pleasure

 

this morning, my boss asked me if i still get pleasure out of eating. my answer was definitely, yes. i do. most of the time, i eat things i like - i make the choice to do that, and not just to see food as fuel and ignore its taste and smell and pleasure. but i'll never get the kind of pleasure that i used to - the breathless anticipation looking forward to a much-loved food, the fantasizing about what i'd order, how it would taste, how it would suspend me in auto-pilot numbness.

leading up to the surgery, i worried a lot about what it would do to me emotionally to lose that, and i wasn't wrong to worry. there have been some dark, sad moments where i've sorely missed that kind of pleasure. the moments have passed, because i let them, and really because what choice do they have?

so that kind of pleasure doesn't happen anymore, and i both miss it AND am okay with it. it's not either or. one feeling doesn't cancel out the other. but i know for sure i would never make a different choice than i made. all kinds of new pleasures await me that chicken lo mein and cupcakes can't deliver.

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