“This is how we must love,
Specifically and out loud,
Naming the spaces of our bodies
As though speaking into being
A universe.”
-Leslie Leyland Fields
My phone got stolen, picked out of my back pocket as I shoved onto a bus in downtown Quito, and the first thought in my mind when I realized it was missing was, “I’m going to eat my feelings about this.”
When we got to the bus terminal, I paid 75 cents for a bag of plantain chips and by the time we finished our short walk home, I’d eaten half the bag.
Food is important to me. I’ve written about how connected food can make us feel, how holy and blessing a good meal in good company can be. But this Race has actually been a process of learning and growing in my relationship with food.
Like most Americans, especially American women, I have a pretty unhealthy relationship with food. It’s something I think I’ve known for a long time, but never fully examined. At home, it’s pretty easy to just get into a cycle of convenience: I’m tired, I’ll just go out, I’ll get the combo, sure. But on the Race, we have to cook. We have to budget. We have to eat what’s given to us, or we don’t eat.
And over the course of these nine months, in between walks to corner stores and street food vendors, what I’ve realized is this: I see food as a form of punishment and reward.
Reward, because I eat when I’m happy (even if I end up over-indulging); and punishment, because I eat when I’m sad. But I never feel feel better when I eat to stop my feelings- I only feel gross and fat and small, like a tiny child with no self-control. Therein lies the punishment. I know I’ll feel that way, and I eat the Chik-fil-a or ice cream or extra glass of wine anyway.
It’s not that I think those foods are inherently bad. I love food. LOVE it. Our bodies were made to eat food, so they were also made to enjoy food.
But I’ve realized just how much food is my crutch, and my obsession. I eat sugar and carbs when I’ve had a bad day, so I can feel physically full even if I feel empty in other ways. And I use food as a punishment, to stuff myself when I feel bad.
On top of that, so much of my day is spent thinking about food. Not about the spiritual aspects of food or anything: just what I’m going to eat and when I get to eat next. Every month or so on the Race, there are about three days where I basically eat nothing, an illness-induced fast. Not only am I not hungry for anything, don’t even want to think about food, but my body craves nutrients- the real stuff that would nourish me, not just make me feel full.
High school Carrie (and maybe even pre-Race Carrie) would have loved how skinny I get after those few days. But I know my body, and I know I get too skinny. Those days, the veins in my hips show through my skin, and my hip bones stick out like my flesh has bites taken out of it. Those days, my arms feel skeletal. And even though pre-Race I wasn’t at a healthy weight either, I know that my bones knocking against each other, oddly out of sync, isn’t healthy at all. It is over-correcting for binge-eating with an opposite form of ill health.
So I want to leave my obsession, my crutch, behind. I want to fill myself up the way my body is meant to be filled, not as a proxy for my emotions. I want the too-thin Carrie and the too-fat Carrie and the food-obsessed Carrie to stay behind on this Race, and I want myself, healthy, to walk out.
Because there’s something so much wider out there than this false fullness like a rock in my gut. There’s somewhere with enough for me and my ravenous soul.
We are bread and wine people, and bread and wine are delicious. The communion our bodies were made for- the holiness, the deliciousness- is a promise of enough. Not gluttony, but abundance. Having abundance means having enough for everyone and having contentment.
I never have enough food. I never have enough of a lot of things, but food is one of the biggest sinkholes in my life I keep throwing things down, trying to fill it.
Somewhere along the way, I learned that eating more than my fill was what I deserved, whether that was because of my sense of entitlement or revulsion. And the Race hasn’t been any different, it’s just made it more obvious that chocolate and carbs are my solace and my form of punishment when I don’t feel good enough. When I’m angry at my lack of self-discipline, or hate that I can’t change my situation, I eat. And I’m tired of being this way. I’m tired of feeling too full, of being sick on my own gluttony.
I want to embrace having enough.
I want to be full in more than just the physical way.
I want to learn how to love this body of mine and stop punishing it for what I’m feeling, when I feel out of control.
I want more than what I’ve been stuffing myself with.
I want to carry my desires for justice, for beauty, for complex answers to difficult questions, for family, for poetry, for good food, for the Spirit in all her forms, like the gifts they are.
And when I get offered ice cream, or flan, or brown-sugared plantains, I want to be able to taste them and feel nothing but joy, without even a tinge of guilt. Because the joy of communion, the joy of our bodies reveling in their created purpose, and the joy of my specific body feeling healthy and whole, will be so sweet.
