Hunger

Photo by Jacob Lo on Unsplash

I can’t eat.

It’s after five. Dinner is being cooked while I avoid the kitchen, cannot stomach the sight or smells of the crisping vegetable flesh.

This will be my first meal of the day, and if not for the fact that whatever is being cooked is being cooked for me, I likely wouldn’t eat at all.

I get the food: roasted vegetables, rice, fish. No seasoning. No sauce. Merely a little oil from the cooking process.

I swallow quickly, without thinking about the pulpy mouthfuls congealing under my teeth or sliding down my throat.

Hunger starts to flicker in a way that feels muted, a mutt growling at my feet. I know it should be louder, should be screaming and ravenous. I feel the emptiness of my stomach and the cramping in my gut as food fills me, yet I do not feel hunger in a way that can be satiated. It is simply a hollow that reminds me it needs to be filled. And even then, the hollow speaks quietly.

I hope this will spark my want to eat. I may seek out fruit plucked from bushes, fresh and juicy, or something savoury that crunches like twigs underfoot. Maybe the hunger will finally appear full and awake and I will graze on everything, unable to stop, even as it serrates the roof of my mouth, burns blisters in my tongue.

If I’m unlucky, I will reach a point where the meal is intolerable. My jaw will lock, my tongue will revolt, and I will be devoured by panicked urgency to spit it out where nothing will prevent it, and nothing else will pass my lips thereafter.

Atypical Eating Disorder.

The assessing nurse seems to not understand that coffee is one of the few pleasurable experiences that fills my senses in a day and is used for enjoyment, not appetite suppression. She suggests my large consumption of water is a means of keeping hunger hidden, or that my love for walking is about counting steps. I say no each time she makes an assumption that’s false. She asks me about calories, I say I don’t count them, and in fact if I could chew some pill that had all my daily needs and meant I never had to eat again, I would take it.

She sucks a breath I don’t know how to interpret.

I don’t see her again. I’m referred to one-on-one therapy with a specialist psychologist.

I did not know I had developed a disorder until it had devoured me whole. I assumed my inability to eat was from stress and not a sign of something much more dangerous.

My lifelong food intolerances, a symptom of an undiagnosed autoimmune disorder, brutally assaulted me post-Covid infection. I spent years learning through agonising trial and error what foods would make me too sick to stay conscious. Which ones would cause my gums to bleed and my guts to convulse.

Food became dangerous. Solids were avoided during the work day to ensure I could do my job, pushing my meals further and further back so I could be present for my child and not be overcome with pains and confusion and a fatigue so throttling I would be unable, no matter what I did, to stay in my body, keep my mind with me, and not drift away for hours at a time.

My therapist is furious when I explain this. She swears, she apologises for being unprofessional, but she’s horrified, she explains, that I was left to deal with a known precursor to disordered eating, alone.

But I’d held it together. I’d coped. I spent three years curating a bubble for myself that allowed me to function. Trauma, naturally, drove a stake through my cocoon and ripped me violently from its safety.

I stopped eating when the memories came back. Couldn’t will myself to. Days of little to no food stretched to weeks. When I ate, my stomach rampaged and warred and flooded my insides with histamines that swelled my knuckles and clawed at my muscles.

It felt good. To have control. To have a mastery over my body and how it could function on nothing, fuelled purely by what I decided it do. And still, I did not see how the beast I was feeding grew and stretched and consumed.

The years have taught me food is poison, and in its absence, I find strength.

But, of course, it was a lie fed to me by the beast of my hunger.

Eating solids before the day leaves morning is a goal I hold daily, hit monthly if I’m to be honest.

Filling myself with nourishment that does not poison or pain is a risk I often do not take.

There are stretches where I eat more, days where I fill my belly with carbs and cheese and sugar and feel glad for it. Every time I think I’m cured. I never had an eating disorder. I never had any problems at all.

But it always passes, and I’m always left with the emptiness that keeps me company.

Today, though, I eat my rice and my vegetables and my white fish, and my mind and body know food is safe. I follow it with grapes, then peas and plain pasta some hours later.

Tomorrow might be different. Tomorrow might be the day that I win and eat before night. Tomorrow my slavering hound may rule, and I may find eating impossible until it rests again.

But that’s tomorrow.