The Filling of Invisible Voids

The following short story was written by an anonymous Impulse contributor regarding the handling of an eating disorder told from various perspectives involving grief, longing, and vulnerability. Readers discretion is advised.

The filling of others.

My nostril hairs are so tantalized by the smell of freshly baked apple crisp that I sneeze.

“Bless you,” says Mariah, my amateur chef friend, whose oven, I swear, gets more use than Duff Goldman’s.

Her apple crisp is meltingly divine, but it sits in your stomach like loss and a manufactured mask of happiness. The food she makes embraces your taste buds just the way you want it to after a long day of classes and work, but with each bite you realize that the intention behind the meal is too strong and sad to ignore.

Mariah lost her Dad to a heart attack at the beginning of our senior year of college and literally has not stopped cooking since. This on top of the fact that the university awarded her all online classes leads her meal constructing count to be about 5 (give or take) each day. Of course, you and I are concluding the hobby as an obvious coping mechanism, but the thing is, all she does is cook for us, she barely even eats it herself. I asked her once if she preferred cooking for herself or others and she looked at me like I had said something in a different language.

“Other people hands down.”

Of course, her roommates don’t mind; they are always full, and happy, and the house has an omnipresent “homey” feel to it from the smell. I cannot help and look at Mariah and her meals as an expression of suffering and distraction. She pours her grief out of her into her dishes mixing in dashes of memories and sprinkles of the most-love filled moments of her life. Moments that she is trying so hard not to relive yet. (I wonder if her mom is cooking simultaneously, alone, in her childhood home.) And she gives them to us…either as a notion of kindness that returns pieces of light to her broken heart or as a message that says, “Hey, I am still sad.”

I have realized that Mariah uses food as a vehicle to drive her grief away from her, as a method of escape from the world that she does not understand anymore, because the measurements of cooking are the stability that death has ripped away from her.

She revels in the act of the process, but not the finished product, as if she can bake the complete happiness she once felt, back into her.

The filling of self.

My friend Shannon is a different story and chooses to manifest her grief by serving herself with all the food she can get her hands on if she happens to find herself in the wrong mental state.

She lost her sister last Christmas after years of not having seen her, enough to crush a person, let alone it was right before her 21st birthday.

Her grief showed its head in a more self-destructive way, as she would detach completely from reality and reattach to the consumption of food. The taste, process, creation and origins didn’t matter to her, it was the physical act of eating she needed.

I know what you’re thinking; coping mechanism again. However, this time the food was filling the void of loss instead of displacing it into something else. A coping mechanism, of course, but a much more dangerous one. One of self-harm and disorientation.

She knows what she is doing and has actually sought help for it, successfully keeping her habit from getting out of control as it once was. For Shannon, her eating misconduct was simultaneously a fleeting feeling of comfort and a secondary problem that distanced her from her true issue.

Her eating habit gave her not only satisfaction, but also more time to remain in denial about what had happened, as she had to solve the problem of “food” before she could solve the problem of “death.”

Food; emotion’s representative.

What is it about food, something so trivial, that allows it to try and stand up against one of the most tragic events we can endure? It cannot hold us or love us or replace the love that we have lost; yet we put so much trust into it to help us recover. So much trust that we become dependent on it to fuel our emotional stability.

Surely these girls are not the first to use cooking or eating to transport them to a place of calm security, in fact, most of society falls victim to emotional eating. We eat to celebrate, to comfort us, to entertain us, to support us, we use it in so many ways not essential to our being that it is evident that food is more of a hindrance to emotional well-being than a vehicle at all.

What people are not realizing is that if food was cast aside as a primary coping mechanism, and direct emotional assumption was embraced, our healing would be so much more abundant, promising, and effective. Instead of healthily confronting what destroys us the most; death, we become attached to trivial means and convince ourselves that the apple crisp melting into our mouths is washing down the sorrow for good. Only to discover later, that we are only burying ourselves in the sorrow, deeper than before.