Days 191 - 194

There are no fat animals in the wild.

Instinct drives you. You feel famine, winter, natural disaster around the corner and you eat everything you find. Warm, soft, secure, blubber. Insurance. Your fat between you and death.

S and I in the Netherlands, outside our tent. Finally dark after 10. A hedgehog skirts the edge of the bushes. S tells me how when you are young, you find the hoglets asleep in the winter and you gently steal them and keep the at home in a box until spring. No, he tells me, you can’t wake them up to play with them or they might get sick or die. They don’t have enough fat for the winter unless they are asleep.

Somewhere in your life a switch was flicked and it was never turned back off. Your primal mind, perceptive beyond your understanding, foreshadowed disaster.

Protected for 9 months and held warmly, lovingly, within the dense darkness of your Mother’s body. You exit helpless, immobile, and the world is so strange and indecipherable. I mean, fuck, aren’t you still trying to figure it out now? You cry. You are held. You are fed.

Food becomes your security. Pavlov’s dogs at your heels. Endless, bottomless, inexplicable hunger betrays a soft gentle undercurrent of fear, cool waves lapping.

You leave a continent after famine, you hoard food in tins, in a cupboard.

I don’t know why my Mother hoards food. Or anything else. But I do think it lends her a sense of control over her universe.

At intake, when I disclosed physical abuse, the psychologist subtly indicated to me that this was essentially a ubiquitous disclosure amongst trial candidates.

Your world is as safe now as it ever will be. Time to switch off.

You can ask me anything.