Deserving

Written February 2020:

I’ve been skipping lunch a lot more than I should be recently. Not accidentally.

This past week I did not bring lunch to my club meeting. It fell on a Thursday, one of the days where I miss track practice, so I felt like I didn’t really need the food. Or maybe like I didn’t deserve the food. I knew it could be spreading the wrong message, but I sat through the whole meeting hoping no one notice, or that even if people noticed that no one would care.

The idea of “deserving” food does seem really wrong and (kinda) gross to me, but I can’t really help it. Some days, I feel like I’ve earned all the meals I want: those are the days when I complete a kick-ass track workout, or where I had eaten a light dinner the night before, or where I had seen myself in the mirror and deemed it “acceptable.”

Other times, I don’t find myself quite as deserving: those are the days where I decide to skip my run because I am too tired, or where I try on five different shirts before going out because they all make me look bigger than I want, or where I feel like people don’t really see me as attractive or thin or athletic.

Being deserving plagues so many aspects of my life, even outside of food.

Sometimes, I question how deserving I am of friendship, considering how introverted I am, and how I feel like I bring everyone down all the time. I question how deserving I am of love because I feel really sad a lot of the time.

Sometimes when stuff just really sucks I feel like I deserve it even if I don’t.

Being deserving, or not deserving, of these things is really silly obviously, but it is hard to remember that when all the dilemmas are going on inside just my own head. Sometimes I don’t feel like I have anyone on the outside to validate me, or to remind me that I am deserving, or that it isn’t even really about being deserving at all.