AW: Morning Pages

 So, I sat down on the couch just to take a break because I had a stress headache. Next thing I know, I wake up two hours later and I'm two hours behind schedule after starting two hours ahead of schedule. This seems to be the theme of 2021. Sit down, work hard, and everything gets fucked up anyways. I am very frustrated and angry with myself. Which doesn't help anything at all.

I was raised in a household that taught me that self care was selfish, vanity, and morally bad for me to do. It was fine for other people but I was taking away from the collective good of the family by taking time to tend to my own needs. Same approach was taken towards food. If I wanted to eat, I ate last after everyone else at the table because my parents decided that I was a glutton. How much food I took was closely monitored and I'd be punished if I took more than a minimum amount (which seemed to get less as time went on). The line that I was told was that I was taking food out of my brothers' mouths and starving them every time I went to have a snack or eat more than that minimum amount I was allowed.

Bitterly, the rest of the family would get seconds and there'd be scraps left because my father would heap up his plate with dinner. I got that minimum first portion and that was it. The only exception was holidays and when we were eating somewhere aside from home. Even then, however, I got the evil eye if I took more than what I was usually allowed if we were at a restaurant. Then my parents wondered as I was in college why I had an eating disorder. They talked about how weird I was as a child that I would stand in the pantry and look at the food in the jars. When I started to finally learn how to eat properly, my parents talked about how I was getting fat. The commentary while I was pregnant was pretty awful too.

Now they wonder why I don't talk to them. When you're constantly being put down for just trying to meet your basic needs, you tend to not want to deal with the people who were giving you grief for it after you get away from them. When the line you hear constantly is that you're a bad person for having needs, you tend to want to run like hell from them at the first opportunities. Now, my family was poor as I was growing up and food was somewhat scarce. But, if my parents had swallowed their pride and actually got help, we'd have had more than enough food.

When the weather was nice, I took to sneaking out of the house to visit relatives who fed me. When it was harvest time, I'd wander the fields before they were brought in gleaning fresh peas to make my stomach stop growling. I'd go through the old apple orchard and eat wormy apples (cutting out the bad parts with my pocket knife). Or I'd liberate some of the produce from my grandparents' garden. My grandmother would joke that she knew that things were ripe when her 'rabbit' came visiting.

Diabetes has made food a fine line to walk. I struggle with the eating disorder again. I struggle with blood sugar numbers that climb high when I'm sick or stressed out. I've gotten bad advice from professionals that basically encouraged disordered eating. It makes it really hard to stick to the healthy eating habits that I was taught by Beloved over the course of a number of years before I could sit down with a sandwich and not feel guilty for eating all of it. I'm rambling and none of it is pleasant. I apologize. I've been stressed out over a number of things and am dreading lunch. That's why today's word vomit revolves around this. I'll try to come up with something more pleasant tomorrow.