Working on tomorrow’s updates, today. It’s been a long time since I’ve done that. Sometimes I forget how much I truly love working on this site.
It reminds me a bit of one of my favorite foods, hard-boiled eggs. Though they’re cheap and very quick and simple to make, I don’t usually remember to add them to my list of favorite foods. I hadn’t had any in like a year until two or three days ago when suddenly I got the worst craving. I went out and got a dozen and boiled them and wound up eating ten in one day. Lunch: four eggs. Dinner: four eggs. Midnight snack: two eggs. The only reason I didn’t eat the entire carton is cause I shared them with Michael’s dad. Several of the eggs I ate right out of the pot–the best way–and they were so hot they burned my tongue and it felt funny for the rest of the day. Eating those fresh, hot, steaming eggs was just ecstasy that’s kind of what working on Charley feels like now.
(On a quasi-semi-related note: the anniversary of the attack was two weeks ago. I deliberately wrote and said nothing about it on that day because I decided to stop marking it, but it was very much on my mind. But very few things are ever so bad that nothing good comes of them. I can think of several good things that came out of the attack, and boiled eggs are one of them. In the immediate aftermath I was so stressed that I basically stopped eating. I lost TWELVE pounds in a month, and I really didn’t have it to lose. That was ten percent of my body weight at the time. My arms looked like sticks, my shoulders like doorknobs. My family doctor told me quite firmly that I MUST start eating again because I’d already lost too much weight.
So I started forcing myself to eat at least two meals a day, and they had to be good, nutritious foods, like beef and barley soup and such things. And I tried hard-boiled eggs for the first time, knowing they were good for you, and discovered how much I loved them. Sometimes I’d take several to work for lunch, each one inside a sock to stop it breaking. By the end of the summer I looked like my normal slender-but-not-skeletal self again. The eggs really helped. So did Campbell’s Chunky Chicken and Dumplings Soup, another food I discovered I really liked and will eat cold right out of the can because I’m totally uncivilized. This is actually a big deal, the eggs and soup, because I have sensory issues related to taste and there are VERY few foods I can eat without discomfort and even fewer I actually enjoy eating.
Other good things that came from the attack, more significant than food: I found out who my real friends were, I gained trust in the competence and compassion of my psychiatrist who handled my post-traumatic stress reaction so appropriately, and I realized anew how much my boyfriend and parents loved and cared for me. And I learned how strong I was, how I could survive something that shattered many people. I was knocked off my feet, yes, flat on my back, but I managed to get back up and keep going. You can’t get over something like that, but you can pick it up and carry it with you.)
The Charley Project Blog 