I’ve been thinking a lot about that Jenny Slate line from her book Little Weirds that goes, “Who will come into my kitchen and be hungry for me?” It pops into my head a lot, especially with a disease such as this one, when I am often not able to be hungry for anyone. Food, in our society, is a great gatherer of people. You sit around tables and at bars, hunched over wrappers in the car, laughing as mayo drips onto your newly cleaned car seats.
You go out for birthday dinners and celebratory work lunches, and you visit different cities and states and countries simply to try the food that looks so appetizing on your TikTok feed. You go on dates at diners and bars; you stop for ice cream on the way home from a concert; you meet your old coworker at the diner down the street you used to frequent every Thursday for a while. And you think fondly of the food you had while on vacation, of the good and the bad alike, because you experienced it together.
Food is a way in which we bond with each other. Or, it’s supposed to be. And when I cannot eat, when I sit at dinner tables and restaurant booths and work potlucks and can’t eat more than a small amount, I feel that I have fallen short in some way. That I have not been hungry enough for the people I love, the people who have made food for me, paid for my meals, or wanted to show me their favorite restaurant on this Earth. I feel exposed when the meal is done and people look over to see me, still with heaping piles of food on my plate at a restaurant. When the waiter asks if something was wrong with my meal, if I want to take it home, if it wasn’t quite to my liking.
I feel like a failure, somehow. That I have come up short in some indescribable and intrinsically human way.
I know it isn’t my fault. I know I am sick and always will be, and my hunger cues are off more than they’re on. My stomach feels full so fast; I am disappointed to even try to order something good. I pick an appetizer instead of an entrée so as not to waste too much. So as not to make it more obvious that I didn’t eat much. I avoid situations in which someone else would offer to pay for my barely-eaten food. I hurt other people’s feelings, people I love and who love me, when I don’t or can’t eat the food so lovingly made for me.
Hunger is a thing I miss sometimes, when my appetite is so low I don’t feel it at all. Not the feeling, necessarily, but the way in which to eat is to love. How am I able to love, really love someone, if I cannot come into their kitchen and be hungry for them? Or for anyone?
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