In the Absence of Taste and the Presence of an Eating Disorder

A week ago today, I lost my sense of smell and taste after testing positive for Covid-19. Despite being vaccinated and not contracting the virus, or at least being asymptomatic, since its mass inception in March 2019, I finally fell ill after traveling during Thanksgiving Day weekend for a family wedding. I packed two boxes of protein bars to have on my person during the wedding parties where food would be present. I also located, in proximity to my hotel, the nearest café – the same one I worked at back home – so that I could pick up the lowest-calorie, and the most filling, protein-packed option which also happened to be extremely satisfying for my taste. The entire time I was out of state for the wedding, I ate either my protein bar or those protein egg white bites from the café. There is no doubt that my eating disorder, the anorexia, is thriving.

The last day I was out of state, I woke up before 5 am as per usual, and asked my father to drive our rented midsize SUV to the café so I could pick up my breakfast. Upon arriving, I saw that the café was closed due to a water problem. I quickly navigated my mobile maps to find four other cafes. All were closed, not due to the time, but for some other reason. After making my agitated father drive unknown terrain while he was sick, unbeknownst to us sick with Coronavirus, I reconciled to have my sea salt chocolate almond protein bar for breakfast. I forged a plan with my father, who knew I was in the thick of an eating disorder despite maintaining a healthy weight: I would tell my mother that I picked up something from the supermarket and hide the protein bar in one of those take out containers with lids that the hotel breakfast bar had available. He looked defeated that his daughter was still suffering from an eating disorder. I, however, admittedly felt triumphant and thankful that I had the wherewithal to go to Whole Food Market back home and stash those protein bars into my checked in suitcase.

We were watching the news while I was stealthily eating my breakfast in front of my mother, behind the cover of a lidded container. I heated up the bar on 10 seconds in the hotel microwave so that the dark chocolate-date blend melted around the almonds and the sea salt’s crunchy contrast was even more pronounced. The taste of the protein bar felt so gratifying. It was healthy and tasty and something I would never permit myself to have while at home. The news flashed a breaking update on the flat-screened television: there was a citywide water mane problem causing all the cafes to close down. I felt a tickle in my throat on our last day there. Something was wrong. I felt the coming on of a sore throat, which made itself known the next day. Two days later I lost my smell and taste.

The truth was most everything I eat is “safe” – the same things I eat day in and day out knowing its nutritional content and if and how it will affect my body. These “safe” items tend to be bland and lacking potent flavors. Think: soft-boiled eggs and crackers. I was eating my lunch, a piece of low-moisture mozzarella string cheese when I noticed that I could not detect its faint smell. My eating process is somewhat disordered: I first sniff my food like a fine glass of wine I have yet to have in my lifetime. I inhale its aroma. I then eat in slow, measurably small, methodical bites to stretch out the eating experience because eating still felt so rare an occurrence that I had to preserve it.

I began breaking off stringy pieces of mozzarella and let it hover over my open mouth before chewing. I chewed, but I did not taste… anything. I was chewing for the sake of chewing. I was chewing to stave off emptiness rather than physical hunger. I ate because it was noon, my self-prescribed time for lunch. But I could not taste the slightly tangy, unique-to-dairy flavor. I kept blowing my dry nose with effort that caused my throat to hurt even more, but to no affect. I was not congested. I did not have a runny nose. I simply could no longer smell nor taste.

As someone with an active eating disorder, this prospect of lacking taste first hit me hard. I would no longer gain any pleasure from eating – the one thing I looked forward to while weight restoring over 50 pounds was to taste food again. The one thing I looked forward to now, when I eat so little and so restrictive a manner, is the taste. The second reaction, however, didn’t so much as hit me hard as it came in a soft, gentle nudge. If I couldn’t taste, perhaps, I won’t want to eat. Eating would lose its value. Food would no longer serve me. I won’t have to eat. I will lose weight again. I’ll be able to walk into any shop and wear clothes without going up a size. My mind spiraled out of control.

