There was a time I was severely hypoglycemic, and the pattern went like this. I would think, I’m hungry. Then that “I’m hungry” would get repetitive, more insistent, screaming so loud that it was all I could hear, until it became a desperate beast that demanded filling. It felt like if there was a banquet for starving children I would push them all aside to shove all the food in my gullet. That was right before losing consciousness.
The beast had no manners and no memory of the woman I was an hour before. But that is the power of my amazing biology doing its damned best to keep me alive.
If you are hungry, if your spirit is starving, you will most likely, inevitably, cross your own morals and ethics to fill that famished hunger. This is not a character flaw, it is simply human biological spirituality.
This doesn’t mean we are not responsible for the harm we cause others. We are. It does mean we are human and there are forces of the body and spirit that are larger than sheer will. Will is a good horse. It is a poor match for the beast of famine, be it physical, emotional or spiritual.
People have affairs because they are desperate for touch, for being seen, for feeling their own vibrancy, and on and on. The woman who fills her closet with things she never unwraps, because the moment of buying is the only moment she feels okay. The man who drinks until the edges soften, because softness is nowhere else on offer. The friend who gossips, grabbing a sliver of belonging by setting someone else outside the circle. The boss who bullies, because being feared feels closer to mattering than being invisible. Each of them is a part at the banquet, elbows out, doing its desperate best with the only food it can find.
The trick really isn’t about how much more we can control our behavior. It’s how do we listen to the hunger signs before we’re tossing children aside and going unconscious? The first pangs are so easy to override. Scrolling past midnight. The joke about running away to a cabin with no phone. A tiredness sleep won’t touch. A snap at someone who did nothing wrong. For me, it can start as a kind of flatness, a shift from a decent state of being into the unrest of “something not quite right.” Maybe yours sounds like a sigh or a restlessness in the legs. A part tapping on the door, asking politely, the way parts do before they learn they have to kick it down in order to be heard.
When do we not take those needs seriously? A relationship that asks us to be smaller. A job that doesn’t allow our creativity to live. A friendship where we always listen and are never asked. A faith that taught us the body was the problem. A family role handed to us at seven that we are performing at fifty. Caregiving with no end date and no relief shift. A calendar so full not one hour belongs to the wild in us. Grief we were told to be over by now. We tell ourselves we’re fine. We ration. We live on crumbs and call it discipline, but the tighter we keep a part in a box, the more likely it is to bomb its way out.
I have gotten pretty good at setting the table early. Leaning into my friend while we watch a movie, an hour in the dirt, deep phone conversations with people who get me, a song sung loud in the car. Most days I eat before the shaking starts. Some days the beast beats me to the table, and those days teach me too.
And when I sit across from someone who pushed past the children at the banquet, I try to remember the hunger before I remember the harm. Both are true. Both get a seat. And I hope, someday, they are fed before they are starving.