Food

I'm munching on some dried apples, trying to take the edge off of my appetite while my andouille sausage and spinach stuffed squash bakes away in the oven. I'm making do, making up an recipe with the discrete objects I still have in the freezer/on the kitchen counter from before I went on vacation a week ago. Except the dried apples. Those are my answer to kettle chips, the junk food Kryptonite to my Superman.

I love food. 

My enthusiasm for food and cooking is reflected in my Christmas gifts from the past couple years. Many of them come from Sur la Table, a store I could spend an entire afternoon in happily. There are candy making spoons, tart pans, fancy cake pans, new pots, a marble pastry board, a Kitchenaid, and Mastering the Art of French Cooking (thanks, Mom!)

I love cooking. I love having other people cook for me. I love walking into someone's house in a sundress in late August with a lattice-top peach pie. I love showing my love and appreciation for someone by inviting them into my kitchen when I don my damask apron, crank up Ella Fitzgerald, and make onion soup and coq au vin to make you weep. 

I love eating what other people cook for me. Laughing out loud when I  find out that the impossibly tender and flavorful Dijon chicken and asparagus I'm eating was cooked in the microwave. Tasting a family recipe that someone learned to cook at the elbow of a loved one. Seeing a new cook execute a tricky recipe for the first time.

I love cooking with other cooks and listening to their stories. How the crepe pan belonged to someone's mother and they used to get crepes on Bastille Day. How a meal brought a couple together. How one cook blew up at another and dumped a pan full of olive oil into his soup. 

I love food. 

I fear food. 

I fear food in the way that only a girl who weighs over 110 pounds and has shopped at the Uptown H&M can fear food. 

I worry about the calories in the cream and sugar I add to my afternoon cup of tea. I can't eat a cookie without counting up the calories in my head. Sometimes I have popcorn for dinner because it's objectively awesome and sometimes I have popcorn for dinner because I had a rich or heavy lunch or a late afternoon candy bar. I rarely keep things like kettle chips or ice cream in the house. The least healthy thing you will find here is a bag of popcorn that needs to be popped on the stove (because then I have to decide if I really want it) and hot chocolate that I keep to curb my sweet tooth.  

In quite possibly the worst or best decision I've ever made, I now keep my scale in my kitchen. I weigh myself every single day. When I'm thinking about after-dinner ice cream, I have to walk right past the scale before I can get to the freezer. Possibly unbalanced? Yes. Best weight-maintenance decision I've ever had? Absofuckinglutely.

A few months ago I decided that I was going to start "writing dangerously." The decision was more or less concurrent with my decision to go into therapy and the realization that maybe never telling anyone what was going on in my head was a bad idea. As a result, many of these recent posts have been more confessional than I ever intended for this blog. It's been a complicated process. A) I'm naturally a taciturn person B) I'm worried that my writing is, as a result of dealing with all these feelings, going down the shitter. C) This process has been therapeutic in a way I'll never be able to describe. D) I don't know if I want my writing to be my therapy process.

I'm inclined to these kinds of false dichotomies in my thinking. I can write about my feelings or I can bee a good writer. I can eat this cookie and still have dinner and be a fatty for the rest of my life or I can skip two meals today because I had an afternoon cookie. I can be successful in all aspects of my life by projecting the supremely confident, funny, smart girl that I am 70% of the time or I can admit that I'm sometimes a shrieking void of insecurity and doubt and will die old and alone, without even the cliched cats because I'm allergic to everything fluffy and adorable.

My relationship with food is probably the best (and worst) illustration of this crazy schizophrenic thinking to which I've suddenly become inclined. I would have never noticed it if my shrink hadn't suggested that I track my panic attacks and see what the triggers were. With the exception of all the worries about my loved one's health and the attendant panic that's occurring there, every single panic attack I've had has occurred after I eat.

What. The Actual  Fuck. How did I get to a point in my life where doing something that I used to enjoy, something that is, I don't know, NECESSARY TO CONTINUE LIVING, became something that I've so pathologized that I cannot do it without feeling like I may be dying when I finish? Might this indicate that it may be time to take the scale out of the kitchen? On a bigger level, to quit with the nutty dichotomies in my thinking?

Absofuckinglutely.