For many people, food is easier to give than love. It only asks to be eaten, and doesn’t complain if it isn’t eaten, though it does change colors and eventually grow hair. Food shouldn’t have hair. When we were kids, being of northern European extraction, love was not really expressed but there was always plenty of food. Nothing said love like having food jammed down your throat and then being accused of being fat, even though I now realize there wasn’t anything fat about being 5′ 10″ tall and weighing one hundred sixty-five pounds. Realizing that I will never again be that tall or that skinny is a bit depressing, to be honest.

I can’t sleep tonight. A little while ago, I ate a tuna salad sandwich. That was around 11:45 pm, just what my fat ass needed. When I am hurting enough either physically or emotionally – and I am a chronic pain patient, so I hurt all the time but deny it much of the time – I get hungry. It’s not as if I say to myself, “I am in pain and food will make it feel better.” I have hunger pangs. I am perfectly capable of analyzing them and saying, “well, it could be that my pain is making me feel either unloved or unlovable,” but that doesn’t make the sensation go away. In a counter-intuitive way, it just makes me feel worse about the whole thing, which in turn may or may not ramp up my hunger – who knows? One of the problems with psychobabble is that it can be difficult to sort out the insights from the nonsense.

Give people love instead of food. It’s a lot less work, although it does leave you a bit vulnerable. At least you don’t have to do dishes after you give love – unless you’re one of those people, and then please don’t tell me about your dishes. Just slide them in the dishwasher and walk away. Just. Walk. Away.