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Grocery shopping with food allergies and intolerances is complicated in the best of times.
I keep thinking I have this thing under control, and I just don’t.
Food is hard. It really shouldn't be this hard, but it is. I have both food allergies as well as intolerances. My body doesn't like food, for the most part. In turn, I don't like it a whole lot anymore either.
When I was in college, I experienced food scarcity. It happened not too long after I figured out I had allergies, etc., and what triggered some of them. I couldn't eat super cheap noodles anymore or anything else I was used to just chucking into my shopping basket for under a buck. So, I turned to carrots. There was a sale. I ate a lot of carrots. I ate so many of them that I couldn't bear to eat carrots again for over a decade. The smell of them made my stomach turn. I'm over that now, but I admit that having too many carrots on hand stresses me out.
Weirdly, having too much food on hand also makes me uncomfortable. It makes me think something is wrong. And, well, right now, something is very wrong on the largest scale I'm familiar with.
I don't know what to do with what most people around me would consider a normal amount of food at home. We didn't panic buy. We didn't over-buy. We simply have a fuller-than-usual-for-us fridge.
What I'm also finding alien is the need to get more things when there's still plenty of other things in the fridge. The rational part of my brain understands that we should replace the staples as we start to run low and get more produce, too. The food-scarcity/lizard-brain thinks we should eat all the things regardless of a balanced diet and not leave home for more until we're almost out of everything.
It's confusing. I'm confusing. I'm trying to rewire my brain around food. I don't know if it's going to happen. Regardless, I'm looking forward to having a mostly empty fridge again. Until then, I draw, paint, read, and breathe.
Addendum: The Dress!
This is one I bought to wear at a special sort of special event. This might be the first time I've just worn it because I wanted to. The blue bits are a slip that shows through in places, like the cut outs in the skirt. There's a good chance I got the slip for free. I was a good scavenger back in the day. When I lived in SF, that's how I procured much of my furniture and even a lot of art supplies in college.
This dress has a lot of good memories tied to it.