Eating a Pretzel

I made a radical step a week ago. 

I was in the mall waiting for my husband and I was hungry. 

Normally, most of our meals are shared and I don't typically snack, but I was hungry and he wasn't around. 

On a typical day, I would have held out, felt miserable, and when he arrived shouted about how hangry I was (this is a combination of hungry and angry, used by those of us with low blood sugar induced rage). 

But on this particular day, the scent of the pretzel shop, so undeniably delicious, was wafting toward me like a cloud of delight. I decided I was going to eat a damn pretzel. I was going to dip the damn pretzel in damn cheese, and I was going to sit by myself in the mall to do it. 

I recommend you do this. Just try it. See what emotions it conjures up for you. 

Because I was sitting facing away from an exit, LOTS of people were walking past. I feel the least comfortable about my figure while sitting. And because I was eating the least nutritious food I would eat in a month, I was filled with fear about the things people were saying about me in their mind. 

"No wonder she's so pudgy."

"Have a damn vegetable, before you get diabetes."

"I hope if I ever gain weight, I hope I won't be stupid enough to eat like that." 

This may be a surprise to you, but I am generally the center of my own universe. Likely, you are the center of your own, and almost everyone else is their own center. In all likelihood, every one of these passers was absorbed in key-finding, to-do-list-making, or feeling insecure themselves. I am not a blip on their radar, in all likelihood. 

It was awful the minute I realized that, because most people were- in all likelihood- NOT thinking of me, I was just being REALLY horrible to myself. That I was projecting on to strangers my own fear of eating, my own sense that I did not have the right to exist in my own space. And even if those people were shouting those things at me, could I ever be in a place so deeply rooted and certain that I would finish the pretzel, dab my mouth with a napkin, and slowly saunter on?

And the pretzel was delicious. And it didn't kill me. I had a junk food and the world didn't end. I wasn't cast into an eternal fire. I survived, self esteem in tact. 

Try it. Sit down. In public. And...eat. Slowly. And enjoy it. See what it brings up for you.