I want something. That’s always been the case. Before I ask a question, before the curiosity, the want is hiding. Desire is there.
Knowing that the desire is there, and what the desire is, that’s what is known as ‘self-awareness’. Self-aware means to know more of yourself. You trust information about yourself.
Already, you have a lot of information you trust about about yourself. I’ll call this your ‘current self-awareness’. What is my current self-awareness? I can’t answer that question without a specific topic to be self-aware about.
I think people who say they have a high self-awareness watched themselves for a long time. Then, they trusted what they thought of themselves. That is what we call self-awareness, someone who knows what they are going to do, so they inhibit themselves from doing it to bring about a better life.
For example, I lost a lot of weight. I did that through divesting myself from emotional buy in to my former eating habits and then built a new system of eating. At every point through the years of ‘building a system of eating’, I had so many ideas about ‘what will work.’
I trusted, at every point in my growth, a brand-new future of eating. I had lots of imagination about how I would eat in the future. Salads every day. A strict diet of vegetables and meat and oils. Not eating a huge diversity of foods. Not going on a food hunt in the grocery store trying something new everyday ‘just for today’.
There were a lot of ‘just for todays’ when I was eating wild. Frozen pizza boxes, three of them for nine bucks, every day, for a month. My stomach would feel the pain, let me know, and I’d eventually move on to less painful food. For awhile. Then I’d try more painful foods for awhile. It couldn’t work, I knew that, there wasn’t a lot of thought put into what would necessarily follow, pain. There was a lot thought put into how exciting and stimulating the food is, what food would I get next, how much would the food cost, and the negative consequences.
When I was in the flow of being a binge eater, my whole existence of knowledge thrived off binge eating. I embodied the practices and thoughts leading to inevitable despair. As if I were cut off from knowledge of the future.
Had a future me arrived via time travel and said: “This Mango ice cream you’re going to eat now is going to keep you up all night in pain sitting in your gut like a rock.”
I might have shrugged and kept eating. Had the pain come from the hour or so later, the Mango ice cream sitting in my gut like a rock, if I had that pain, I wouldn’t continue eating.
I think a majority of the change that happened was the timescale of perception. I began to feel the pain of my decision at an earlier and earlier time.
Long ago, when I entered the grocery store, I used to approach the food I wanted. I would take it. I’d eat it.
I’d look at price and justify to myself why I’m buying this, the money isn’t important, the food is what is important. I have enough money for the month’s necessities, so I’m safe enough to eat this.
Those days were a lie. There was truth in them. I would be fine with money for the month. The food would taste good. I would have a lot to eat. I’d feel great about buying it. The missing information: for an evening. For about fifteen minutes, which is as about as long as it took me to eat. I didn’t taste most of the food, the act of eating was one of engulfing a quantity, then moving onto the next distraction.
The truth is the food worked. The lie about food only got revealed years later, when I got new information from the internet and my body. My body started to feel the pain of this eating. I started going to the ER, on the regular. I got diagnosed with Chronic Pancreatitis, spent a lot of time in the hospital.
This didn’t deter me. Really, it wasn’t until I began to feel the pain of being in the hospital through trauma that I finally could come to verbalize “oh so maybe eating everything I want is bad, huh?”
They tried to put a food tube down my nose while I was awake. I thought it would be nothing. Not a big deal. The next day, I was lying in bed contracted into a ball. For the next year, every time I laid down to go to bed, I thought about my nose.
I trusted the people at the hospital. They said, hey let’s put this thing in nose, I was like, okay you are the people at the hospital let’s go, and then, I’m the one who gets handed the reality of the results.
The people at the hospital weren’t lying to me. They didn’t enter with a deception. What happened is what happened: everyone there believed, especially me, that the future was a beautiful place without pain and suffering. That all our efforts today would compound into the future, that not only is this the right thing to do, the responsible thing to do, that we’re going to do it and nothing bad will happen.
“Nothing bad will happen,” that’s the lie. However, for a lie to be a lie, someone has to stand behind the statement. If they had said to me, “Look there’s no chance of you thinking about this moment for the next year of your life,” that would have been a lie. They never said it.
When I think about events like this, it’s almost like someone slipped up. They didn’t know, it was an accident, they couldn’t have imagined it would happen— yet it happened. The lie of “nothing bad will happen” got washed away by the truth of “this became one of the worst years of my life.”
No one was at fault, and everyone was. Pain happens. It’s that simple. How we formulate who is at fault is a way of taking someone and making them suffer for our pain.
I didn’t blame the hospital or the nurses. I already thought going in, this was under my control. I didn’t have to be at the hospital. But, I know now, pain happened. I trusted my knowledge of the situation. I trusted it would be painless. It was not.
Just like I trusted that food would be good, I couldn’t feel the pain of the future at that time. I felt the anticipation of the food, so I went for the food. Costs be damned. When I hunted for the food at the grocery store, I felt in control, I believed that little bad would come of it.
I never thought it would lead me into ERs over and over until I caught some medical trauma. Even then, I thought I was in control, that this was my fault, that if only I did differently, thought differently, that I could have turned this all around.
Was that ever possible?
I trusted a false premise. “The future will be fine, despite this indulgence, I won’t pay any hidden costs.” For a long time, I ate whatever I wanted, the indulgences of hunting for the next new arrangement of binge food never cost my health, until it did. Then, what I trusted became a lie.
New information made it a lie. It was never fully a lie. I had my model of the world. “Food tastes good. I eat food. I feel fine.” That was my whole of reality. Even if I could imagine a possible future where there would be lots of pain, I didn’t live that life. I didn’t identify with that pain.
Now, here, sitting in the future with all those painful memories, I cannot look at food and feel the same about it anymore. I see an alternative truth of the universe. I see the pain swirls in ice cream, where once there was once caramel and fudge.
Did reality change? Or did I? Will your reality change? Or will you?