When the noise goes quiet · call recap
The negotiation stopped and I did not know what to do
16 September 202410 attendedHeld by Jonah
Ten people describing the same thing in ten sets of words, which is what this circle is for. A constant mental negotiation about food, running since childhood in most cases, that has gone. Relief, mostly. Also disorientation, and in three cases something closer to grief, and one person genuinely unsettled by how much of her inner life that negotiation had turned out to be.
Where the room started
Trying to describe it, which is harder than it sounds because there is no shared vocabulary and the phrase everybody reaches for online has been worn smooth. Gus said he finally understands why he was hungry for thirty years. Zen described it as a radio she had never been able to switch off, in a house where she had assumed everybody had one.
That was the moment that changed the hour. Two people said, more or less at once, that they had not known other people did not have this. One of them was quiet for a while afterwards.
What came up
What was underneath it, once it went. Boredom, for three people, which had been getting eaten over and was now simply visible. Time — an unexpected amount of unallocated attention that nobody had warned them about. For one member, a low-level anxiety that the negotiation had been masking and that arrived undiluted in about week five.
And the grief of losing something you hated, which is the sentence Nell used and which two other people said was the closest anyone had got.
Where we left it
Carefully, and with one thing said plainly by me. Not everybody gets this, and the people who do not are not doing it wrong. There were two people on the call whose experience of appetite has barely altered, and in a room full of relief they were at risk of feeling like a failure. We spent the last ten minutes there deliberately.