How to Grow Up (24 page)

No, I'd rather not say anything at all to young, freaked-out Michelle. I'd rather just pull her close and pet her cropped head.
Don't worry
, I hope my pats would communicate.
That heart inside you will never stop caring, but it will never stop longing for beauty, either. It will never stop craving pleasure, and this will both lead you into terrible trouble and save your life. You will donate money to struggling artists and people who can't pay their hospital bills,
and
you will buy overpriced wrinkle creams and dresses that are expensive even when on sale. You will be, finally, like most everyone else: part of the problem, always, but part of the solution as well.

Eat Me

I
don't know about you, but here's what I ate growing up: hot dogs. Frozen fish sticks. Hamburger Helper; Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. Deviled ham sandwiches (or regular ham, or bologna and cheese—or, for something really special,
fried
bologna and cheese). Steak-umm—slabs of particle board “steak” that you peel from waxed paper sheaths and throw in a frying pan. The last time I visited my mom she fried me up a Steak-umm. I was shocked they still exist; I thought you could only get them if you time-traveled back to the land of my childhood—1980s New England. But no—you, too, can taste the greasy glory of a Steak-umm if you like. Because the thing is, Steak-umm is kind of delicious. Perhaps my palate is sadly conditioned to enjoy such cuisine, or perhaps it's one of those grody, trashy foods that are weirdly scrumptious—like Spam, or Ellio's frozen pizza, which is basically pieces of cardboard with some shitty cheese and sauce blasted onto it. Okay, I guess it's my palate. Unless you grew up eating Spam, chances are
the salty goodness of that canned meat product is a kitschy joke, not sustenance.

The question “What are we having for dinner tonight?” was frequently answered in my household growing up with “Shit on a shingle,” or “Fish heads and rice.” It was a joke response, but creepily true. Some of these dinners
were
the equivalent of shit on a shingle. But people eat what they eat, and your palate is built from what is presented to you. Once my mother topped a shepherd's pie with a packet of neon orange cheez powder from a box of mac 'n' cheese. Processed foods served creatively—this is the cuisine of my people.

Growing up, everything in my cabinets and refrigerator was canned or boxed, processed to the max. The only fresh vegetables I ever saw were roots like potatoes and carrots, or some corn on the cob in the summer. Anything green was in the freezer or an aluminum tube. Now, I know that frozen broccoli retains as much of its nutrients as the fresh stuff, but ours came with a frosty brick of microwavable cheese sauce. I was so ignorant about the food I ate that the first time I saw a vegetable being grown in the ground I was baffled, then filled with rage. The cucumbers our neighbors had planted looked bizarre to me, just sitting there in the dirt instead of on a store shelf where I usually saw them. Cucumbers were my favorite. I jumped the fence and picked one; instead of eating it, I smashed it on the ground. I often wonder what I was thinking. Did it seem unreal to me, like a fake cucumber, even though it was actually more natural than any I'd ever held in my hand? Was I resentful that this person had figured out how to hook themselves up with free cukes, while we were all
buying ours at the grocery store? Or was it just the sad pattern of bummed-out people trying to bring down anyone who tries to rise up a little, plant a veggie garden in a blighted neighborhood? Maybe I was just a kid, pranking. Maybe it was all of the above.

Because of the way my vegetables were delivered to me, for years I thought I didn't like them. String beans, for instance. Does anyone enjoy the soggy, olive-green contents of a can of string beans? It's taken me decades to come around to the fresh stuff, pulled by the handful from a bin at the co-op, roasted with salt and garlic and oil. They bear absolutely no resemblance to the string beans of my youth. Same with spinach. In my house we just never ate it, and being aware of its reputation as a veggie children gagged on, I was fine with that. Now I cannot imagine going without greens. Mornings I blend up a swampy concoction of spinach, its overachieving sister kale, some powdered green probiotics, a giant glug of aloe vera, a heaping teaspoon of bee pollen, bought from a beekeeper at the farmers market, some chia seeds (not sure why but, hey, can't hurt), and a bunch of coconut water. This is so far from the sort of stuff I ate growing up, I do think it might send some part of my psyche into shock each time I drink it. Is it good? Well, that depends on your definition of
good
. In my family, if something didn't taste awesome, you didn't eat it, and awesome was defined as meaty, fatty, oozy butteriness. My family still laughs at me if I mention I'm preparing tofu for dinner, and they'd certainly look upon my morning smoothie as something a doctor would force you to eat before an invasive procedure. (“What's wrong with sugar?” my mom recently demanded. “It grows in the ground!”) But somewhere along my
stumble to adulthood I began to realize that, while it was important, food tasting good was only part of it. It should also
be
good for you, and maybe even produced in a way that doesn't harm working people or the planet itself.

