Napkins

One of my least favorite social media trends is people who are eating things in their cars. Usually it's folks in a front seat, showing off some new fast food offering or limited time special they are reviewing for their followers. I understand their goal from a professional standpoint: sample the product as soon as you get it so it is still the best temperature. I think there's also a purpose to being in the car instead of at home or somewhere else, because it seems maybe more genuine and spontaneous, whereas something recorded at home may have been rehearsed or altered and the reaction may not be as sincere.

I find these tremendously triggering, though. My associations of eating in the car are overwhelmingly negative. The times when I have been my most depressed or upset, I would frequently self-soothe with fast food or secret groceries that I would shovel into my mouth as quickly as possible before getting home and being discovered. It wasn't about hunger, satisfaction, or even enjoyment. It's about feeling something other than the numbness of depression, it's about feeling full of something other than sadness.

A few months after my bariatric surgery, my son sneezed in the car and reached into the storage console for something to blow his nose. He was surprised to discover an unexpected consequence of my surgery: we no longer had an emergency stash of napkins in there, accrued from all the secret drive-thru trips. It was funny in a sense, not necessarily a non-scale victory but definitely an interesting effect I hadn't anticipated.

All of this is to say, right now my console has a lot of napkins in it. It's not entirely depression-driven - there has been a lot more eating on the go, all the trips to the fertility clinic and the lab, plus the summer camp drop off and then the pick up. It's been a couple thousand miles on the car just in the last few months, hours and hours at a time. Sometimes I'll pack bariatric-friendly snacks - every trip, I can definitely be counted on to pack a caramel protein shake to mix with a coffee. But there's usually at least one meal that I have on the road.

I still can't eat a lot at once, the surgery works the way it's supposed to. So even when I go out somewhere, my choices still have to be reasonable. It's more about my emotions and the things driving me to go out instead of packing something consistent with my goals, or just waiting until I get home.

Part of my emotional eating issues involves food hoarding. My family struggled financially when I was a kid and now as an adult, my default panic reaction is to surround myself with food. Even if I'm not eating it immediately, I gather it - stock the fridge and pantry in case of issues. My brain feels calmer with a freezer packed to capacity. My anxiety about scarcity is quelled and this itch in my soul is scratched.

I've been really struggling with mental health this last month, with worries about my job and our future here in California, concerns about my health and the IVF process, missing my son while he was at camp, and feeling really really frustrated with my weight - feeling out of control, in a way I haven't felt since before my surgery.

So I'm not really surprised about the state of the napkins in that center console. I'm just at a loss of mental energy to figure out what to do about it.