How I Learned to Eat Again

anonymous

cw: disordered eating

On a beautiful evening in late May, deep inside the mountains of northern Lebanon, I was 19 years old and I did not know how to eat anymore.

Grandma had inaugurated the dinner with her traditional "What a beautiful ãdeh this is, we thank God for bringing us all together" speech. Ãdeh is one of those delightful words which finds no perfect description in any language other than its own: for, while its literal translation is "the sitting", what it really refers to is the distinctive feeling of warmth generated by the experience of sharing a meal with loved ones. And indeed after her speech was complete, grandma had handed us all a fatayer, as she had done at every family meal since before most of us were born. Three of the grandchildren were from New York, one from Berlin, two from Delaware, and I was from Paris; but within that little triangular pie, we all had always found the same thing: not only a generous filling of spinach, but also a most basic gesture of love and belonging. Sahtein, grandma finally said —"two healths", the Lebanese version of bon appétit. Everyone started eating.

I, however, just stared at that fatayer resting in my hand. For years, that single piece of food had been what we in France would call my madeleine de Proust: an object of the everyday that somehow has the power to suddenly provoke an experience of involuntary and intense remembrance—one which, for me, had always led back to Lebanon. The expression comes from a passage in the first volume of Marcel Proust's seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time, which is assigned to every French high schooler like a rite of passage. In the excerpt in question, the narrator tastes a small madeleine cake and is transported powerfully back to the years of his childhood, when he ate one each Sunday morning at his aunt's house in the countryside. Afterwards, Proust goes on to comment that this involuntary memory of the senses brings to bear the essence of reality in a way that the voluntary memory of our cognitive mind cannot help but distort—but that part had not struck any chords in my fifteen-year-old self, and I had put the book down mindlessly as soon as I had learned what to name the fatayer's magical ability to transport me instantly to the cedar trees of the Kelhat mountains and the fresh smells of my grandparents' house.

All of that, of course, now seemed like a memory so distant that it surely had to belong to someone else. It had been almost two years since I had eaten something without vomiting it; almost two years since I had had a sense of taste, or an awareness of my appetite; and almost two years since a fatayer had been a delectable reminder of home's tenderness rather than 294 calories sitting on a plate. Feeling nothing but numbness, I looked up towards all the others as they ate, and watched with confusion the patient eagerness with which they dipped their breads in the hummus, the quiet sparkle that appeared in their eyes with each new taste of the kafta, the pink bursts of childlike wonder that flushed their cheeks every time they glanced at the baklava table. So this was what a madeleine de Proust looked like from the outside. Everything about the sight had become so painfully foreign to me. Yet, even within the alienation and the strangeness, I still knew—and could not forget—that I, too, had eaten like this before. With the paralyzing awareness of having had and lost something immeasurably precious, I asked myself repeatedly and tortuously how this could ever have happened to me.

The chronology had been simple enough. I had arrived in the United States, and discovered at once two entirely new and painful things. The first was a strange new culture around food that left little room for taste, tradition, and the basic intuition each of us possesses as a child regarding what and when we wish to eat. The second was loneliness. And, somehow, my two discoveries had latched themselves to one another. I learned that, in America, food had numbers; that it was often seen as something to fight against rather than cherish; and finally, that it was not really considered a fabric of the social bond. In fact, after some time I started to doubt the existence of that bond at all. For people here frequently ate alone; they most often ate fast; and they almost always ate things that didn't seem edible at all. Eventually, food began to lose, in my eyes, all of the qualities that had previously made it what it was. All that remained was a soft, chewy material which, with a bit of water and some help from gravity, could be as easily purged as it could be swallowed.

Unsurprisingly, though, no matter how much I binged on the dining hall dishes or supermarket aisles, my hunger never actually dissipated. And how could it, when the shelves were bare of the ingredients I really craved? I couldn't eat my way towards laughter and conversation, towards a sense of oneness with something bigger than myself, or towards the madeleine de Proust quality of journeying into one's past through the senses. And, while I began to grasp this basic fact relatively early on, by then it already seemed too late for any of these realizations to matter. I saw myself as irredeemably crippled, stuck in the harrowing position of being intellectually aware that there had existed an alternative to my pain while remaining unable to return to that reality—unable, in other words, to remember how to eat. And so here I was, two years later, cocooned within the tenderness of a Lebanese ãdeh so long awaited, sitting besides my grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, cousins and neighbors and yet crushingly alone, just me and 294 calories bearing the inescapable nausea of two years of emptiness. As usual, I let the nausea seep in until it was unbearable enough that I could wash it down. The ritual had always been disgusting; but this time, it felt like I had dragged my grandmother's own hands down the toilet drain.