My body stayed still – sedentary – as my lifestyle has quickly become in my overtly watchful household in a sleepy Long Island town that can be traveled solely by car and not by foot. I stayed sitting on the leather swivel stool that bordered my kitchen island. I finished my string cheese as it dawned on me that the Coronavirus was very real and I was human, susceptible to airborne illness from my nearest and dearest, my father. After eating my lunch of string cheese, I began eating my choice of fruit – cubes of watermelon that I had cut up into a bowl. I could no longer detect the sweetness and instead honed in on the feeling of spongy flesh of melon and liquid bursting in the walls of my cheeks. I felt the bolus go down my throat and enter my abdominal cavity. I became acutely aware of my body no longer being empty. In that moment, I wanted more. I wanted more because I wasn’t satisfied. Without taste, my scant serving sizes seemed just as small as my therapist had been trying to convince me. I knew string cheese did not constitute a meal. I knew that fruit could not make me gain exponentially and that most of the feeling of fullness was water retention.

I saw two photos of myself. One was of me at a wedding function in the evening, after consuming watermelon that afternoon and everyday before then. The other photo was of me during the out-of-state wedding function. I hadn’t consumed fruit in a few days while out of state because, like I said before, I ate either the café egg white bites or a protein bar. In the latter photo, my face was less bloated, less round, less voluminous. My cheekbones were more prominent, my clothes fit, as they should. But fruit was safe for me. It kept me full and it satisfied me, so I continued to eat it while home.

Without taste, I became more aware of the importance of food. That’s not to say that I will change my disordered ways. Epiphanies do not necessitate change in implementation in spite of a change in mindset.  But my loss of taste has made me approach food in an even more rigid and calculated manner. I eat breakfast before 5 am: my protein cereal immersed in high protein flax milk that has been heated up in the microwave for 8 minutes to produce a porridge-like texture. I eat lunch around noon. I eat dinner around 7 pm. I then consume fruit until I get ready for bed, which nowadays, is by 8 pm. I taste nothing. My food has become like Play-Doh. I chew it and slosh it around inside my mouth, manipulating its shape into something small enough to swallow.

Suddenly, textures have become meaningful for me and no longer seem like arbitrary accouterments that Michelin-star chefs add to their dishes for décor or resourcefulness. I opt out of eating my soft food and try and seek pleasure in the crunch of my chia seed-dotted crackers that contrasts so delightfully to the soft shell of egg white surrounding a rich organic silky yolk. I also find temperatures mean so much more. I prefer hot to cold foods, again, because it makes the eating process last for a longer duration.

I’m trying to make good out of lacking both my sense of smell and taste, but the truth is, I’m losing my tolerance for believing that the glass is half full. I would relish the aroma of coffee brewing in the morning; I used to taste its slight chalkiness and slightly acidic taste offset by notes of milk chocolate. Suddenly, coffee didn’t have its same affect. I drank it for taste, not for caffeine.

There were three pros to working in a coffeehouse: the income, the regular gentleman customer who I took a fancy to, and smelling of a freshly concocted espresso latte. I could no longer smell myself. I couldn’t smell a day’s worth of work or a freshly showered and laundered self. Drastic as it may sound, I don’t feel alive without smell and taste. But I have also never felt more alive than I do when I eat without taste. It is as if my cells are real-time absorbing nutrients from the little food I do ingest.

I don’t look forward to eating because I am mechanically masticating food items without tasting it. But I do look forward to eating because I know that in doing so, I am practicing what it means to be recovered from an eating disorder. I’m not starving myself in spite of not tasting. I found alternate avenues like texture and temperature to make up for taste. An yet, I cannot imagine continuing to live like this – without taste. I’m still not recovering but I hope to. I hope to again indulge in the spices of my culture, to again have milk, real milk, in my tea that is spiked with cardamom, clove, and fennel. Without taste, recovery isn’t possible. Seeking pleasure in the ingredients used to create culinary invention is not possible. But without taste, I am now able to determine that there such a thing as recovery. Its just a journey that I have yet to embark on.

