I just ordered a pizza. I know. Why are you using a blog to tell us about the food you're about to eat, Adam? That's what Twitter's for! But no. Bear with me. I'm making a point here.
I ordered a pizza because I've spent the last six or seven hours or so in a kind of bizarre fugue state, triggered by the tectonic grinding of my anorexia against the fact that I really ought to eat something. I think of anorexia as kind of like alcoholism - a disease which you always have, even if you've been clear of it for years, because the thought patterns that can lead to a relapse are always ticking away in the back of your mind, like lines of junk code which, every now and again, get garbled into the main stream of information and bugger up your mental hard drive.
Today was, for reasons I don't really want to talk about at length here, kind of distressing. And I chose to deal with this by going up to Newcastle, as I often do. It's a bus ride away and there's a world of ways to distract myself from the chaos of my life. In this case, what I chose to do was go for a coffee, do some writing and then meander around town.
At about half three, I figured there would be no point getting a bus for about an hour, because the buses would be packed with noisy, annoying schoolchildren. So, I figured, I may as well go and get something to eat and, because I was in town and, what the hell, it hadn't been the best day, maybe a nice draught beer as well.
And that's when the junk code struck.
Suddenly I found myself completely unable to bring myself to enter any restaurant in town. I walked almost a complete circuit of Newcastle, considering different eateries and finding reasons to reject them. Wetherspoon's? Nah, Wetherspoon's food is rubbish these days. O'Neill's maybe? No, it's usually full of gits. The Forth? Full of wankers. The Salsa Cafe? A bit fiddly, and no beer on draught.
I kept this process up until I found myself at the Tyneside Coffee Rooms, a tremendously nice venue which I've always enjoyed dining in. Their beer isn't draught either, but they do a killer bacon, brie and cranberry sandwich and they have San Miguel. Should have been a no-brainer. Except when I got there I found, like an uninvited vampire, that I couldn't cross the threshold.
I couldn't go in and buy food. All my reasons from earlier, it turned out, had just been empty rationalisation. I didn't want to eat because, on an emotional level, I found the idea disgusting. Sickening. Shameful.
I made a few half-hearted stabs at going elsewhere, but ran up against the same problem. Even when I eventually made it home, I sat for half an hour in the kitchen fighting back an avalanche of sheer bloody curl-up-on-the-floor depression at the thought of eating anything. Eventually I gave up, went upstairs, and took a nap.
About half an hour ago I woke up. I felt hungry again, properly hungry, not disgusted-hungry or ashamed-hungry. Hungry because I really, really, really feel like having something to eat.
So. Pizza.
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