Sugar is a scary thing

I added sugar to the last of the blackberries I bought at Lepp’s – they’re a smidge bitter – when a memory hit me.

We used to head out to the field/school yard behind the house in the summer months to pick blackberries when I was young, we being my parents and two brothers. Once the various ice cream buckets were filled, we returned home with our bounty.

My mother made freezer jam, but we always had blackberries with ice cream the night of. I liked to make what I called “blackberry mush,” and my brothers usually joined in.

It’s a simple recipe – ice cream, blackberries, and a few heaping teaspoons of sugar. Then you mush it all together into a soft cream and enjoy.

I’ve not enjoyed it in many a year. It would have been hard to, what with both sugar and ice cream being verboten. ^[i]

I only started adding sugar to berries again last year. That was a behaviour utterly foreign to my eating disorder brain, and difficult to reintroduce – see also juice.

Add sugar? Are you on glue?

Of course, that eschewing of sugar never extended to gummy candy. How could it, when they became meal substitutes?

You miss a lot of food when you have an eating disorder, and by extension, you miss a lot of life. They’re hideously interconnected.

I can tell that I’m struggling, food-wise, when my Haribo purchases increase. Happiness is a gummy bear, after all, and I know how to make one last for a quarter of an hour.

Of course, I can also make one hundred disappear in seconds.

It’s good to have skills.

I wish, sometimes, that mine were more John Wick. ^[ii]

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^[i] Save for binges. All rules flew out the window when bingeing.

^[ii] I’m trying this new thing where I write down the thought streams I often have. We’ll see how it goes. Persistence is not my thing these days.

*header image: NRTCgroup

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