Anxious Appetite: Table for One

I'll set the scene.

It's 8pm. I'm alone. The day is done or pretending to be done, honestly it's hard to tell anymore. The flat is quiet. Not peaceful quiet. The other kind. The kind that has opinions about you.

I open the fridge.

Not because I'm hungry. Not really. I open the fridge because standing in front of an open fridge is something to do, and doing something feels better than sitting with whatever just walked in. The fridge has never once solved my problems but it has good lighting and absolutely no expectations of me, which at 8pm is more than I can say for most things.

You know this hour. I know you know it.

Living alone in this city is something people romanticise until they're doing it. The freedom is real. The silence is also real. And sometimes at 8pm those two things feel like the same thing, and sometimes they don't, and the difference between those two nights is everything.

The feeling that shows up uninvited at this hour, the low, slightly sourceless unease, the sense that something needs attending to but you can't name it, I used to think that was a personal failing. Like I was doing solitude wrong. Turns out it is just chemistry. Your body is running low on the things it needs to feel settled. The craving at this hour for something warm, something real, that's your gut filing a formal complaint. It is not weakness. It is plumbing.

So. Feed it.

Here's what I've found actually works. Not from a wellness account. From years of field research conducted entirely on myself, in this flat, at this hour.

Dal and rice. Every single time. I used to feel mildly embarrassed about this, shouldn't a grown adult have more sophisticated dinner ambitions?, until I understood that this combination is doing something real for an anxious nervous system. Tryptophan from the dal, just enough carbohydrate to help it reach the brain, serotonin nudges up slightly, the noise nudges down slightly. Your grandmother knew. She just didn't explain the mechanism because she was busy actually cooking it.

Curd. The end of the meal, always. Your gut is where most of your serotonin is made, not your brain, which is a fact I find simultaneously fascinating and annoying, and curd feeds the machinery that produces it. Cold, simple, good. I don't know why I was ever eating anything else to finish a meal.

food helps. People help more. Both are true and neither cancels the other out.

A banana. I resisted this for years because it felt like advice from someone who had never been actually anxious. I was wrong. Magnesium, potassium, tryptophan, three things a stressed person depletes first. I eat one most evenings now. Quietly. Without irony.

Dark chocolate. 70% and above. Two squares, theoretically. More in practice. I'm not going to lie to you about how many squares I eat. The point is it helps and I have made peace with that.

Ginger tea. Hot water, ginger, honey, lime if it's available. Not elegant. Made at the stove in a t-shirt questioning my choices. Still works every time.

None of this is the whole answer. I want to say that clearly.

The times I've been most anxious in my life, the dal was still good and the banana was still good and none of it was enough. Because the thing underneath the 8pm feeling, the thing food is trying to reach but can't quite, isn't serotonin. It's the absence of another person. We're not built to regulate alone. Two nervous systems in the same room, without even trying, will settle each other. This is just how we're wired. It's why the same meal tastes different with someone there. It's why shared silence is different from solo silence.

I know this. I still eat alone most evenings. And I've learned to be okay with the 8pm hour even when it's awkward. But I think it's worth saying honestly: food helps. People help more. Both are true and neither cancels the other out.

Two more things. From experience.

Lifting weights changed my baseline. I came to it late, reluctantly, because I needed something that would occupy my brain completely and leave no room for the noise. It does that. You cannot ruminate and also concentrate on not dropping something heavy on your own face. Over months, the floor of how I felt on a normal day went up. I don't fully understand why. I don't need to.

You cannot ruminate and also concentrate on not dropping something heavy on your own face.

Less alcohol made the evenings more honest. I know. I know. But the drink that takes the edge off at 9pm is a loan, and 7am is when it collects. The anxiety you managed tonight comes back tomorrow with interest. When I reduced, and then stopped for a while, the ambient hum got quieter over a few weeks. Not gone. Quieter. The 8pm hour became more honest, which sounds like it should be worse and is actually better. That's all I'll say about it.

It's 8:15pm. You're alone. The fridge has been opened twice already.

Make the dal. Sit at the table. Put the phone face down for the length of the meal, not because some article told you to, but because you deserve twenty minutes of being a person rather than a content-consuming apparatus.

The city is loud. The flat is quiet. You are okay, even when 8pm doesn't feel like it.

Someday I'll tell you more about me. But for now, I'm right here if you need me.

Opening up is strength. Love, Chimbori.