Recovery Story #37, Wildflower Bouquet: Feeling Bad Can Lead to Wild Eating

My sugar/white flour addiction loves it when I wallow in darkness, self-pity and mental pain. After a day in bed, Miss Sugar, in her purple stilettos, crushes my heart and squeezes a puff of poison perfume on my brain. And then it seems like the only thing that will help is hunting down more sugar and white flour. It’s a vicious cycle. But I have hope. This is the next installment in the series I started on 1/31/21.

Wildflower Bouquet, alcohol ink, 2021, Linda Silver. My talented cousin Lin has been producing beautiful art since her girlhood in the Bronx. I’m proud to say that our good Dads were brothers. First, there were three — Anthony, Aldo and John — but now there are none. They live on in our hearts.

Many things lead me to feel bad, and feeling bad is the trigger my addiction craves. The gun goes off; the race to overeat begins. The joker’s wild, I’m plucking wildflowers from the side of the road — except the straggly picks are French bread with butter, the teenager’s treats in the fridge, the husband’s granola bars, the red canister of raisins. It’s a hunt in a hurry. Miss Sugar lurks on the sidelines, delighted, digging in her manicured nails. Examples of feeling bad:

1. Remembering an alcoholic I loved deeply — someone I crocheted gray mittens for in the 1970s at The Yarn Center in Dumont. I think of how that person must have suffered with addiction, unable to put a cap on it. I wonder how it must have affected the immediate family. I mourn the cloaking and denial (yet as you can see, I sustain it, referring to “someone” and “that person”). I puzzle over secrets gone to the…