03 Apr It’s a Love-Hate Relationship

The sun shines through your window as a new day breaks. You open your eyes and you roll over. It’s your first thought as the day begins.

Thinking about being together again.

Then, as the day goes by, you start to question it. You gave in. You wonder why you did because you know you shouldn’t have. Your whole body regrets it.

The love-hate relationship.

I’m currently in a love-hate relationship. A relationship that, when it’s good, it’s really good. Every moment we spend together fills me with joy and happiness. But when it’s bad, it’s really bad and it hurts everywhere.

My love hate-relationship has been going on for years.

What relationship is this, you ask?

My relationship with food.

I’ve been in a love-hate relationship with food for a very long time. We’re one of those couples who met a really long time ago and started out as friends. We’ve had many ups and downs – lots of fights where we just can’t agree with each other. Some great times too, when the comfort overwhelms me. We have such a history that we keep finding our way back together, no matter how difficult things get. No matter whom, or what gets in our way, we always find our way back to each other.

But right now, we’re broken up.

For some reason, myself and food have just not been getting along. As I wrote recently, we broke up for a bit – for over a month, until my doctor helped us work things out. I gave food a chance, and it seemed like we were getting along fine for a little while after.

A few weeks ago, however, food stabbed me in the back again – and at the worst possible time.

I woke up early one Saturday to get to the set for a new show I’m filming and felt very strange. Not having a choice, I headed to the filming location. Within 10 minutes of being there, we got into a huge fight and I began throwing up. I couldn’t stop for basically the entire day, while filming all of my most important scenes.

The director would say “ACTION,” I’d do the scene, the director would say “CUT,” and I would run to the bathroom to vomit. Then I would come back and start over again.

Food is one of those illicit lovers who can make you feel amazing one instant, then horrible the next.

The feeling of eating something decadent and sweet, or sour and crunchy – those are some of my favourite feelings. Like any good lover, food can make you feel like you are the most important person in the world.

But like any bad boyfriend, food can also take that all away. Not only can food ignite pain in my body from the inside out, but it has the ability to eat at my mind and make me feel like I’m worthless.

Having Crohn’s disease and an ostomy has required food and I to do things in our relationship that many others will never have to do. I’ve had to cut out stringy foods and foods with seeds to dairy to meat to essentially cutting out all food in general. I’ve been on almost every diet known to man to even not being allowed or able to eat anything at all. Because of this rocky road we’ve been down and continue to follow, it’s had both physical and psychological effects on me.

Effects that still haunt me today.

For those amazing faithful readers of mine who have been following me for years, you may remember the days when I used to complain about the love-hate relationship I had with one of my exes. I would blog over and over again about how we had gotten together after being friends for years, had broken up, then gotten back together, then broken up again, and then miraculously found our way back to each other before breaking up one last time.

It was exhausting.

But here I am, about 7 years later, and I find myself chatting with him on Facebook chat, seeing him at parties, and going out for with him for lunch (well – only tea for me) last week.

With my ex.

Why? Because we’re friends again. Really good friends, actually. Just like we used to be before we dated.

Which is crazy to think because if you remember how messed up our relationship used to be, you would have never thought that we’d ever want to look at each other again, let alone spend time together. But here we are – civil and getting along well.

This got me thinking that maybe there is a chance for me and food. Sure, things are rough right now and I’m unsure of where we might end up, but there may be a settling point where we can both get along, just in a different way. This is what I’m currently working towards. I’m taking that break from food, but trying a little bit of something here and a little bit of something there. Letting food in just enough to keep me going but not too much to bring me back down.

While there are still a ton of physical and psychological side-effects that food has given me, I think that if I work hard on mending our relationship in whatever form that may be, those will hopefully disappear.

Where our relationship will go in the next few weeks, months or years is unknown – but at least I know anything is possible.

Excuse me while we go work it out.