Page 73 of The Ground Beneath Our Feet
“It’s not unhealthy to eat. It’s unhealthy to eat too much food when you’re not hungry or to eat food that your body doesn’t like. When you accept that food has been serving an important function, that is the key to transcending your addiction to overeating.” She smiled. “You’ll learn. You can let food be food. When it’s not so weighted with meaning, it becomes a simple pleasure, and your weight naturally regulates itself—at whatever weight your body wants to be at naturally. I’m not talking about the unhealthy images of society. I’m talking about a natural and normal weight for a woman of your age, height, et cetera. But that will happen gradually over time. For now, I want you to start appreciating the effort you have put into keeping yourself alive. You overate to escape something you perceived as unbearable. And for this, you need to be acknowledged. You kept yourself alive.”
“I did.” God, I did. Maybe God hadn’t forsaken me. Maybe this was my way of staying alive. “It was my escape from my reality.”
“Do you know what reality you ate to escape?”
“My father.”
I left the therapy session an hour later having opened up a painful emotional wound. During that session, we applied hydrogen peroxide, which stung, but the bubbles cleaned out the dirt and impurities.
I didn’t get out all of the dirt.
My wound was still open.
But it was a little cleaner.
When I came home, I told Mikey that I’d opened up an old file folder in the back of my mind, gone through the contents, and decided I didn’t need to keep any of it. While there were still more file folders, it was the first step to getting mentally organized. And for a neat freak like me, arranging my thoughts was the final frontier.
With my therapist’s words about letting food be food, I called the soup kitchen next to Mikey’s work and scheduled a day a week to volunteer. I was going to teach myself how to let food be something that sustains life, not something you use to escape it.