Wanted

Couples are getting hitched. It seems so persistent a truth, and one that never cedes because maybe it’s just my present. Marriages are looming. I attend, subconsciously placing myself in lieu of the bride. Tonight just happens to be the season premiere of the reality show ‘Say Yes to the Dress’ and it is hitting me hard that I am not her. The bride in these weddings and formal engagements - a blending of two families formally as opposed to the get-down-on-one-knee affairs - Are draped with a lovely red embroidered shawl. They are presented with semiprecious stones, jewels, and luster. They glow. They’re eyelids drawn almost closed, their heads bowed down, partially to teeter the cloth upon their head so that it stays, partially to stare down at their new trousseau, and partially in thanks. They’re eyelids suddenly flicker open, full, and bright, they look on yonder- beyond all the hullabaloo. They are the center of their universe. I am their spectator.

I hear my father’s breathing falter a bit as we observe that young woman on stage become a bride. It should have been me. I feel my mother’s acceptance as she sits quietly, pushing out of her mind the possibility of her own daughter’s marriage. I am self-aware: simultaneously feeling deeply hurt and possessing juvenile angst, embraced by the buoyant energy in the air that is at odds with the otherwise heavy, ornate garments.

‘’When’ I attended a wedding recently, there was the ‘what’: the anticipation of getting ready for all the events- laying out the clothes, shoes, jewelry. The ‘who’ we would be seeing - old and new. The ‘where’ we would travel to and stay while waiting for events that started hours after the previous one. It was an entire to-do, this wedding. After the longest time, I, depressed, still unemployed and still stuck in my eating disorder, got dressed up, mingled, spoke, and had something to look forward to day after day. I felt like I was getting betrothed. And now that it’s over, reality settles in once more. Again, I am isolated, again, refreshing my email every three seconds in anticipation of a job offer, again, crying my eyes out during and after therapy when I relayed this truth of mine. 

It’s like Lorelei Gilmore from Gilmore Girls says - my go-to pop-cultural anecdotal evidence - “every now and then, just for a moment I wish I had a partner, someone to pick up the slack, someone to wait for the cable guy, make me coffee in the morning.” Marriage is more than intimacy is what everyone relays to me. It’s a hug, a peck on the face, and a holding of the hand. Marriage is a barrage of family expectations and cultural norms. And yet I fear it. I fear it and I also want it. I want the celebration of a wedding to be a daily memory. I want photo albums that my parents never possessed, and a dress that my mother never had. I wanted all this for them, too, and yet I have never been on a date much less been in a relationship.

To be wanted has a sense of urgency; doing certain tasks and sometimes going to any lengths in order to retrieve that which is desired. Then again, not everyone gets what he/she wants. This is my case scenario. I feel unwanted, and yet everyone says it’s because I am not going out there - getting out there - into some macrocosmic place that includes the blind spots. That someone for me may be hiding in the periphery, I know not. I do know that I may entertain the idea of outside intervention, however, not until I’m employed and perhaps could enjoy eating outside, unmeasured portions and unmodified chef’s creations. Right now, I want for nothing more than a career, nothing more than an excuse to purchase stationary. 

I feel stationary, not even on one of those good forsaken bikes because my legs feel stagnant as I try to pummel my way forcefully against all the odds stacked up against me: no job, no boyfriend, no role besides daughter and sister which are old news. I have no Hallmark cards that celebrate anniversaries or motherhood. My father still calls me princess, and I believe it. My mother, on a very good day, refers to me as “baby girl,” and I believe that too. It’s difficult for me to sense that so many years have passed when yesterday feels like over  ten years ago- a time when I was not diagnosed with anorexia - a time when I did not identify my body with something that weighs less than half of myself now.

Am I wanted? My age dictates that I am not capable of being so. It’s not just a number- it’s time passing by. My weight isn’t just a number, it’s my body at rest, amplifying with every morsel. I’m not so jaded, not so sheltered, and not so lost that I cannot see what is right in front of me: marriages and pregnancies - it’s like the bedroom door is wide open and I’m witnessing all. I don’t mean to sound crude, but this is the truth of being wanted and sought after. I sometimes wish that my eyes were veiled, my vision akin to staring out of rose-colored glasses, like it is for those brides with the red tinged shawl covering their head and shoulders.

