There is a glob of peanut butter on my kitchen floor. There is also one on the floor next to my desk, in the middle of my living area, and in front of my couch. A browny-orange trail is also dripping downwards to my elbow, but I leave it there for the moment. There’s a tissue box on my bed and I’ll get to the mess (floor and arm) later.
It’s because I’m not using a plate. Instead, I’m using my hand as a plate and carrying the slice of drippy peanut buttery bread perched on my palm (the other hand is holding a 1 litre carton of juice and yogurt cup). I won’t use a plate. Or a mug (I drink directly out of the carton—I live alone). Not unless it’s necessary. It’s just another step of the eating process that I can’t cope with.
When you prepare food, do you count the steps? All the things you do to get the food from the fridge to your mouth? I do. I’m very aware of them. And I try to cut out as many extraneous steps as possible. Which means that I often drop food on the floor and mess up my desk (my usual eating area) because, for me, using a plate and mug are two unnecessary steps to the eating process. It’s not laziness. It’s anxiety. It’s not being able to cope with getting the plate, putting food on the plate, carrying the plate, bringing the plate back to the kitchen, washing the plate, and putting away the plate. It’s not wanting to dirty a plate because it means having to clean it, and it bothers me that things have to be dirty before they can be clean, and that this cleaning process isn’t instantaneous (it’s about the state of limbo—more below). Organizing my brain and figuring out how to carry out each of these steps, even if they seem simple, also requires mental labour. If I do have to use a plate (because my palm won’t work), then I use the smallest plate possible, as if that will somehow reduce my burden at some stage of the plate-using process (the washing, I guess). I also rarely use bowls. I eat food out of the can whenever possible (though I generally don’t eat food from a can anyways—can opening is another step that creates anxiety).
It’s just too much emotional work, all these steps. If I always had to use plates to eat from and mugs to drink from, I’d probably skip meals (I’m a terrible eater as it is because being “step averse,” in addition to other challenges, makes it hard for me to make good food choices, but eating is a story for another day). Just like I skip showering daily (I usually manage to shower every other day, but I sometimes need an extra day to mentally prepare myself for the ordeal). Showering has even more steps than eating. There’s so much to remember and so much to do and I can’t get through it all at once, which means some part of me is always dirty until I finally reach my feet. I hate this feeling of incompleteness/imperfection/not wholeness. Not being able to finish something all at once and preferably quickly, especially when the incomplete part feels so yucky (I’d rather be completely dirty than uncommitted). I’ve tried breaking it into stages (Stage 1: head, Stage 2: back, Stage 3: torso, Stage 4: arms, Stage 5: legs and feet) and prompting myself through it, but this just makes me more anxious because I become hyperaware of how much there still is to do before it’s over. I’d be so happy if taking a shower was a one-step procedure: no undressing, getting wet, washing up, drying off, dressing again. Instead, I’d be blasted with a laser beam that magically dry cleans me (without vaporizing me in the process).
Cooking isn’t even a thing for me. I simply don’t do it. I can’t (and don’t want to) imagine the nightmarish sequence of steps involved in transforming raw ingredients into something more edibly complex (on top of my worry about starting a fire). The most I’ll do is maybe boil an egg (rather, the entire carton at once, because there’s no way I’m separating the eggs from each other—more on this idea of belonging and separation below). I’ll boil the water, gently plop in the eggs, and remove them when it feels right, panicking the whole time that I’m somehow going to burn down my apartment. If I might use my stove once in a blue moon, I absolutely will not use my oven. That is a hard no. Even if it were possible to convince me that I’m not going to set my apartment on fire (which I don’t think anyone could do), I couldn’t cope with all the steps needed to actually cook something in there. Unfortunately, not cooking limits my food options. Fortunately, I really don’t care about food. Flavour is not something I’m particularly concerned about. The blander the better. It’s more that I can’t enjoy foods I might enjoy, possibly some baked goods, and it means that I can’t make as many healthy meals as I’d like to. I’ll heat something up in the microwave, like a frozen meal, and I’ll choose ready/easy-to-eat foods like fruits, veggies, and dairy products (no steps involved other than perhaps peeling, and yet I throw out so much of the food in my fridge because I can’t cope even with opening a bag of snap peas), but sometimes I’ll see a recipe I’d like to try and feel kind of bad that I won’t get to because it involves cooking/baking or there are just too many steps involved in the preparation process.
Steps. It’s about certain things needing to be done in a set sequence. Even getting dressed has steps (which I more-or-less manage to get through, sometimes with tears in the winter, often choosing to be cold over struggling with winter gear). But it’s also about not separating things that belong together due to common traits (things I perceive as a collection) and not doing in multiple steps what “should” be done all at once. Like bringing in all the bags of cat litter in one go, not in multiple trips (leaving some behind to retrieve later). If, for whatever reason, I have to separate things that belong together or can’t carry out an activity in one go, then I invent “rules”—reasons why certain items can be separated from the larger group. For example, one is a different colour from the other, one of the bags is ripped, the items are different sizes, or some other logic. I need to find a logic, or I’ll crash. One-hundred-percent guaranteed meltdown. And I won’t leave one thing behind alone. There must be at least two left behind together. Maybe I worry it’ll feel lonely, forgotten.
Steps. They’re hard, they’re anxiety provoking, yet they’re associated with almost everything. I haven’t really found any perfect solutions. I muddle through. I use my palm, limit my showers, eat simple foods, deal with the cold, and load my arms with inseparable things. And I drip peanut butter, sometimes nearly missing a cat’s head (literally, I have three cats and there’s almost always a head in the way of dripping food).
If you have any suggestions, I’m open to hearing them.
Rhonda Cheryl Solomon, MSc, PhD (cand.), at the University of Toronto can be reached at rhonda.solomon@alum.utoronto.ca or (416) 820-9654.