Growing up, I was a skinny kid, and never had any bullshit flung at me about what I should or shouldn't eat. A big bottle of Pepsi sat in the center of the kitchen table at dinner, and unlimited refills were granted. Still, I became obsessed with the concept of dieting (or “health kicks,” as I called them). Inevitably some of this fascination with dieting came from the body-shaming, weight-obsessed culture a girl grows up in. Even if my family didn't send me those messages, the rest of the world did. One thing I always understood was that diets were something females (and Richard Simmons) did, and those females were often leggy white women with bouncy, wild hair, clad in bathing suits and laughing with their big red mouths.

In fifth grade I devised an all-pickle health kick. I really, really loved pickles. I still do, and now I buy the ones with probiotics so I'm actually doing something good for my body while chomping down. But—an all-pickle diet? It didn't last long. That was the summer I watched
The Richard Simmons Show
each afternoon, joining him in his televised workout and then eating a pile of iceberg lettuce, a cut tomato, some Italian dressing, and an English muffin slathered in butter. This was my daily regimen, unless I was hanging out at the park down the street and getting the free lunches the city handed out. My diet ended each evening, when I ate whatever my mom whipped up for us, but after
every dinner of Minute Rice and chicken fingers I looked forward to the next day's health kick.

I had a few incidents of passing out when I was a kid, both times on hot summer days when I ran around and didn't eat. I wasn't trying not to eat—I'd intended to get around to it, or maybe I did eat, but not enough. I wasn't a very hungry person, except for the things I especially loved—Italian ice, watermelon, pickles. And not only was I not very interested in food; I couldn't always tell when my body was hungry, and I was able to go seemingly forever without replenishing the reserves. This served me well in my twenties. I was so broke, it just
killed
me to spend money on food (especially when I could be spending it on booze, yo), and I always had enough native energy to run around doing all the superfun things I wanted to do—go to clubs and bars, put on shows, have crazy affairs, run away on road trips. Only now, with older, wiser, and more sober vision, do I see that I was getting
high as fuck
off of low blood sugar.

Low blood sugar affects people very differently. One of the first things you learn about someone you are seriously dating is what happens when they don't eat. I've dated people who rage out, hard-core. Dashiell doesn't get “hangry” like those folks; she gets what I call “hungfused” (I know, it doesn't really work, but it's stuck). Dashiell gets spacey and drifty and floaty and scary to drive in a car with. But I get high. I've done crystal meth, and there is a similarity there. It fosters a slight mania. I feel lighter and brighter; my thoughts seem clearer; everything is faster. My self-esteem reaches delusions of grandeur levels—I
dig
myself! In
addition to the variety-pack chemical bender I spent my twenties on, I was also probably really, really hungry all the time, but too messed up to know it.

When I first got sober, I didn't really know what to do with myself. Like most newly sober drunks, I spent a lot of time watching television and, well, eating. Maybe that's what most people do anyway, but when you're an alcoholic it's new to you—you normally spend your time wherever the alcohol is, with your attention focused on obtaining it and imbibing it. Sober, I started to be in touch with my body more and began noticing when I was hungry. And I was hungry
a lot
. My body was going through a massive sugar withdrawal. Though I never had much of a sweet tooth, I'd been ignorant of the fact that I was basically sucking down pints of sugar water each night. When I shut off the taps I found myself starved for ice cream, for Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, for the sort of dismal plastic-wrapped sweet treats that jumble the counters of coffee shops. I didn't care—if it had sugar, I needed to put it in my mouth. After a while my body leveled out, but the sweet tooth stayed behind.