Youthful Indiscretion

“Any girl under the age of 17 is the enemy. They’re going to take our jobs, our thunder, our starter husbands. They’re coming and they’re going to keep on coming, like the locusts descending on Mankato. We’ll be beating them off for the rest of our lives… the ones with the alabaster skin and perky breasts.”

                -Paris Geller of my beloved formative youth show, Gilmore Girls

I’m two weeks away from turning 32 years old. I remain sober, ten years after becoming legal, yet I still purchase the fruity bellini from Trader Joe’s for my parents’ imbibing. I still get carded – asked for my I.D. – only to have the cashier and enforcer of company policy requiring that only those of age be able to purchase an adult beverage, that his wife was the same age as I. In fact, his wife was born six months after me. She was younger than me, too. I’m a millenial and those avocado toasts are looking murkier and untouched by the Tuck Everlasting quality of acidic citrus, like a lemon that touches a cut apple prevents it from turning brown. Generation Z is making their way, and simultaneously making my social media bio, declaring me a graduate from the class of a decade past, seem more like a Wikipedia entry of a bygone encyclopedic era than an updated tagline. It’s less the fault of my generation, and more the fault of me – slithering in quicksand the more years that past as I remain unemployed, the more my eating disorder takes hold.

My eating disorder first manifested physically before it gripped me mentally. My body was deflated and an anomaly. I ended up getting taller despite an osteoporosis diagnosis, and as my body began to heal with outside intervention, baby hairs are still growing along my hairline, while I’m in my thirties. My hair is thicker than before. My breasts seem perkier than before as my body has inflated seemingly from square one. It is as if I have been reborn, grown into the nose that I was always meant to have  - the one reconstructed after I fell and shattered its entire structure at my lowest weight, running around the cold hardwood floors of my house barefoot in a feigned attempt at doing the forbidden -exercising.

I’m an anomaly – like the always-ripened avocado already cut. I’m always cold despite my weight restoration. I’m always trembling, shivering, cowering into the crew neck of my collegiate sweatshirts in the backseat of a car with open windows. My skin always looks sun kissed, but in a sickly manner – a shade of yellow that was once thought to be a beta-carotene overdose in my consumption of sumo citrus, in season between January and April, has stayed well into the end of May. Blood tests reveal nothing off kilter so yellow I remain.

But I feel my youth disappearing as my depression worsens. Perhaps its not my age that is detaching me from that girl who was once full of color and life, who had soundtracks to her life as if she were a film heroine – a protagonist with a plot unfolding in real-time. Instead, it is my sadness that is the byproduct of the eating disorder. It is hope that I feel fading away – a geriatric hopelessness that takes hold of me as if I were abandoned in an old-age home without visitors. I’m without visitors because my relationships have gone awry. I suspect my closes kin of acting on spite when they tread on the treadmill, or opt for less drops of oil. I suspect them of wanting to be a sick version of themselves –a smaller version of themselves the likes of which I had dabbled in that landed me here – jobless, never once part of a relationship, and openly, admittedly, afraid of intimacy without a libido for as long as I have been without a menstrual cycle, over a quarter of my life.  I’m an anomaly. I’m not yet fertile and as pure as the blanket of snow not yet tousled by footprints, turning 32.

I feel my youth fading in the unwillingness of my knees to levitate and perform a box jump at the gym. I feel my youth desiccating the longer the sun stays raised above the horizon once it turned spring. And yet there are bursts of youth that try in earnest to surface. My ears will perk up and I pivot on my heel as soon as I hear the ice cream truck jingle, knowing fully well that my orthorexic mind will never permit me to have added sugar and processed, metallic enclosed and churned out soft serve. The question surfaces again: is it sadness or youth gone past? And I am discovering that in my case, the case of anomaly, they coexist.

