On your last nerve? Read this to reset.
My people were not at this party.
Image: Vow of the Pheasant (Philip the Good and Isabella at the Feast of the Pheasant in Lille in 1454), anonymous (copy after), c. 1500 - c. 1599. Rijksmuseum. Used with permission.
Hello my friends! Remember learning about fight-or-flight in middle school? I do.
Sadly that's all I took away. I wish I had known like a couple more things. Such as:
1. The way I ate (BINGEY!) was not a choice I made. Mostly, it was a choice my nervous system made for me.
2. But also, I didn't just eat the way I ate (binge -> restrict -> binge -> ad infinitum) because I was always on my last nerve. It was just as much the other way around: The way I ate KEPT me on my last nerve.
Everlastingly on my last fucking nerve.
Here is what I thought for more than five decades: Only disgusting fucked-up binge eaters think about food unless it's two minutes to dinnertime.
I thought—and by "thought" I do not mean came to a smart conclusion after calm consideration—I thought if I did anything that showed I had food on the brain, the people around me, the actual humans, members of Human Club, they would be able to tell I was subhuman.
A gross subhuman binge eater.
From whom they, the humans, would naturally run screaming in disgust.
This is the kind of thinking that kept me suffering and starving and kept my nervous system perpetually jacked. Thoughts like:
Never let em see ya eat! Never tell em you're hungry!
Make sure they always know you could care less about feeding yourself!
Make sure they know you're like, way too interested in LIFE for that eating nonsense! Books! Movies! Kim K! Wolf migration! Who has time to EAT when there's so much LIFE out there!
(But also if a full human makes the first move, get it while you can! And GET A LOT.)
Today I live with one of those human people, Mr Jones by name, who thinks about food starting two minutes to dinner. We've been together for coming on 20 years and almost the whole time, I went with his schedule of meal planning aka NOT really planning because even though we were married I STILL didn't want him to know I was always committing the repulsive crime of THINKING ABOUT EATING.
So even after I quit bingeing, like years after, I was STILL on my last raggedy-ass nerve all the time. AUGH!!!!! Because try as I did to convince myself it was okay to care, I just really thought it was not. This was the more powerful conditioning: Danger! Not okay! DO NOT BE CAUGHT CARING ABOUT FOOD.
But guess what I come from a line of people who factually didn't get enough. That's right I'm not descended from kings. There's generational trauma and some real genetic drivers leading -> to my NOT being indifferent to food.
I do care, very much. I don't want to starve, I don't want to go hungry for long, I don't want to have a bare cupboard, I don't want to be without a plan. I don't trust that it's okay to leave the next meal up to chance. And I accept that maybe I never will. My nervous system gets a vote, and that's how she's votin'.
(In a way, this is kind of the opposite of Intuitive Eating. A lot of those IE people will tell you never to worry about future hunger because we live in a time and place where there's ALWAYS plenty to eat. My response: Mmmmm, maybe I will just keep my powder dry and my freezer stocked.)
So here's what I asked myself, not that long ago:
What would happen if I believed it was unconditionally okay to eat, plan to eat, spend resources like time and money and attention on eating ... what would happen THEN?
Only good things.
Tell you what: it's so relaxing over here on the other side. Do I have to wait for Mr Jones to make a plan? I do not. My plan is in place. Must I wait for Mr Jones to be ready to eat? Also no. I can just eat. Suffering dissolved!
I HAVE CALMED THE FUCK DOWN. All the way down.
And it is not the only way to be human, but it is fully human.