Tuesday, September 17, 2013

remember Paris, Part 1

Like so many of the "yeah, I did that" episodes in my life -- living in New York, having my son, not being bulimic, nursing school -- my trip to Paris was catalyzed by my husband. Without Z, I just never would have gone. There are about a dozen other places I've wanted to go, mostly to do some sort of volunteer program or relief work or whatever, and none of which I've actually made it to because student loans and living beyond my means and the vicious cycle I navigate with such finesse: Everything is too much and nothing is enough and eff it, I deserve and need five dollars worth of coffee, preventable malaria deaths be damned. If I can't be actively engaged in medical missions while raising eight adopted children and writing and publishing thought-provoking critical theory that is also accessible to lay-readers, I might as well be at home watching Mad Men over a three-roll combo.

So, a couple of things about that:

1. Yes, consumerism is poison. "We all" -- those of us who kvetch about our First World Problems while scrolling through memes about First World Problems -- know this, and we know we should feel guilty about it. But I spend most of my time confused about the nature of this guilt -- as I did with my eating disorder, honestly --  and thinking that the problem is this: by buying all these stupid things I am  privileging my own well being over that of other people. Shame on me! (Because shame: always a great inciter of life-affirming choices and changes.)

Actually, in my experience, the more immediate (not more significant) problem is that consumerism is poison to me.

For example: I'm a big eater of "special foods" -- those well versed in eating-disorder language might call them "safe foods". Yogurt is okay, but not if it's sweetened with sugar; chinese food is okay if it is steamed, sauce on the side and ultimately unused. Bagels are okay if a certain amount of time has elapsed since one last ate carbs; sliced bread is a problem, but bread crusts can be torn off and eaten if one is prone to nighttime snacking. And so forth, ad nauseam, so that often I just order sushi because I enjoy a. identifying each individual ingrediant in what I am eating, 2. allowing another person to make the exhausting and existentially-charged decision of how much food I "deserve" to eat.

This obnoxious and unproductive little mindfuck is sustained in no small part by my insistance that, when the going gets tough, the tough throw up their hands, run for an hour, and order sushi ten minutes before the restaurant closes, because weighing more than a hundred fifteen pounds and cooking and eating dinner with one's family and before eight o'clock all feel intolerable.

Insofar as there is a root cause of my bulimia -- there's not, but it's a useful little story, so indulge me -- it lies somewhere in this general area: I do not believe the everyday things that people enjoy and look forward to are acceptable things to value, so I do not let myself have them or notice them or enjoy them. As a rule, I mean. I don't plan and look forward to outings or shows or trips or parties. I don't buy new shoes when I'm sad -- even when that sadness stems directly from my inability to walk in my current work shoes, purchased in 2010. I get my eyebrows done when I feel too bad about them to leave my house; when I go, I look at women who are there for manicures like I'm some kind of anthropologist encountering the rituals of an unfamiliar tribe.

And when you feel this way -- that you deserve nothing, that Nothing is in fact a tangible moral imperative for you, a prop in some sort of weird and ritualistic exercise in not having -- and when, paradoxically, your response to Facebook pictures of other people's offices or children or friends is to wonder why you're not good enough for a sign on your door or another child or  for people to want to go to, and document, brunch with, and when a sandwich is an okay thing to eat at lunch, but not at dinner, and only if dinner then has no carbs in it, and only if it costs less than five dollars -- then sushi after a long, hard day, seems like the answer. And it can be easy to overlook that part of being a grown up is that most days, in fact, are kind of long and hard.

So I stopped eating sushi last week. I was inspired by my trip to Paris. Initially, I did this because I wanted to save the money to go back to Paris, but also because, in Paris, I thought much less about eating. I fought much more about it, because I was still no more inclined to eat Foods Combined with Other Foods and because their bread is delicious and terrifying and everywhere, but there was so much else going on that food just became a necessity -- and by the time I ate, I was usually hungry enough to reconsider some of my essential truths about foods, and also, it's hard to stay obsessed with breakfast when you're at the Musee D'Orsay.

I'm rolling into week two of my sushi fast, and it's hard, because eating my special foods is a compulsion and now I'm trolling for other compulsions. I'm obsessing about how much I run; on Saturday, I bought an issue of Shape magazine. But the particular consumption-compulsion that kept me going through much of the past year isn't there.

And it's clarifying for me a little how -- at least for me -- buying this thing, so I can feel this way, isn't (only, or even most immediately) an issue of social justice (I could eat sushi or, like, help dig a well in Cameroon). It's also an issue of my own quality of life, because if I'm getting through the day by imagining my run-and-sushi, I'm not calling my friends or taking comfort in the winning husband-and-child combo awaiting me each day or taking the risk of saying uncomfortable shit like:


  • I think I made a mistake. I think I made a series of mistakes and am now so far from the things I once believed I wanted that I no longer know what it is I want.
  • I think answers like, "Not my will, but His," are not meaningful in the sense I once believed they were, and I'm angry/hurt/raw over that, and I wonder if I gave up things that mattered to me in an effort to live out a belief that, in reality, is more a slogan than a principle.
  • Some days -- see my last post -- I'm genuinely excited by my job. A lot of other days, I just don't want to deal with it.


It's hard. And buying things, to eat or drink or wear or own, is a distraction, and makes it feel like things aren't so hard. But that's only because you're distracted.

So I'm trying to stop, sushi first. Because another thing I really loved about Paris is that consuming is not a project; that eating and drinking are part of everyday life, not activities. They just, you know, eat dinner. Then they go do something else. They don't really seem to understand about low-carb or gluten-free or Paleo diets, none of which seem much more healthy or normal to me than my Safe Foods diet, but all of which kind of allow eating like mine to seem life a lifestyle choice and not a symptom of a mental illness.

I'm so blessed and so grateful for my physical health -- that I feed myself, no matter what, or how weirdly, and that I don't throw up. But I'm tired of the weirdness I have about food, and the way it separates me from other people, and the way I settle for delicious sushi when I am stressed or ashamed or disappointed or entrenched in today's existential meltdown.

Sushi's really only the answer to the following problem: hunger. For September, I'm interested in figuring what other answers to non-hunger-related problems I can come up with.




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