Sometimes quitting drinking inspires you to quit other things as well. I know a bazillion people who cut sugar or dairy or wheat from their diets their first year sober, people who go Paleo or buy a dehydrator and start a raw food diet. Perhaps as alcoholics you have a heightened understanding of your body as a sort of chemistry set. I'd been pouring a little of this and snorting a little of that for decades, trying to strike that perfect balance. A lot of dieting seems like the same thing—what can I put into my body, or never put in my body again, that will make me feel perfect? I'm
drawn to cleanses, though I've only ever done one, and it was one that had you eating three square meals a day. I think about the Master Cleanse like I once thought about certain drugs I'd dreamed of trying: What would
that
be like? Would it get me high? Would I feel just so, so perfect, and pure, and healing? As an addict, I kind of get it from both ends—the addict urge to get high off starvation, and the recovered person's desire to get super healthy
right now
, to make up for the wear and tear all that drinking and drugs did on my body. In sobriety I am sometimes shocked to think about what I put into my body—like chunks of heroin from goddess knows where, pulled out of the grimy pants pocket of a grimy man, cut with all sorts of crap. I'd dissolve it in water and snort it up my nose, followed with the grisliest, yellowest baggie of cocaine I'd ever seen. (It came for free with your purchase of the heroin!) Is it any wonder I have chronic mysterious sinus problems now? People think that drug addicts don't love themselves, or else how could they do what they do, bumming a crack pipe off a stranger who looks positively tubercular and proceeding to smoke a drug so gross it's become a punch line? But I think it's more complicated than that. I
did
love myself; I just loved the crystal meth, that glittering pile of battery acid,
more
. For me, once I got sober and exited that haze of obsession and compulsion, I could feel that self-love again, wounded and shaky, fragile and neglected. I pledged to make amends to myself by taking care of my body, whether through regular massages, mani-pedis, or learning to cook healthful meals and eat them regularly. More or less.

Breakups can send a person on a real cleanselike eating
regimen—or, a not-eating regimen. One friend called it “the personal tragedy weight-loss plan”—you're not necessarily trying to shed pounds, but you're too fucked up and heartbroken to feed yourself. At the end of my eight years with the rapper, I found myself eating less than ever. It felt lonely and uninspiring to cook for myself. Single and left to my own devices, I will eat the exact same snack food again and again. One year it was Tillamook cheddar cheese on Triscuits. Another year it was avocado on tamari rice cakes with cumin-spiked adobo. For many years I lived near a taqueria with shredded chicken tacos I would sometimes eat for three meals a day. After my breakup I ate a lot of almonds and not much else. I found that when I ate food I felt really, really sad. It put me right back into my body, a sack of skin and bones that felt abandoned and heavy and weepy. If I didn't eat, I got lighter and lighter, until I was hovering somewhere above my feelings. It felt great. I lived like this for a few years, eating more than almonds, but never very much.

Sometimes I wonder if I had, or have, an eating disorder. I certainly don't have a normal relationship to feeding myself. But when I look around, it seems like nobody else does, either. I have friends going on and off vegan and gluten-free diets, friends who burst into tears when they try to quit sugar, friends who cleanse five times a year, and friends who pride themselves on living off bacon and meatballs. None of this looks like the textbook anorexia depicted in my favorite eighties TV movie,
The Best Little Girl in the World
, but it all seems pretty disordered. I'm not even sure what the baseline for “healthy” is. Some believe eating whatever you want and not stressing is healthy, but if I eat
whatever I want it's a lot of burritos, chocolate chip cookies washed down with giant glasses of milk, ice cream, Oreos, and bowls of buttery popcorn covered in nutritional yeast. And then I feel sort of grody. Eating dinner with Dashiell has been a revelation—when she is no longer hungry she
stops eating
! This is fascinating to me. I don't have that mechanism that tells me I'm full and it's time to wrap it up. No way. As long as the thing tastes good in my mouth, I will keep putting it in there.

Some people believe cutting out all such decadent and trashy food is the way to go, and as attractive as that way of life is to me, it's also shades of orthorexia—anorexia disguised as superrestrictive health kicks. Although my long-ago foray into veganism was definitely orthorexic, it also set me on the right path for feeding myself in the long run. I know a lot of people live healthy vegan lifestyles (I pin your recipes on Pinterest, thanks!), but leaping from a lifetime of frozen pizza and ramen to veganism was too brutal for me. I simply didn't know what to eat. I didn't know how to cook vegetables, having rarely eaten them. I recall eating a raw bell pepper and hoping it was enough. I found a recipe for dal at the back of the book
Animal Liberation
, and it became my signature (i.e. only) dish. I paid attention to what the people around me were eating—one girl had me over for dinner and served pasta with black beans dumped on top of it, plus chopped tomatoes and raw garlic. I ate this every night for about a year after.