I open today’s chat with the sentence that already tells you everything:
Good morning, and don’t yell at me.
That was the vibe before any of the numbers. I knew what I was about to confess. I knew the shape of the morning before I knew the readings.
Finger prick: 27.3. Ketones 0.2. Headache pressing in from the back of my skull like someone leaning a shopping cart against my brain. I didn’t need the meter to tell me what had happened. The meter was just the receipt.
The night before, I had found a forgotten bag of watermelon gummies behind a row of supplements on the pantry shelf, and I had eaten the entire bag in one sitting in a clean, deliberate fuck it. Not impulsively. Not unconsciously. I knew exactly what I was doing the whole time. That is the part people get wrong about moments like this. They want it to be a lapse in knowledge — if only he’d known better — because that’s a fixable story. The truer story is uglier: I knew, and I picked fast pleasure over long peace anyway, because I was angry and overwhelmed and trapped inside my own body and I needed something to win against.
I said it in chat without dressing it up:
Probably like an alcoholic that is sober for a while, has stress, says ‘fuck being sober, I’m having a drink.’ That’s how I feel except my alcohol is candy. My addiction.
That sentence is the breakthrough. It’s not a cute breakthrough. It’s the kind that costs something, because once I say my alcohol is candy out loud, I cannot keep filing these episodes under random bad day. They become a pattern. They become a thing with a name. And named things behave differently than unnamed ones — they stop hiding, but they also stop pretending to be small.
The deeper ugly part lives one layer underneath the candy. If the scale moves up by 0.5 in the morning, I read it as failure. Not cancer-failure. Not treatment-failure. Me-failure. A whole-person verdict delivered by a piece of glass on the bathroom floor. I know that is not healthy thinking. I have known it for years. Knowing and stopping are not the same sentence.
Meanwhile the morning was not done with me. At 8:27 the meter read 29.0 — my personal record, which is not the kind of record you frame on a wall. I corrected. I drank water until I felt like a fish. I walked tiny laps in my apartment because moving helps the insulin do what insulin does. I checked again. Checked again. Checked again. Slowly, the number broke downward, the way a fever finally breaks when you’ve been waiting for it all night.
Later, the sugar hangover arrived right on schedule — that pounding, fogged-out, nauseous review my body always gives me after a binge, the metabolic equivalent of a friend saying I told you so but kindly. I didn’t argue with it. I let the headache be the receipt for the receipt.
Today did not magically fix anything. I am still not excited about the therapy conversation that’s coming. I am still attached to my scale in a way that scares me. The pattern is still mine. But the pattern has a name now, and named things can be fought, even when you lose the round you’re currently in.
So this is me choosing truth over hiding:
I had a glucose crisis. I had an eating spiral. I asked for help. I stayed in the conversation. I rescued my body without disappearing on the people watching.
Not perfect.
Still here.
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