You want the way it makes you feel

I would say today was slightly better, in that I don’t, you know, feel like a complete failure and brat.

I just finished reading the book Women, Food, and God and man, does that hit dead-on. I had to stop and dog-ear a page where she wrote something along the lines of, "You don’t actually want the cookie. You want what being allowed to eat the cookie makes you feel… accepted, welcomed, adored." It was sort of talking about childhoods at that point, and it just sucked all the air out of me. Yes! That is what I want… and that is why I will sometimes inhale $30 worth of pizza delivery or an entire package of Double-Stuf Oreos when I am not even pleased with the taste anymore or the experience, let alone actually being hungry. I want to be ALLOWED to have what I want because I equate being ALLOWED with being accepted and loved. This from a little girl who went to work meetings with her mom and would have peed her pants to avoid interrupting. And that not-worthy-of-having-a-need-let-alone-desire thing that my brain bakes up on a regular basis has only gotten a million times worse as I’ve gotten older.

When I was in the fifth grade, I had this friend, Tiffany, who always had this crazy-fabulous lunchbag filled with stuff I NEVER got: fruit roll-ups, pudding cups, Capri-suns AND a quarter for chocolate milk, sandwiches made with white bread… you get the picture. My lunches were always much healthier, which is obviously okay, but they were also WEIRD, and I feel like they didn’t represent a lot of effort being made… like, a big hunk of the end of a baguette and a mostly-gone container of eggplant-garlic spread, a whole carrot with the greens on the top, that sort of thing… all tossed into a re-used plastic produce bag. And I know that’s okay… it’s just something I remember. And Tiffany’s mom started putting treats in her lunch for ME at one point, which seems sad now, but also awesome, haha.