“When one person collapses, the other instinctively shoulders their weight.”
Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner
As the month of February drags on, I find myself stuck in a continuous depressive episode. While my depression is not seasonal, I can’t deny that this long winter has exacerbated my struggles. Not only has my emotional state and mental health experienced a decline, but my eating habits have also been affected. Below are a couple entries I wrote into the notebook I’ve been keeping for this ILC when I couldn’t find it in myself to do any other work. Writing has always been cathartic for me, so with encouragement from my faculty Prof. Sarah Williams to “bear witness to myself” I thought putting my thoughts here could also give way to catharsis.
This post discusses feelings of depression and food habits while depressed; if these are sensitive topics for you, please read with caution or feel free to skip past this post.
February 2, 2023 – Thursday
My relationship with food has been contentious this past week. Full transparency, I’ve been floundering in a depressive episode and thus I’ve had an increasing lack of energy. Eating has become a chore, cooking a near impossible task. In those moments where I have a burst of energy returned to me, I go to the kitchen and cook, even if I feel no hunger because I know this energy will leave me later. I am hungry in my depression, but food holds no real appeal. As someone who eats by craving, the exhaustion and apathy of my depressive episodes takes away my want for food. Even if a craving strikes me, blinking dimly in the back of my mind, I have no effort to cook it and I’m too broke to order take-out. So, I go hungry in a cycle that only has small reprieves until I finally come out of depression.
How odd to feel so transient. It’s like I’m falling from a cliff, but I can never hit the water and the ground is long gone from my grasp. The kitchen is, in a way, a safe space for me, but depression turns it daunting. But tonight, I am mustering up the effort to cook so I don’t have to do it tomorrow.
I was recently told about the theory that food absorbs the energy of the person who cooks it and I wonder if that’s why my food is less satisfying when I’m depressed like this. I don’t have any real way to tell, but if water can have memory, why can’t food hold emotion?
Cooking still feels like a chore tonight, but the preparing of the ingredients remains peaceful. I just wish I didn’t feel so exhausted. I sing while I cook and feel a sense of catharsis. I wonder if it’s like people singing to their gardens?
February 14, 2023 – Tuesday
I skipped out on cooking this past weekend, I wasn’t feeling very called to it and life got busy. I’ve learned that not only am I someone who eats by craving, I’m also someone who cooks by craving or inspiration. Food, for me, is tied to comfort and joy so deeply that to cook or eat when I am lacking that comfort and joy feels wrong; the task suddenly feels laborious instead of calming.
What happens when nourishment becomes not an act of healing, but an exhausting task? In these late winter months, cooking can change from a safe and peaceful space to a mountain of effort which I don’t have the tools to climb. Food is something joyous to me and it’s difficult to retain that joy when in the midst of a depressive episode.
Eating becomes a chore, and even when the food tastes good, it sits like air in my stomach, never satisfying me. I’ll feel constant hunger, unable to get full. As I’ve written, I eat by what I crave, and it’s hard to muster up the want to eat when you don’t crave anything. Food is no longer a comfort in those times when I can barely bring myself to get out of bed. Even more so now that I live away from my family. No longer do I have the luxury of someone cooking for me or telling me what to eat. What I wouldn’t give to eat my parents’ or sister’s cooking. Instead, I get stuck in a cycle of hunger; feeling too exhausted to cook, eating minimally or not at all, and then repeat. Eventually it gets better, and I come out of the depressive episode, but while entrenched in those emotions it feels overwhelming. Those thoughts that I’ll always be this way and always feel that continuous hunger linger in the back of my mind. How do I nourish myself when I can’t even find the effort to care about myself?
I had hoped my depressive episode would’ve passed through me by now, but it continues on and so I’ve felt a need to reckon with myself and this aspect of my mental health. As one could probably infer from my website and its title Feeding the Diaspora, my ILC is all about food, which has become difficult as my passion and want for food has waned ever since the start of this month. So, I began asking myself questions; Why am I never satisfied with food in my depression? Why do I feel this constant hunger even when I do eat? What is it that I really hunger for? I suppose I already gave the answer in a previous writing; I crave for home.
