waiting, waiting for the sun.
At least I’ve got trail mix, and perhaps Crow, to sustain me.
*These terms are used with respect to the first peoples, the indigenous peoples of this land and their ceremonies. I use them as they were the words used by the native person in the ceremonies of that day long ago. It is not my intent to culturally appropriate them.
**Thanks for reading. Please join me next week as I re-create the food memory, “Dementors.”
***If you’d like to learn more about the Food Memories book I am referencing for these posts, you can support a small bookstore by purchasing it here:
This week, after that long stretch of torturous memories, I was glad to have the assignment of re-living a memory of eating at McDonalds. I decided to go to a particular McDonald’s near a river as I was feeling the need to walk before, to get into a contemplative state to re-experience this deep memory. Little did I know that I would be met by the real situation going on in our downtown homeless population, as when I got to the river I saw that the governmental building lawns and the riverside park was completely taken over by homeless people in tents. All varieties, some raucous and immersed in a hazy drug dream, some just hanging on hoping to get out, some just emotionally dead in between. As I walked through this tent-city, I heard sounds of metal playing, which of course took me back to the memory I was aiming to recreate.
Thirty years ago, I had met a man who introduced me to the worlds of heavy metal, and it was after my first Iron Maiden concert in the bowels of Daly City with him and his crew that I had this meal at McDonald’s. I remember walking with him through the dilapidated neighborhoods on the way to the restaurant, and so this occurrence that I had not planned felt oddly like that day so long ago. But this time, I was not lost in the love-induced fog of romance to see what was happening around me. As I walked through this tent town, my heart sank for the reality and my utter powerlessness to do anything to change it.
At some point, I was past this tent-city and at the door of the McDonald’s, and like my past memory, the door was opened for me. Not by him, but by a sanitized automated door opener. I stepped inside and looked around for the booths I remember from that day, plastic red and yellow ones with little children running and screaming in the aisles. I looked for the semi-creepy Ronald McDonald statue that greeted me that day, but all of these elements were not there.
The seating was roped off, and as per the ways of these days, there were plexiglass shields covering everything, including the poorly paid workers standing by for my order. I had to almost yell to be heard through the mask and the thick plastic barrier between me and the register person, but that’s just old news by now.
All so unlike that day, so many years ago. There was no plexiglass, and I remember sunshine beaming in the windows and lighting up the entire place…it felt so warm and happy inside. But today, it was cool, dark…the colors of the restaurant literally changed to a black/slate and green inside to presumably appear more sophisticated. Although I couldn’t really verbalize how, it all felt so metaphorical, symbolic. Of the changes in the external world, of the changes in my inner world.
I ordered a Bacon, Cheese and Egg McGriddle through said plexiglass, paid without touching anything, or anyone and in seconds a bag was in my hands and I was walking out the door. I had hoped for some sort of seating to be available, outside at least, but there was none, probably to discourage the nearby tent residents from sleeping on them. So I had to take this McGriddle to my car.
So much for the universe arranging my reality to totally match the memory I was trying to re-create, but it was close. And after the sights I’d seen that morning, I felt pretty damn lucky to have a car. To have the money to pay for this “play food” challenge. I felt grateful.
But sitting there alone in my car, I was still…alone. The sun was beaming in, and I let that warmth balance out this emotionally dead place I felt into. No one ever said re-living these memories would be easy.
On this day I sat there alone, no one but myself feeding this food to me. Then, he had opened the box for me, he had encouraged me to enjoy it, he had eaten with me (which was still such an amazing thing to have after years of having no one to eat with in my childhood). This time, it was just me. Although sad, and amazed that I still miss him after decades, I thought that maybe I’d integrated his positive, encouraging energy into my being, that maybe he was still with me in a way.
But as I bit into the maple infused cakes, through the crispy salted bacon and finally the billowy egg folds, all I could think about was death. Of him, of these creatures I was taking into my body who had probably lived a very tortured existence before being whacked for my eventual perfectly wrapped meal. I thought of the people involved in the processing of the food, of their wage and living standards, of shit on the fur and feathers of the animals crammed in with each other. I thought of the wheat, manipulated and chemically enhanced soil that it grew from, how different this plant treated from eons ago when it was held in such high respect, in ceremony. And of course I thought of the tent people, how this meal kind of supported that whole scene, and how many people were dead or dying in those tents. This is where my mind went as the sweet, pseudo maple savory flavors congealed on my tastebuds.
The first bite, as I took that all in, was amazing, as I’m sure it was crafted to bedazzle. But after the downloads of all of these images and thoughts and heavy heavy realities that it also held in between it’s perfectly stamped cakes….of course my appetite started to wane. My stomach started to gurgle, and everything inside me wanted to put it down, this meal.
And of course, it makes sense, doesn’t it? That this whole situation of reality, eyes now wide open and unencumbered by the haze of love, would make one lose their appetite? The fact that I must turn away from this reality at every corner is somewhat deadening. And for someone who hadn’t struggled with a restrictive eating disorder, it would be simple…just put it down. Don’t even go there, these fast food places of hollowness. But for me, it is a challenge, and there are so many layers of confusing complexity within such challenges.
Of course I pushed myself to eat Mister McGriddle, allowing the horror and the illusion of nourishment to mingle together in my senses. To not eat it would be “disordered,” right? To eat it shows “recovery,” doesn’t it? I wish it were so simple.
Regardless, this wasn’t my main point of doing this challenge, nor is it for any of these challenges. It is simply to re-experience these long held memories and to see what comes forward. I am not doing this to prove to anyone how “recovered” or not “recovered” I am. It is for different reasons, ones I don’t even really fully know.
So I fed myself, encouraged myself, and validated myself of the confusion and complexity of emotions I was having in eating this meal. I validated my nausea at the situation, and I sat in gratitude for all I have. I also sat with the shape of the loss of him, so many years later, that still hangs within me.
My process art later that evening included tears, and tent towns, a broken heart and the once sacred image of the wheat plant, Triticum aestivum, that has given us so much. With the sounds of that 1991 Iron Maiden concert playing behind it all, I remembered him and McDonald’s and the world the way it used to be.
*Join me next week for my next food memory, “Deli Sandwich.”
**If you’d like to learn more about the Food Memories book I am referencing for these posts, you can support a small bookstore by purchasing it here:
TW: I by all means do not mean to disrespect the Black Lives Matter situation with this entry. It comes from a recent personal experience and I acknowledge the layers of complexity and privilege with what is happening.
I am sitting in the car. It is just past midnight.
The crinkling of the wrapper crunches in my palm
As I gobble down the night’s protein bar snack.
I look up to see a white car passing slowly by.
It suddenly swoops into a parking space several cars ahead.
I think nothing of it.
A few moments later I sense the air thicken.
A primal fear swells in the space
As a black man walks down the sidewalk
Towards my car.
I try to squash this fear,
Rejecting any sort of possible racism I may be feeling about
The danger
Of black men in the night.
I have black friends
And I stand with people of color
And I hate that there is this fear, rising.
But the feeling is real and I taste it,
Along with the chocolate and grainy bits of protein crumbles in my mouth.
In seconds the passenger door rips open
And the scent of cool air and wet pavement whooshes in.
My heart is pounding in my chest
As the black man…kid…reaches over
To try to wrestle my car keys from my hand.
I scream, “What the fuck are you doing??”
The words stream effortlessly from my mouth.
I feel his own young primal fear body thicken as if surprised.
Letting Go 