Day 6 of the fast and a few days ago my body woke up to the fact it has been a really long time since I've eaten solid food, especially since the illness added an extra 3 days of clear liquids to the front end.

I began to obsess about food.  Lapsing into an old soothing habit from the nights I would go to bed hungry as a child, I lay there and imagined eating. I savored each bite of  the imaginary food and took comfort in the illusion of having enough.

As I scan my memory banks for imaginary sustenance, most food has no emotional hit and  I can pass it up with a mental shrug, but the soft warm creamy food category has a huge unmet need attached to it.

I started a written list to stop the mantra-like naming ceremony that was becoming a habit and to see if I could find the exception to this rule.

If I think about pizza I can remember the chewy, crusty, melted cheese, delicious sauce experience but I feel detached and comfortable with not indulging for another few months. I can think about spicy, crispy delicious Korean food, but I don't get the punch-in-the-stomach, against all logical reasoning, craving that I get about some foods.

For example, I am irrationally addicted to a certain Chile Verde burrito. The meat is extremely spicy, and I am gasping in pain by 1/4 of the way through a small burrito. It is inedible without sour cream, and it kills my stomach for a day afterward, but if it crosses my mind I must have it, even though I'm going to regret it for days.

I've read that if you crave crunchy food you are essentially angry, and that soft creamy food is a way of looking for love in all the wrong places.

This feels like the key to a puzzle. My mother did not nurse me because that was just not done in those days, and she tells me that she did not bond with me because I was an independent baby.

 I never stopped to think about what those words meant before. I raised a baby, and they are by nature not independent. Somehow she felt like I did not need her enough. I know she didn't want to be a mother, and certainly not so young. Judging by her tendency not to share food through the years, I'm guessing that feeding the baby was not something she was comfortable with.

It may be that I am still crying out with hunger and the fear that there is no one to take care of my most basic needs.

 I am working on reframing the story of my life, trying to step out of the helpless victim position and into the role of the observer.

What if I think of the neglect and anger I was fed by my mother as an agent of change in my life.  I am fiercely, almost pathologically, independent. My therapist tried unsuccessfully for years to get me to say the words I want...

But I do not ask for help. This has not always been the best solution. I have a visual of trying to get my couch up  4 winding flights of stairs by myself when I moved to San Francisco and meeting my new neighbor just after I dropped the upper end onto my face, effectively wedging it into place and  blocking the only way in and out of the old Victorian.

But I am also inordinately proud of this trait and it feels like survival. I would not have made it through so many hard times without this automatic need and ability to do everything on my own. So if neglect and hunger burned that pattern into my soul, I'll take it and be grateful. Without it, I would not be here.