It’s part and parcel of being a guy. My character defects are interwoven inside my gender traits.

Wanting to eat compulsively, eat overabundantly, eat emotionally is wrapped up in my gender. Eating doesn’t directly cause character defects nor directly cause harm to others. But it’s intertwined inside of them. It’s also interwoven inside my character strengths. Everything good about me has become linked to food, just like everything bad. My taciturn nature. My moodiness. My brooding. My incommunicativeness.

These things are also wrapped up in my manhood. I feel I am simply behaving like a man. However I am behaving like an ass. Manhood can cut both ways. Good and bad.

Even this trying to cut to the heart of the matter, not bottling, is tricky. It can so often backfire if I am not keeping my eyes on the prize. Salvation. Self-knowledge. If I only go half way, it can be a catalyst to a slip. If I rest on my laurels, if I am at all self satisfied or self obsessed, I am cruisin’ for a bruisin’.

Scott and I used to use that expression. Good ol’ Scott. I wonder where my defects of character bled into our friendship. I can think of one instance where I was probably in a particularly brooding state of mind, and he called it out. But there are others where my particular personality quirks gave us that wonderful rapport that was the key to a close friendship. That’s what I’m talking about. My obsession with food is a symptom of who I am, the good and the bad. If I wasn’t a glutton, Scott wouldn’t have had the opportunity to cook me somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 egg in a baskets on some Saturday mornings. It was a springboard for certain fun times. It didn’t directly cause me to act like a jerk, like alcohol apparently does. But it got fused with whatever maladjustments I have been prone to over my life. Of course in my first family food was intimately interwoven into our traditions and daily lives. So whatever bad personal qualities I absorbed within that environment, have been addressed in a certain way by my relationship with food.

Food is unfortunately an odd but common replacement for human connection. Perhaps some character defects spring from this replacement. Anti socialness. Distraction. Detachment. Uncommunicativeness. Fuzzy thinking. When you put food above people, you obviously are less social. When you’re always thinking about food, you can’t focus on other things and your mind gets lazy. When your diet is so unhealthy, it affects your brain and brain functioning. I am finding myself getting very sleepy lately as a result of not overeating. I think it’s both physical and emotional. Physical because of not having the constant oral stimulation as well as the substance flooding through my bloodstream. Emotional because I used to be trying to be high on food all the time, and now that’s been removed from my daily routine.