It started with a whisper.

I keep not writing.

I don’t know why.

The thought of stopping, and simultaneously *doing* don’t sound appealing. I’ve been doing a lot recently. And when I stop, I just want to read and/or check out. But writing has not been high on my list. It hasn’t been anywhere on my list.

I did consider multiple times today and a couple yesterday that I should write. But it felt like anything I wanted to say would start in the middle, and the thought of that annoyed me.

The middle is that I’ve been struggling with food lately and food has been a struggle and that today I was choosing not to use it as a crutch or to numb or to comfort.

The beginning is that over a week ago, I tweaked something somewhere in my back and the spasms at my ribs, in my back on the right side have been so violent and overwhelming that my kids can announce “spasms” when I involuntarily gasp from across the house.

Which makes me smile, amidst the paralyzing oww.

But yeah, so this pain has been bad. A pain that ibuprofen couldn’t even take the edge off of. It’s made cleaning and being productive hard. It’s made sitting and chilling hard. It’s made being okay with me very challenging. It made being challenging.

I am almost always in an ebbing and flowing state of pain and/or discomfort physically. That part is not new for me. But this spasming was something different. It was something so completely overwhelming. I felt like I could never get ahead of the pain long enough to overcome the mental and emotional weight of navigating being alive.

And as such, my body tried to revert back to a default comfort. For a few days, I stopped being mindful of my body and I ate when I wasn’t hungry. I used food to numb and avoid and fill an insatiable part of my brain. The part of my brain that is certain that, with enough food, I will be able to generate enough comfort to override the physical pain.

This, at best, is an illusion. And at worst, a complete lie.

Eventually my lack of mindfulness turned into my version of “fuck it”. So I got potato chips and disregarded my body’s inability to process canola oil. And I got ice cream, which my body probably would have been fine with (free of allergens), but under the circumstances, my brain was not. And I indulged for a couple moments.

I don’t feel guilty for eating the food. I didn’t self-loathe or beat myself up. It didn’t change my worth. What it did, was put me at a risk for making the pain worse. Which, when you stop to consider is completely asinine.

So Tuesday night, I gave the culprits to Chris to take to work for himself. And Wednesday morning I dumped the ice cream. And then Chris called me enlightened. And I had to chuckle for a moment because prospective is funny.

I’m still in pain, but it’s not the crawl in a hole and die pain. Or maybe it is and I’ve just grown accustom to it. But I’ve leaned back into my regular eat when I’m (actually) hungry routine and despite the pain, I’ve been purging the basement again and making notable progress. I have three different loads of donations ready to go in the garage, the kids are almost out of school for winter break, Christmas everything has been taken care of and life carries on.