Apoplectic, anorectic

I haven’t been eating much lately. Like an idiot, I put off eating when I’m hungry and then forget about it when the feeling eventually evaporates, my body deciding that it had better not waste its available energy if it isn’t going to be getting any more anytime soon. I say “like an idiot” because I don’t believe I’m an actual idiot; I’m just stressed. Apparently.

Graduating from high school was also apparently stressful for me: I forgot to eat for three days. After a morning final on the second day, I was hungry, but mystified; why was I so hungry? Hadn’t I eaten breakf…well, but I had eaten dinner at least, on the night—or lunch, or breakfast on the previous day…right? Except that no, I hadn’t, and so I went out to breakfast.

Then I forgot to eat lunch, since breakfast was so late, and then I was busy getting ready for the baccalaureate ceremony and didn’t eat dinner, and was again mystified when the cookie I had at the ceremony’s reception was the best I’d ever eaten, despite being store-bought, and a sugar cookie. I may have actually struck my own forehead at this point, in cartoon-like shock—but not hard enough, because when the reception was over, I still forgot to eat dinner, and went to bed with a single sugar cookie in my stomach.

Until 3 a.m., when I woke up with a growling stomach and got up to pour myself a bowl of Fruit Loops.

And that was only day two.

I can’t remember a time since that has been as extreme, but there was also a month during my first year in China—November—when I lost about as much weight as a person can healthily manage, by eating nothing but saltines and margarine. It is, I agree, a gross diet, and not actually meant to help a person lose weight, so I don’t recommend it. I suspect that, in addition to typical culture shock, I was experiencing a dairy deficiency, since cow’s milk is hardly the staple in China that it is here. I know PETA might not agree, and I acquiesce that people don’t necessarily need dairy products to live healthful, osteoporosis-free lives, but my body was used to it—and I love milk, so it was used to a lot of it.

It was also beginning to get cold there in November, and since we were south of the river and thus had no indoor heating, when it got cold, it got bone-chillingly, frighteningly cold. It was actually colder inside the house than out. Other than when we jumped into bed with our electric blankets at night, the wet chill was unrelenting and inescapable; I'm not sure we would have survived without those blankets. Even then, they only kept our lungs from freezing solid—not our toes. Not much seemed appetizing under these circumstances.

And now, I’m in a similar mode: not eating regular meals, regularly. I always eat breakfast, but after that things get to be touch-and-go. Lunch is usually some combination of carrots, soy nuts, and some kind of trail mix, or crackers and marmalade. This fare is typical for me. What’s not is the way I look at these things now and think “Why bother?” and then can’t answer the question of what I’d rather have.

Not that anyone wants or needs to know my eating habits, of course.

It’s just that I’ve never heard anyone else complain that they had forgotten why to eat, and that this bothered them enough to stop. I have not forgotten the process: assemble delicious foods, set them on a plate, stab/scoop/pick up, chew and swallow. And I’ve not forgotten which foods I like or how to procure them. It’s as if the whole telos of eating has suddenly become a mystery for me, and I can’t start again until I’ve solved it. I’ve forgotten the fundamental drive to eat. It’s been temporarily wiped clean, become inaccessible.

It’s like a instinctual reboot, and it’s a strange feeling. Aren’t the lizard-brain drives that run us at the most basic levels supposed to be the last to go? If I were in the wilderness being confronted by a dangerous predator, I’d like to think that fight or flight would kick in, not my knowledge of pi to ten digits. If I were busily installing Linux onto my home computer, I wouldn’t expect to be able to run Word at the same time. (Although if any OS could do it, it’d be Linux.) How is it that I’m functioning on a cognitive level, but not on a basic one?

I don’t find it worrisome (which would probably also be lizard-brain level stuff), just interesting. And at least I know, from my own experience, that it will pass.