After that, I retreated to my room and did not leave it for days. "She is having inhilal", I heard grandma whispering anxiously to my parents in the corridor. In Arabic, that means decay; disintegration; breakdown. But we should never underestimate the importance of a breakdown—mine, though I couldn't see it yet, would turn out to be the first stage in my body's attempt to reclaim itself. By making it impossible to go back to business as usual, it was making a very profound, albeit inarticulate, bid for survival. And indeed after six days, I finally got out of bed. At that moment, I decided to do three things: sign up for hypnotherapy sessions, finish reading Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and shower immediately.

I picked up the novel exactly where I had left it off. The sentences were certainly as long and arduous as I remembered them, but growing up had given the ideas an entirely new taste, accompanied by an aura of truth of the private and intimate kind. Among all of the wisdom contained in this novel, what captivated me beyond all else was the divide that lied at the heart of Proust's search for meaning, between what he called "art" and what he called "habit". Art, his work seemed to say, meant seeing the world in a way that was fresh, appreciative, and alive; it was, ultimately, the only possibility for us humans to get out of ourselves. Habit, by contrast, was what kept us safely locked within those selves, buried under a shroud of familiarity that dulled our senses and prevented us from appreciating life for its true and deserved glory. A simple but powerful image for conceiving of the opposition between art and habit is children. Children have not yet had the time to be touched by habit, and this is precisely why they get boundlessly excited by things as simple as puddles, sand, or melting chocolate.

The more I read, the more it seemed to me that the ultimate burden of the life of habit was to suffer from the one thing that children had not yet discovered: the pains of having a coherent, unitary, singular self and of being irrevocably bound to it. By contrast, the essential beauty of the life of art seemed to reside in its unique capacity for connection and creation: connection to others living in the world, connection to the world seen through the eyes of others, and most of all connection to the immense realm of possibilities for the selves one had yet to write and rewrite. This was intricately related to something I had been beginning to learn in hypnotherapy: that I wasn't an entity waiting to be discovered. Rather, the whole journey ahead consisted not in finding but in becoming myself. And, perhaps most encouragingly, I was beginning to believe that I was ready and deserving of undertaking that journey and of claiming it as my own. Thus, as sessions progressed, the alternative reality in which I knew how to eat again, which had previously seemed so elusive and faraway, began to have a shape, a smell, even a slight taste.

Before I knew it, months had passed. I had finished reading the last volume of Proust's novel, fittingly titled Time Regained. I had undergone three months of hypnotherapy. August had finally come, and with it the familiar warmth of the Kelhat mountain as it reaches the end of the season. As the summer started coming to a close, I decided to go hiking on one of my favorite trails from childhood, which blazes through the hilly terrains of Balamand, circles around near the very bottom of the mountain then follows a stream-bed of majestic cedar trees lined upon ridges all the way back to the starting point. I had not walked the trail in years, and could only hope that I would not lose myself on the way. But the very moment that I entered the path, beautiful things started to happen. The delicious smell of the cedar, the subtle crackling of the branches, the sweet caress of the wind all occurred to me at once as though they had resisted the passage of time and had never really left my side. Finally, the intuitive memory of my senses had been returned to me.

I thought back to my cherished fatayer, and no numbers came to my mind anymore. Instead, I thought of the hands of my grandmother working its dough, of the spinach growing out of rows and fields of greenery, of my eight-year-old self licking her fingers with delight and gratitude at the idea of the next bite. I thought how magical it was that a small piece of food could hold the power to connect me with people, with nature, and with my past self all at once. It served as a humbling reminder of what being alive, fully alive, really felt like. And, as I observed the imprint of the footsteps recently traced all around me, I was hit with the realization that each passerby in the world went through this experience of aliveness in a manner as vivid and complex as my own. That thought alone gave me the amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm; and all I wanted was to let everything dissolve even further into the painting.

I suddenly felt immersed into an unprecedented sense of clarity. For years, it had been so naturally tempting to put my faith in the idea of a selfhood discovered and achieved over the course of a lifetime. Yet now it seemed so infinitely intuitive to bestow all of my faculties of gratitude upon that most modest and most easily dismissed of increments: the day already in hand. Proust, I hope, would have seen that decision as a small step away towards the life of art. As I made my way back home, I instinctively stopped at the dining table. This time, I brought the fatayer closer to my lips and inhaled the sweet smell of the Kelhat mountains, thinking that no finale anywhere in the nebulous distance was worth this sweet a smell.

And finally, I experienced it as it really was. Not in my body, hurt; not in my story, familiar; not in my self, tired. In this moment, all of that was gone, and what remained was a mere succession of experiences, starting with that ineffable pleasure of the first bite, relieved anew at each dilated moment. It felt warm. Deep. Delicious. Heavenly, like the feeling of returning home after a long and sorrowful journey only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness.