Everything Feels Like Cannibalism 🥩

All eating feels like cannibalism if I think too much about it.

Everything feels like meat.

After my cholecystectomy, I read The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood. I brought it with me to my post-op appointment. It follows a woman - Marian -who, in light of her impending marriage to her long-term boyfriend, begins to self-identify with her food. She subconsciously perceives her fiance as a predator, herself as prey, and her marriage as a sort of digestion of herself and her identity. She becomes afraid of being consumed and finds herself disgusted with her own consumption. Marian slowly loses her ability to eat, disgusted and nauseated by the act. At my post-op appointment, I asked my surgeon (who had once commented that the surgery would be easy for him because I was so thin) when I would be able to eat a normal diet again. The only breakfast I had been able to keep down for two months was hard-boiled egg whites and yogurt. He told me, “Maybe a month, maybe six, maybe never.”

Me at my post-op with my copy of The Edible Woman

I’ve only cooked raw meat once. I kashered and seared beef cubes for a Rosh Hashanah stew. I bought them pre-sliced so I wouldn’t need to touch them any more than necessary. I can’t touch raw chicken. When I watch my mother trim the fat from chicken breasts with kitchen scissors, I feel it in my arms. I can feel the tendons ripple open. It doesn’t hurt, in my imagination, but it does feel violating.

The two-year anniversary of my surgery was one month ago. I still don’t eat like I should. I’m still 15 pounds lighter than I was before I got sick. I don’t eat breakfast anymore; I don’t try. Like Marian I have felt increasingly alienated from my body. I have never fully recovered from the surgery and my body will likely never function the way it once did. Maintaining a semblance of medical normalcy requires upkeep; intermittent fasting, pills twice a day, avoid fructose, limit fat, small portions, routine. Going to the doctor makes me feel like a slab of meat being sliced open, so I stopped going.

The extremity of my restrictive behavior fluctuates. At its worst, I didn’t eat outside of my home for two months. I would go on first dates and not touch my food. I dated a girl for two months and only ate in front of her once. It makes me feel raw in front of other people. It gives me flashbacks of being 11 and anorexic and throwing away my lunch every day. Now, I can manage a public meal most days. Some days I can’t. Some days I eat nothing but eggs and peanut butter crackers and I feel hungry in a way that extends beyond my stomach and into my bones.

I hate eating and it is all I think about. I am only ever thinking about my next meal. My life revolves around what I will eat and where and when and how much. Ingredients and nutrients and protein and calories and fats and vitamins. My often meager meals make me feel stuffed and gluttonous. My body struggles to process food, leaving me tired and nauseous. Food is a necessary evil. It is a ritual.

My meals feel like an extension of myself. My diet is an aspect of my identity. Kashrut and fodmaps and fasting. Food feels religious and personal and sickening. I feel as though I could also be measured in calories and proteins and fats. My food has become a part of me and I a part of it. The lines get blurry. I have become a meal to consume.

I could never be vegetarian because plants still feel like meat to me. Fruit juice feels like blood and bread feels like bone marrow. I am always eating something that was once alive. Cells and proteins and amino acids breathed and pulsated and bled. I can’t tell if I’m pantheistic or delusional or just have a very active imagination.

I think I would taste like chickpeas and olive oil. Salty and bland. You could crush me with only the pressure of a tongue on the roof of a mouth. I can see myself, very easily, being boiled down to broth.

At the end of the book, Marian bakes a girl-shaped cake and eats it herself. She overcomes the fear of consumption, scares off her fiance, and feeds a bit of the cake to her emo, lit-major boytoy as well. She takes control of her narrative in a way I found heavy-handed and silly, but ultimately the message sticks. Consume yourself before someone else can consume you. In my case, before illness consumes me. As with everything, I am relying on God to fill that role. The only thing I am willing to be consumed by is devotion and faith. It does the job for now and keeps me sane.

With love, XOXO.

(I got through it without mentioning Hannibal Lecter once, be proud of me.)