Alien in the Cereal Aisle

I made braised pork chops with apples and thyme butter sauce for dinner. My own recipe, nowhere near as sophisticated or complicated as it sounds. We ate in front of the television while we caught up on the football games we missed this afternoon.

It seems a little thing now, cooking a meal and sitting down to eat it, but I remember not too long ago when it would have been impossible for me.

Anorexia is knowing you're dying but refusing treatment because you're afraid of the medicine. It's much more complicated than that, I am simplifying, but at the very depths, the brain needs a certain amount of nourishment for any other kind of therapy to be effective. You have to start eating again before you even begin treating the reasons behind your refusal to eat. The truly sad part is most people see the food going in and assume everything is now fine- crisis averted, panic is over, on to the next problem. Really all you're doing is fueling the battle looming on the horizon.

When I was in treatment in Baltimore, the charge nurses took us on "therapeutic trips" to grocery stores and restaurants and held cooking classes and seminars to desensitize us to food. To me, each trip felt like landing on Mars. I didn't feel more normal tagging along behind six other emaciated girls and three nurses, discussing the merits of the different varieties and flavors of Ensure. There was something odd about pretending to be normal and knowing you're failing miserably. At looking at the young mother picking out apples for her daughter and wondering if you could take the rejection if you asked them to please take me with you I don't belong here.

And in the end, it really wasn't that we were afraid of food- or recipes, or cooking- most of us could arrange a four-course dinner party for 12 in 30 minutes flat. Our problem was sitting down to the table we set, eating the food we prepared, then leaving the table and letting ourselves go on with our day.

My parents say I don't give myself enough credit for what I've accomplished. It's probably true. I'm much more apt to punish myself for what I did yesterday than pat myself on the back for what I did ten years ago. The truth is what once was so difficult is pretty easy now. I guess "normal," like everything else, is a sliding scale.

While normal changes, the memories don't. I still remember being the alien in the cereal aisle, unsure of the changes she was seeing, yet knowing going home the same was not an option. And hoping desperately this new world would have a place for her after all.