Eating a Mystery: week 1

CW: This post gets heavy and may be difficult for people who have issues with suicidal ideation or depression.

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The first week has been checkered.

Each meal has been eaten, but sometimes I’ve not been full when I’m done, sometimes the meals are lackluster, and sometimes I’m purposefully distracting myself from eating because its the only way I could find to eat. I’ve had to sort out where the rules can be bent and where they can’t, because trying to eat while teetering on the edge of a meltdown is very challenging. Making the choice between what is more important: being present or being able to eat has not always been clear, and I often erred on the side of eating over mindfulness, and hopefully O would agree to that decision, but I’ve really no way of knowing. Breakfast is usually one of the least-mindful meals because I’m often barely functional at 6 in the morning, and its not uncommon for my depression to be sky high first thing in the morning. In situations where I found myself eating with others, I often decided it was more important to be present than to focus on navel gazing. Hopefully these are the right answers to whatever is going on because no one gave me any guidelines for these sorts of situations.

As it turns out, its hard to want to nourish yourself when you 1. don’t want to nourish yourself and 2. aren’t particularly interested in nourishing the person who directed you to do this to begin with. Every time I’ve sat down to eat, I’ve heard a phrase run through my head, a sort of attempt to put me in the right state of mind for what I’m trying to achieve, and most times when I think about nourishing myself to nourish O, I have difficulties with wanting to.

There is a large rift between us, and I still don’t entirely understand how it got there, but its there all the same. I’ve not trusted him for years, and while I was willing to finish the work I had started in 2016, I ultimately haven’t wanted him touching anything that is mine. I’ve had this inherent desire to draw a very thick boundary between my work and what I do for the NTRW, lest they decide to dip their fingers into my stuff without asking permission. Where did this come from? I don’t know, but its been there and it’s not gone away.

Asking me to nourish my body for a god I don’t want anywhere near me is asking a lot. Asking a god I don’t want near me to potentially draw close to my body because that’s where the nourishment is is asking almost too much, apparently.

There was a bout at some point during the week where I really rifled through all of my memories of O, and our earliest interactions were not what I’d consider to be, uh, healthy or consensual. Boundaries have been crossed by him in nearly every respect, and yet somehow I’m still here, and I’m really skeeved by that. I had an overwhelming moment where I found myself rejecting what he had done, and I think by extension, rejected him. I can’t tell what impact that’s going to have, since my ability to really tap into anything from O since has basically disappeared. For all I know, I’ve broken it or messed it up before the first week was even done. I can’t even tell if I’m bothered by that.

I’d sometimes shift my thoughts to nourishing Father-Lover instead, to see how I felt about my nourishment nourishing him. Parts of me were just as against the idea of nourishing him as they are against O, but my thoughts regarding FL were mostly tinged with sadness over contempt. I found that the biggest hiccup with FL was that I never mourned him in any of the situations where he was, well, killed. Each situation where it happened, I had no way of knowing if he’d show back up again or not. He was so hellbent on not coming back, and yet it seemed cruel that inevitably, he would eventually re-manifest back in the same awful place he tried to leave to begin with. It’s partially why we got on so well together — we could both commiserate about how little we wanted to be alive.

Of course, he eventually got what he wanted, leaving me with one less person in my life.

I made some artwork to try and process the mourning that I never completed. I would be lying if I said I knew if it helped or not. There are moments when I think it has, and there are moments when I’m sure that it hasn’t. Though as the week dragged on, I found that my focus shifted from “fathers” to myself and my inability to want to take care of myself.

Someone had commented on the last post about how the act of making my food could be folded into all of this. I know it could be, but the idea sounds awful to me. Any attempts to really cuddle up with the notion of being invested in my food prep have left me frustrated and against the idea. The thought of investing myself even more into making food that I ultimately don’t like, that ultimately doesn’t seem to ever fill me or sate me just sounds like Too Much. So even though I’m supposed to be really going all in with eating, its just not happening. I don’t like eating, food is not pleasurable to me, cooking is boring and sucks the life out of me, and I just really don’t know how to get around that.

When I went to therapy, one of the first issues she really wanted me to sort out was being invested in being alive. She told me that I couldn’t expect life to ever be worthwhile if I was only half-assing everything I did. Which is fair, I guess. Shortly after I really tried to start going “all in” on life, and I held on to my motivation to push forward despite the odds until sometime last winter. I felt it slowly slipping away from me as the spaces that had been inviting before began to change, and suddenly they became lonely and alienating for me. I lost more of my friends, and with it, everywhere I went just felt all that much more isolating. I pulled back on every social media platform because of this, trying to shelter myself from the loneliness that howls inside of me, and by the time I began having daily panic attacks in March, I knew that “all in” was gone.

And perhaps that’s the largest core issue for me so far with everything tied to this “project.” I’m not invested in living at this point. Its a combination of so many things that have converged to really just suck the desire to bother out of me. I am a burden to myself, a trait I learned by being a burden to my parents and family. I abandon myself because that’s what people do when they are abandoned by others (particularly at a young age). These two things feed into one another — you don’t want to do the work when it feels like a burden, especially because you’re not invested in the person/s you’re doing the work for. I can barely muster the effort to do basics so that I’ll be here for my partner, a person I actually care about, let alone a deity that I feel like I can barely tolerate at this point. Instead of drawing me closer to wanting to sustain myself or sustain my gods, its mostly just dredged up all of the reasons why I’d rather not.

I have no clue if this is what O had in mind when he tasked me with this, but here we are all the same.

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