Does your food ever skeeve you out? You are just in the kitchen minding your own business, preparing a meal, when all the sudden your eyes are not seeing the ingredients, but are instead seeing something macabre and terrifying? This could very well be my ugly OCD coming out (yeah, bet you didn't know OCD could manifest by making you obsess over nightmarish things, didcha?) It's a lot like this.
I remember when I was a kid, there was this one time that my dad was fixing hot links. For those uncultured swine out there that don't know about hot links, they have a very strong smell to them while they are cooking. Like hot, greasy, fatty, spicy hot dogs. Only not necessarily good. They are these spicy sausage links. Hot links. It's a thing, I swear. So my dad is cooking hot links and our house smells very meaty. While we are eating at the table, my dad tells this horrific story (that I'm pretty sure is a true story, but I think it might have been just an urban legend. I like to think it is just an urban legend. Anyway.) about these two LDS missionaries who were murdered at a meat processing plant and the only things they ever found were the missionaries name tags. I was unable to eat a hot link for about thirteen years.
Sometimes it's less scary than that. After I worked in the Brookshire's (east Texas grocery chain) deli for six months, I just couldn't work with raw chicken very well. I would do it if I wanted something made with chicken, but once I was done cooking, I suddenly didn't want that chicken dish I just made. I would be able to smell soapy dingy water and burnt grease, just like the deli at closing time. I couldn't shake it until my depression messed with my memory. Or if I eat something new and then I get really sick, I'm forever skeeved out by that food. Chicken sausages. Can't do it. No matter how good the sample may be.
Today, the kitchen creeps struck again. Our local grocery store's butcher counter sells these delicious little monsters called brat burgers. What!? They are amazing. David and I figured that if we bought the brats at Sam's, we could just remove the little sausage casings and then have our own brat burgers for a better price. I pulled one of the casings off a brat, all excited about brat burgers for dinner when my brain switched funny. No longer was I holding a sausage casing, it was a disgusting pork flavored used condom. I nearly ran from the kitchen and hid in my bed. But that's what I would have done when I was sick and, by golly, I'm not sick anymore. I can handle cooking! I can totally unwrap two more brats...It was terrible. I couldn't stop my brain from conjuring up all these ugly, ridiculous images. I fed the cases to the pup because I knew she would find it an awesome treat and what does she care that they are terrifying? She did love them. She ate them right up and then all my brain could think about was my Majzy being a mohel's garbage disposal. I tried to laugh it off, but I couldn't.
I wasn't able to finish preparing our burgers. That will be up to David after he gets home. Has this sort of thing happened to you? I guess it will now that you've read this. Sorry.
This is the kind of thing that I vaguely remember being very ashamed of while I was in the thick of my depression. I think it's important to open up dialogue. While I want there to be less of a stigma for my own sake, in case I fall back down the rabbit hole, I think it can benefit anyone dealing with their own mental illness or neuroses to be more open with and supportive of each other. I don't know.
How do you get your brain back on track in the kitchen?
Music, I talk on the phone to distract myself, and I deeply and seriously think about other deep subjects. It happens to me too!
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