This week’s food memory reenactment took me to my own mountain town’s deli, as it was too much to make the drive to the actual location of the original memory. As in past weeks, my attempt to recreate the memory brought forth some synchronicity. As mentioned above, fresh starts of rosemary plants were lining the entire outside patio, similar to the rosemary of the original scene…the starts never having been there until this day, I thought it was interesting, as if something was meeting me, playing with me, as I attempt these re-creations. Perhaps.
What wasn’t there was someone to help me get the deli staff to make a decent sandwich. He knew how to make something taste good, and I still have the propensity for lack. The option of a BBQ Chicken sandwich was not on their specialty list, so I had to fill out a build-it-yourself list. What came out the other end was pretty disappointing–minimal BBQ sauce, dry chicken, stale bread. So eating it was not exactly exciting nor did it remind me of the deliciousness of that day so long ago. The deliciousness I was paradoxically contending with as I was so very deep in grief that day.
The sourdough roll I remember being fresh, toasted…the BBQ sauce overflowing…the tomatoes ripe and juicy. This time, that was not there. But my determination, my knowing I needed to eat anyway, was. Granted, I could have marched back into the deli and demanded a re-do, or purchased something else entirely, but feeling not really motivated to enter into drama I chose to just eat the damn sandwich and call it a day.
While I was eating, I did manage to notice some interesting emotional spaces of which I noted in my art process later in the evening, with Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here playing in the background. I noticed that instead of feeling shame at having people see me eat, I rather felt kind of badass. Interesting transformation–to have that shame not be such an issue anymore, and that I don’t even notice sometimes how much I have changed in my relationship with food even though there are still struggles. I also noticed a certain sense of determination. Synchronistically, I seem to be dealing with some emotional emptiness like that day, and instead of the choice to quell that feeling with the choice of not eating, I chose to eat anyway. Hmm. Another transformed behavior. Having frustration at not being able to get what I wanted to taste was also a very different emotional state than that victim-y despondent place I was in.
While not full of bells and whistles, this eating experience showed me some of the ways I have transformed in my life, as well as the obstacles I have chosen to stick around to overcome. I spent some time thinking of all the things I’d been through since that day, how intense life has been, and how in some way I have managed to come out fighting, or at least determined to keep trying.
I took myself on a long hike after the meal, letting the sandy hills and the Ponderosa Pines hold me in my process. I let the wind caress my cheek, and marvelled at the awakening of spring blossoms and wildlife around me. I let my relationship be with nature, as I’ve learned to do, whenever I feel alone. That day, so long ago, I did not yet have this awareness, and almost chose to leave the planet to find love on the other side.
I’m so glad I chose otherwise, even if it results every once in a while in having to eat a shitty BBQ Chicken sandwich.
*Join me next week for “Oatmeal.”
**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:
As a result of contacting a prior boss to have her review my memoir, I found out she has now started training what are called eating disorder “Recovery Coaches.” These coaches meet with you in person or on line in your everyday life to provide support in facing eating disorder behaviors. They text you, they meet you for meals, they go grocery shopping with you. They do all the things it is so very hard for therapists and regular treatment team providers to do. And all of this is done towards the aim of facilitating “complete recovery,” not just feeling like you’re getting through life but not fully living it.
As I have mentioned in previous posts, “recovery” is an uncomfortable word for me, partly because of the sound of it, to re-cover myself doesn’t sound appealing. Yet it is also uncomfortable for me because as far as I have experienced, a life without some form of these thoughts or behaviors, or at least the awareness of them and needing to set boundaries with them…this kind of life has never become a reality for me. After countless attempts to reach this state. To hear someone say, “Yeah, I don’t really think about it anymore” just floors me. So of course when I heard that there were coaches to help one get to this idyllic place, I was skeptical.
Yet I was also sad. I’ve tried to “get over this” for decades. I’ve turned away from traditional perspectives on treatment, and took my own journey deep into my heart, made sense of it, made it sacred, loved and accepted myself despite my continued cycling up and down with these symptoms. I worked really hard at learning to honor the fact that I may just need to learn how to “deal with it” at this level forever. So to hear that there are these coaches helping one to get to that place, over the rainbow, hearing this brought up so many feelings. There was a disbelief. There was anger. There was confusion.
But there was also a longing. This paradoxical longing stirred into that skepticism. And the fact that there was an opportunity to work with one of these coaches for free, at least initially, feels important somehow.
So I decided to give it one more try. Sure I could pose all skeptic and doubt this possibility that these coaches could somehow work utter magic on my decades-old eating struggles. But I could also be curious. Which is what I chose, to be curious, and now have started working with one of these coaches to see what is possible. To give the longing, the sadness, the yearning to actually experience this sense of moving beyond, to give this a chance. Again.
So this “recovery coach” is texting me at challenging times where we’ve set up goal behavior changes. This person is hearing me yodel about my small but annoyingly restrictive behaviors that keep me bound, in fear, anxiety. That keep me smiling to the world–functioning–but not really fully feeling free. I have hope, but I also know this road could dead-end and the skeptic is here too. The skeptic is ready to be disappointed.
So far, the focus on behaviors is making them stronger, and I hope that does not continue. There is a sense that whatever I am dealing with is bigger than me, and has been with me and my ancestors for many generations. There is a sense that a “recovery coach” may not be able to handle and work through this layer of bigness with me. Yet that doesn’t mean I will discount it. I have also enlisted some support from a spirit-worker I trust to help me see into the bigness of this energy I am wrapped up in, to see if there is anything bigger than myself that is opposing my attempts at shifting behaviors.
I am so ready to transform this, and the coincidence of the recovery coach concept coming to me at this time–when I am about to publish my memoir about my lifetime eating and body struggles–is one I am definitely taking notice of. With the recovery coach helping me with the behavioral moves, and the spirit work helping me to explore and possibly heal the bigger energies tied up in this epigenetic illness pattern, I hope to really feel into this sense of “moving beyond.”
For me, however, I think it may result in a more animist way of being with the spirits of illness rather than never thinking about them again. For me, as I’ve written about in previous blogs and in my memoir, I think that the ED is an initiatory energy, and if it can be honored as an archetypal, transformational force but not allowed to destroy one’s body, then the work is truly done. I feel this is my path, to learn how to work with the spirit of this illness, and to possibly help others struggling, but not to let it take me down. This is where I am letting my curiosity with the concept of “full recovery” and recovery coaches take me. Hopefully I will come out the other end with an uplifting story to share around the fire.
Letting Go 