Ice cream

Every night I’m alone (almost without exception) I eat ice cream.

The rational part of me knows that I don’t like ice cream. I don’t want to eat ice cream. Eating ice cream is something that I judge myself for and others would judge me for doing.

Ice cream makes me wake up in the middle of the night. Ice cream makes me panic. Ice cream is something I hide from myself and others. I’m fortunate because I know I don’t need to eat ice cream. I don’t have to eat ice cream. I could stop. I don’t have that excuse.

But that doesn’t stop me. I keep doing it because I’m alone and I don’t know how to be. Because as I eat ice cream, before it takes me over into some other state, it allows me to escape from feeling and knowing and sitting with myself.

It should matter that eating ice cream means that it ultimately keeps me more alone, more scared, worrying that one day, in the middle of the night, my fears of bodily pains will actually realise and I’ll be faced with the choice of doing nothing, enduring the end or reaching out and knowing it might be too late.

I flirt with the idea that somehow, eating ice cream is noble. In the way that causing yourself suffering when you know it is suffering is noble and thus deliberate. I know I am doing myself harm.

Yet still I do.