My body and I have stopped agreeing about when it is safe to be hungry.
I have been struggling to eat again. It's been a fairly big problem for the past few years, ever since my first hypomanic episode, the one that led to my Bipolar II diagnosis. What can I say? Humans are complicated.
I’m able to get food in during the morning, before the anxiety has quite caught up with me. For the rest of the day, I could easily go without eating, but I do my best to get something simple in. I try to cook dinner, but usually my husband has to make it, because I can’t get excited about eating, and sometimes it makes me want to throw up.
It started as a strategy. My stomach has been a mess for thirty-two years, a long medical story I eventually turned into a musical, because isn’t that a totally normal thing to do when you’re in pain? Sing at it? But you can’t sing at dinner every night. So I’ve learned to keep it simple. Watch the trends. Eat what seemed to work yesterday.
Control the food, control the pain.
Somewhere along the way, the strategy grew into something more complex.
Now when the anxiety comes, my body quiets the hunger the moment I think, Maybe I could eat, and sometimes even tips me toward nausea, as if it’s trying to help. As if it’s saying, Don’t worry, I’ve got this. We don’t need that.
So there are two of me, both holding the same rope, pulling for different reasons. I hold on to manage the pain. My body holds on to manage the panic. And somewhere in the middle, where our hands meet, I can no longer tell which one is mine.
Lately, I take an edible about an hour before dinner.
The first time I decided to take pot for dinner, (as opposed to taking it recreationally) I stood at the counter with the little sugary gummy in my palm and thought of my dad in the late nineties. The doctors gave him Marinol so he could eat, back when that was the only legal way to borrow a little appetite from a plant. Nearly thirty years later, here I am, reaching for the same plant for the same reason. Different bodies, different battles, but the same nausea, the same closed-off hunger, the same fear sitting where the appetite should be. I remember being slightly jealous that he had to be made to eat.
I was always a little overweight when I was younger. Not by much, but enough to make me recognize that now, at 105 pounds, I have achieved thinness and control, and perhaps that was what my brain wanted all along. It’s confusing. The world is confused by it. When I’m at my thinnest from not being able to eat, I also tend to get the most compliments. I’m not sure what to do with that.
An hour later, once the pot kicks in, the fist in my stomach opens a little. I eat. I laugh at a joke I’ve heard four times. I’m nicer. I’m funnier. Who cares what time we leave? I’m cool, man.
The edible is just another hand on the rope. I’m letting go on a schedule. Even my surrender comes in a measured dose. 10 milligrams. This is the most surefire way to loosen the grip.
The grip (Musical theater people, does this make you think of "Adelaide's Lament." La grippe. A psychosomatic cold from a woman who couldn't let go. Hold that thought.)
The grip (should I say it one more time?) runs in my extended family, right along with the men’s hairlines, our great singing voices, and our ability to find the funny in any situation. We are a talented bunch. We are also people with opinions. “This is how you really should do it.” “What are you, an idiot?” We joke about it at holidays, and everyone quietly glances at Mom. (At me.)
I understand how I got here. Two kids, ambition, a chronic illness, a tendency toward hypomania, and a husband and a child whose minds are somewhat debilitated by ADHD. Somebody has to hold the map. I don’t really know what map I’m holding, but I’m gripping it tight.
Lately it has started to close around my own throat.
I’m sure you feel it too. The world seems to be (not so) quietly collapsing.
We are clearly living through history in the making: societal breakdown, an authoritarian turn, and who the hell knows what my kids will do for work.
I know instinctively that I need to loosen my grip on…uh, everything. And I can tell it needs to be a fairly radical act. I say radical because I sense that in order to live longer, I need to release myself from grasping so my body can more easily find its flow.
In the ten years I’ve spent growing through my illness, I’ve learned to flow with it more. Some years it’s easier. Other years, I feel like I cannot take one more day of this.
The single biggest thing that has helped is learning to wake up. Not in some glowing, enlightened way. I just mean noticing. Noticing when I’ve left the room in my head, and coming back.
When I’m awake, life gets simple. Pick out dinner, make dinner, eat dinner. Pick up my daughter from school, make her a snack, help with her math homework. Write this article, record this song, build this course, teach this lesson. Nothing is rushed. I’m not racing the clock. I feel whole. And mostly, I notice what’s missing: the ache.
Because the ache always lives in the future or the past. It’s when I step outside the minutiae that I start slipping underwater. Every few days (hours? minutes?), I find myself mired in questions my ego desperately wants answered.
What am I doing with my life? Why haven’t I been discovered? Why isn’t anyone paying attention?
I have always felt a drive to be famous. I know I wouldn’t like it. And still, it drives me. Or it drives my lower self, the part of me that never got the memo. It’s annoying.
Isn’t that something? I can’t feel hungry for dinner, but I’m starving to be seen.
The Buddhists call this ache dukkha, that low, constant suffering of wanting things to be other than they are. There’s an old teaching about two arrows. The first arrow is the pain life hands you. The second is the one you shoot into yourself, the story about the pain. My stomach is the first arrow. “Why haven’t I been discovered?” is the second.
And sometimes I wonder if that second arrow is trying to protect me. If part of me keeps success at arm’s length because I know what my body can and can’t carry. Like the thinness, it’s confusing. The thing that hurts might also be the thing keeping me safe.
There’s no easy way to wake up, as I’m sure you’ve guessed. It’s basic. It’s mundane. It is not sexy. For me, it’s been five minutes of meditation a day, every day, for over five years. Non-negotiable. Five minutes hasn’t made me enlightened. It’s just made me better at catching myself when I wander off.
And that’s what meditation actually is, by the way. It isn’t clearing your mind or not thinking. Your mind will wander. That’s its job. Meditation is noticing that you’ve drifted off into thought and coming back. Every time you notice, that’s one rep. One push-up. One sit-up. You’re not failing when your mind wanders. Every time you catch it, you’re getting stronger.
The hardest place to wake up is with other people. When my daughter or my husband or a friend is stuck, I can see so clearly the simple thing that would help. And I get annoyed when they don’t do it. But I can’t make anyone do anything. I’m worrying more than the person who actually has the problem. That worry feels like love, and some of it is. But some of it is just my hand on their rope.
When I feel the grip, I ask one question.
Whose hand is this?
Is this me, steering? Or is this the panic?
Some days I can tell. Some days I can’t. But I keep coming back to something simple.
A fist can’t hold anything new. You can’t take a fork, a hand, a bite of dinner, or a little help while you’re squeezing this hard.
So tonight I’ll sit down at the table. Maybe with a gummy, maybe without. I’ll open my hand.
And I’ll see what I can receive.
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In love and health,
Molly
