When you just don't want to
So now I have the ingredients for two different Start Here lessons. I have the nugget of a meal I can make from either of them, and I have an evening to myself. I need to eat, and I need to eat more than just the crisps leftover from the potato salad, but. My God. The effort.
Neither of the dishes I would prepare would take longer than 20 mins prepping/cooking time (I think???). Neither of them require anything other than basic skills (peeling, chopping, measuring, frying or throwing into a blender) and would be great things to ‘tick off the list’. I could definitely keep Terms of Endearment on and not miss any looks Shirley MacLaine is throwing while I prepared. No one will eat the meal but me. Yet.
I can’t bring myself to prepare either. I can’t bring myself to throw pasta on, or order a takeaway, or do anything more than eat crisps1 and get my thoughts out in this lil bloglet.
Is it because I have been taking a moment to photograph? Taking the time to “Game Plan”? Taking the time to consider, make notes, be a good girl? Now that I’ve done it a few times, I need to keep it up, the pressure of which is too much and welcome to the element of transgression that allows me to feel control. The need to reflect and judge and share is also just off-putting (though other times it’s so much fun. I was excited to figure out what ingredients I needed for these meals, I like putting my actions three feet away and being the critic. I like this lazy sort of writing, where I only need to record what I have cooked and the vagaries that come from that).
But even the non-considered meal - boil pasta, open a can of chickpeas, add rocket, olive oil and salt - is too much. I know that it’s all okay, that once I finish writing this there’ll be twenty minutes where I watch more of this movie and then get fidgety and tell myself I’m too hungry not to make something and there’s no takeaway worth a damn nearby anyway (such a lie. I can see one from this sofa), and I’ll put the kettle on and that will be that.
But if I didn’t write this down - would that change? Would I have gone through this process in any case? The refusal, despair, anxiety over the refusal AND despair? Or is it only occurring to this level because I am forcing myself to reflect publicly? I am quantum, hear me roar.
And look, now I’m going to go and take photos of some ingredients, and fill the kettle while I’m there, then probably post this and move the process up twenty minutes. You absolute fuckers.
Eggs tomoz, probzzzz.
P.S. I think the crisps gave me the energy to be hungry enough to cook.
And it’s not guilt, exactly. It’s training, but very specific training, where to have a snacky dinner doesn’t feel fun and transgressive, it just keeps me in a weird sort of hunger for longer into the evening. I know I can do what I want (though knowing what I want is hard2, and knowing what I’ve trained in as what I should do is much easier and keeps me regular), but I don’t really want to be weird hungry and indecisive until I go to bed too early. ↩
Sometimes, rice is hard) ↩