I began experiencing depressive episodes as a result of my clinical anxiety when I was fourteen years old, though I wasn’t diagnosed until I was fifteen and made the decision to go to therapy. At the height of my mental health struggles I lived at home with my parents, twin brother Noah, and older sister Miranda. While teenage growing pains were a part of my mental health issues, my house and the people in it were largely a safe place for me. My room my refuge, and my family people I could seek comfort from, even if it was only a hug. But more than that, I never had to worry about food. When in the midst of a depressive episode, something I usually never told them I was going through, there Mom, Dad, and Miranda were with food prepared. They would cook dinner or pack my lunch, and so I never had to think about eating or cooking when depressed. Food was always freely given.
Now, living away from home and having to rely on myself for food, I feel even more isolated during this depressive episode. There’s no one in the kitchen taking care of my need before I even think to consider what I’ll eat, there’s no one reminding me that there’s food on the table, and no one to pull me from my room and sit me down for dinner. My roommates are around, yes, but we’re all three busy people with a lot going on and it’s not their job to play caretaker for me. It’s not their responsibility to give help when I don’t ask for help–but my hesitancy in asking for help is another conversation entirely. So, with my food intake exclusively dependent on me, cooking and eating becomes more effort than I can give. Standing in my apartment’s kitchen feels wrong with its cool tones and dark wood, so much different from my parents’ kitchen, all warm colors. Looking into the fridge and seeing only ingredients rather than dishes immediately deters me from the kitchen. My safe space is now riddled with challenges at every turn, from the dishes in the sink to the pans on the stove top to the spices in the cupboard. I know I need to eat, but I don’t feel any desire to commit myself to the act. When the apathy sets in, so does that continuous hunger, haunting me for days on end. If I eat, I’m never full–never satisfied. It’s only been in the past couple of days that I realized what I hunger for is something I can’t have in these moments. More than anything, I want to be home with my family, eating dinner with them, as arduous a task that would be in my depression. I crave that sense of comfort, the inherent knowledge of not being alone that I feel when I am home. I crave their cooking and their hugs. It’s not food I hunger for in my depression, not really, it’s home I hunger for.
It feels odd to talk about being hungry for home. How can one hunger for a place? And this hunger isn’t even in the metaphorical sense–I feel real hunger pains in my stomach. But I suppose it’s not just the place I hunger for, is it? It’s what’s within the house. That familiarity that only comes, for me, with the place I grew up in. The sense of security I’ve always felt with my parents and the way their food always tastes better than mine. When my parents cook for me, I always feel full. I’m often laughing at dinner with my family, or at least in a good mood. That sense of contentment that I subconsciously associated with my parents’ food is what I’m desperately missing. Those days and moments gone by that I can’t go back to, not completely anyway, and I can’t find them here on my own. I couldn’t even tell you what I would ask my mom or dad to cook for me if they were here (or I was there) to ask. With a fog hanging over me, I can’t even recall the specifics of what I enjoy eating. All I know for certain is that I want their food, whatever recipe that is–that’s what I want.
I included a quote from Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner because I feel a sense of relation to some of the feelings expressed within the pages of her book; grief, depression, hunger. Crying in H Mart is a poignant and brutally honest account of Zauner’s relationship with her mother, herself, and her mother’s death told in snapshots from her early life and play-by-plays of the year her mother died. The memoir also poses the question of what keeps us connected to those we’ve lost, especially in the context of when that loved one–in this case Zauner’s mother–ties us to a part of our cultural identity that is otherwise hard to reach without them. While what I’m experiencing right now isn’t grief, my removal from my family has left me unmoored in a way I hadn’t anticipated when first moving out. Suddenly, I can’t recall recipes and don’t know what groceries to buy. The feeling Zauner expresses of standing in a grocery store aisle or kitchen and seeing an insurmountable challenge is what I have become intimately familiar with in my depression. The fear of not knowing, or never knowing, makes my kitchen all the more daunting. And while my parents are only a call away, and as open as I can be about my mental health, I still struggle to speak about the depths of it with them. It boils down to the childish need to not worry them, at least not while I’m so far away, but to worry is to feel love. To be worried about is to be loved. And what a wonderful thing that love can be.
This past week, bit by bit, I’ve been finding my way back to the kitchen urged on by my body’s need for nutrition. I’ve eaten leftovers and a simple one-pan dish I was able to cook in no more than 45 minutes. I still have no true want for any food, no craving for anything inside or outside of my pantry, but I’m trying to push past that. I’m trying to muddle my way through until I feel craving for something other than home again.
Be First to Comment