I want for nothing but the days when my parents did not wine and dine. I want for the days of food that warmed the heart, from family and flavor, from holidays and horticulture, like when we would clip the basil we grew to make a pesto sauce over pasta or the mint leaves for minty onion chutney to bathe barbecued meat in. I want for the days of my youth, of promise and progress, when meritocracy reigned supreme and working hard produced profit. I feel my youth slipping away. It is now less than two weeks, eleven days, until I turn a year older, decidedly in my thirties.

Photos of marriages and births make me recall my faith: sarbat da bhala – blessing bestowed on all. I’m happy for he, she, and they. I see promotions at jobs add up and accolades collect while I remain a virgin in so many respects, clinging to my youth as others age but seem so happy. I’m getting older, but in retrospect, I could still be young in the eyes of myself thirty years older. My sadness is ageing me. My eating disorder is eating me alive.

The Power of the Mundane

Sleep. Wake Up. Rinse Mouth. Brush Teeth. Wash Face. The increments of time between each task is recorded with care and kept in diary-like volumes when I want to acknowledge productivity. This proclivity for documentation oftentimes segued into wasted paper, crumbled, and the frayed binding of notebooks after I had torn out the pages of timelines. Our country’s founding fathers had kept such journals; I had come to learn in history class. Yet this mundaneness was decidedly antiquated, at least in the eyes of my college peers whose time was better spent jet setting across oceans on the weekly. Serendipity was in the nature of their coming and goings and a clean house, groomed body, and completed mentally stored checklists were involuntary and therefore not requiring of attention. My declarations for having to do laundry or purchase paper towels to clean, was a buzz kill and unintentionally sobered them up enough to roll their rose color-reflected eyes.

What explains the Tik Tok phenomenon of less-than-a-minute, minute-to-minute rundowns of a day’s cleaning, cooking, or cuddling? Its’ not just the ASMR visual and audible cues that spawn primordial neuronal activity spikes. Even videos with soundtracks in the background engage the viewer enough to follow these productive people. From Day in The Life, AM and PM routines, to viral concoctions of leftover food into something new – Emily Mariko’s salmon and rice bowl – mundaneness is in. Mundane tasks are the new athleisure wear popularized during the pandemic. They are necessities that have to get done regardless, and in a comfortably doable and accessible manner – at least in highlight reel videos that don’t show the minute-to-minute tedium.

Suddenly, scrubbing a refrigerator seems not only doable, but also effortless. The videos are white lies. These errands do get done and the doer does smile, but the annoying sing-song alarm from the refrigerator that goes off when the doors are kept open too long, are edited out. The catching of one’s breath and dripping sweat is not captured in the snapshots of alluring workout-wear spandex that hugs without strangling, or so we’re made to believe.

ASMR - Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response – gained popularity with every scuffle, shuffle, and scarfing down of any food prepared; These audible cues, combined with visual representations, ignites human centers of thought that associates edible fuel with pleasure and intimacy. These videos are a reflection of one’s self and performing these otherwise solo tasks suddenly seems community-wide. It’s not just the mundaneness of sight and sound that is trending. There is something to be said for the tactile mundane as well.

I attended a last rites service where everyone sat in silence aside from the echoing recitation of prayer when the host of the service came up to me- his face covered by mask as per pandemic regulations- when he placed a heavy flat palm right on top of the light silk scarf wound around my head. I felt the weight of his hand for a longer time than he actually had it lying there, on top of my head. The combination of a gesture of bestowing blessings with a palm, inside a house of worship, during the daytime so that daylight shown through floor-to-ceiling glass windows reflecting white light, and the gauzy ethereal-like fabric that I draped around my body, had all coalesced into a metaphysical feeling of purposeful positivity. Mundaneness, like in this example, is more popular due to its seemingly involuntary effortlessness – and almost millenial-like serendipity.

