All Right in the End

The food called to me today. Not particularly loudly, but it was there, more audible than it has been in a couple of weeks.

The other day I looked wistfully at some black and white cookies when I was in the Guy & Gallard, availing myself of their wifi while drinking my diet Dr. Browns cream soda (best-ever diet soda in the world, though Barq's diet vanilla root beer, which I've found only on the soda machine of the future). But today there was some full-on longing: As I walked home from yoga, I wanted everything I smelled (pizza, linguine with clam sauce, Belgian waffles) or saw (cannoli, cake at Amy's Bread, even a stupid Larabar coconut cream pie bar.)

I know it's because I'm a bit low and feeling sorry for myself. This week I've made a couple of decisions I know are the right ones for me, but still I resent that I've had to make them. (Please note I am fully aware both are very first-world problems to have.)

Tonight I opted not to take up an invitation to go on an ethnic food excursion I was told is usually a lot of writers boozing it up in a faraway corner of a distant borough that is nearly impossible to get home from on one's own (and this is coming from a travel writer and longtime New Yorker who has been going to these for years.) I would only know one person – and she would know everyone else well. Given the unpredictable food and copious alcohol – and let's note my tendency to binge with these two factors – and the possibility of being trapped (also a binge trigger) I opted out. At first glance, it seems a very isolating thing to do.* But if I am bingeing, I'm not really there, either. I'm in my head, plotting how much and can I get more and how-unfair that-none-of these-desserts-are-really-what-I-want-but-I'm-eating-them-all-anyway and actually, if I'm going to eat all this could I get home before the Magnolia Bakery closes and oh-f—k-I-can't-so-what-can-I-have-instead. Blah blah blah.

Nor could I face the possibility of waking up tomorrow post-binge and having to spend another weekend detoxing from it and feeling the level of shame I'd feel from a public binge. So I stayed home, went to yoga (that's this week's obligation to it checked off), and cleaned my bathroom. (I wasn't kidding yesterday when I said I led a quiet life.) I also nearly had a fit – and very briefly, I'm talking split-second, contemplated a binge -- when I realized the little container of sauce was missing from my dinner.

The other decision I made was not to go on a beach holiday in August to a Greek island with a good friend from London and a friend of hers from NYC – both people I'd gone to Belize with. I'd thought I would go to London or Provence before or after the trip, but the timing doesn't seem to work, and the idea of long-haul flights plus planes-trains-automobile to get to this island to get to a beach seemed a little crazy. Especially because it is a crazy-hot summer in New York – it's not like I am in need of heat, like I was during the winter (Belize).

And speaking of Belize, I have binged like mad on every single trip I have taken this year: that one, London, even the brief sojourn to Toronto. Worrying about whether I will binge and loathing myself every day for being able to stop and freaking out about whether any of my clothes will fit at the end of the holiday is not a vacation. Nor is it a vacation to return from one more stressed and exhausted than ever (because that's what endless bingeing does), and to first have to start recovering from that. It is not a vacation when all you want is to escape yourself, and feel more trapped than ever.

I have travelled before without bingeing, and I'm hopeful that at some point soon I will again. But right now, I don't think I can. And believe me, I hate that. I think it's unfair. But as my mother used to say when my sister or I would complain that the other had gotten something better: "Life's not always fair."

I'm also thinking about a line I particularly liked from The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which I saw with my aunt last night: "It will be all right in the end. And if it's not all right, it's not the end."

Day 16.

 *For the record, I made this decision before I heard about the shootings in Colorado. Tonight does seem like a night to be with friends, but would I feel better or worse with people I don't really know? I guess it doesn't matter.