An involuntary function of a female’s healthy reproductive system is ovulation and menstruation. That she bleeds is of no personal persuasion, though it is dependent on the body receiving adequate fuel and rest. On Christmas Eve, for the first time in eight years, though was no mistaking that I was again having a period – my body is slowly but surely healing from years of duress put on it. It may seem mundane – a natural function of the reproductive system – however the mundaneness created celebratory angst in the heart of my parents and one of my best friends. I remember telling her earlier that day that someone else whose body went through similar mistreatment resulting in loss of period, upon having it returned, celebrated with red velvet cupcakes – symbolic in color.

Mundaneness can be tedious and scarring – like cleaning out a refrigerator or changing bed sheets – but it can also be a non-manmade, completely out of one’s control, happenstance – like menstruation. Mundaneness can be intentional and not tedious as well – the mundaneness of typing for example. The act of conveying language for another’s consumption is done with intent. Take the now outdated Blackberry that concluded its service the first week of January 2022, a decade after it first launched in 2012. The Blackberry exemplified tactical intent in its tactile keyboard that, like ASMR, created clicking sounds upon buttons being pressed down, alerting one of his/her intent actually manifesting.

Mundaneness actually produces exclusivity, including the rise of Blackberry as a premier mode of communication. There is also the exclusivity of certain fruit thanks to the mundaneness of preempting the fruit’s anatomy for consumption. Let’s take the sumo citrus fruit that has reigned supreme as one of the most decadent oranges the world has ever seen. The sumo orange is priced at a premium. In 2022, it is $4.99/pound. Considering the fact that one fruit, its thick skin that is peeled away accounting for most of its weight, can weigh in at about a pound, means that one can easily spend upwards of $15 for two pieces of citrus. However, the mundaneness of peeling away skin is so vital to our peace of mind that the easy-to-peel sumo is worth the prices, sometimes peeled in one shot resulting in a curlicue of skin. Not as astronomically priced are the equally mundane easy-to-peel mandarin citrus fruit. They are marketed as “cuties,” and “halos,” both positive connotative words to describe fruit. So important is the mundaneness of revealing an edible fruit from its exoskeleton that they are considered attractive and angelic.

Mundaneness usually connotes mediocrity or routine. Routine, however, is an increasingly attractive concept. In an age where anticipatory anxiety reigns supreme, knowing what is to come, while mundane, is also a welcome respite from reality. The concept of “binge watching” a series, not having to wait for one episode to come out weekly, underlines this idea of mundaneness in sitting hour after hour to satiate a desire for knowledge and wrangle a cliffhanger off a mountain in one fell swoop. Patience is not trendy here. Patience is the antithesis of being proactive – a quality that is perpetuated by routine. Take circadian rhythms – going to bed and waking up at the same time, day after day, promotes pinnacle performance. Your body knows what to expect. There is a homeostasis –mundaneness that us humans are primed for. It is this primal sensitivity to mundaneness that has risen in popularity.

Mundaneness is also primarily a solitary concept. Showering one’s back – that hard-to-reach crux between and just below the shoulder blades, for example, is mundane but not futile. According to Livestrong fitness coverage, reaching unto this space increases shoulder motility and mobility. It’s like eating – a primarily solitary concept, social setting aside – that is also a mundane task in its necessity. Still, one’s eating is increasingly utilized for purposes of mindfulness. My uncle had explained the idea of savoring; relishing a final moment of eating to stave off what he believes may be extraneous eating or past a time-lapsed fullness. He would make sure to engage with the last bite of food on his tongue and leave it housed in his mouth, activating the salivary glands before finally letting it be swallowed into oblivion as if to stave off hunger in the sheer appreciation of a moment cherished in time.

It is no wonder that Emily Mariko and other Tik Tokers cataloging their comings and goings, reactions, and sheer living out Pascal’s hierarchy of needs are so astonishingly attractive. We seek solace in others playing out what we are or should be doing on a grand scale. It feels nice to have your life play out as a film reel where there is an audience validating the importance of your sense of self. It’s that feeling of recognition for having done what is and isn’t effortless that gives one purpose. Mundaneness is not a lack of productivity and is instead the opposite. It gives us life.