What Did You Eat Today?

What did you eat today was the classic question my mother asked anytime I expressed any emotion besides happiness. If I was sad, frustrated, annoyed, depressed or certainly angry, ‘what did you eat today?’ was the classic response. This wasn’t completely out of the blue or inappropriate. We kids had an allergy to artificial colors and flavors that caused us to be very cranky and irritated whenever we ate them. Of course it wasn’t the best response to validate a kid’s legitimate feelings, but it did teach me that there was a physical, chemical cause for the emotions I felt, and even to the thoughts I thought. It wasn’t until I met my husband, (the son of a therapist and a psychologist), that I learned that talking about your feelings could actually make you feel better. I really had no idea. I thought that was a myth. But my mother gave me quite a lesson in the biology of emotions. I realized in college that when I would be feeling off because of something I ate, it would actually affect the things I thought. I would imagine terrible things happening like the gas station I was walking by would blow up and kill me, or someone would jump out of the bushes and stab me 27 times with a switchblade. This realization made me wonder if there were other, less dramatic, influences to my body that were also effecting, not just how I felt, but what I thought.

It’s ironic that that concept has so dictated my exploration of pain in the body. I realize in retrospect that this idea of exploring emotions in the body was something I had been working on in many forms for a long time. When I was a choreographer in San Francisco in the 1990’s the big piece I was working on was about emotions. It was an exploration of the contagiousness and physical manifestation of emotion through the body and face. It was about that time that something happened that changed the course of my life and work. I developed chronic pain.

I fell in a dance class and hurt my pelvis. It didn’t heal. I developed bursitis and tendonitis in my left hip which hurt all time and got worse and worse. It was, at the time, a terrible experience, but in retrospect taught me a tremendous amount about what it was like to have chronic pain. What it does emotionally, what it’s like to see lots of doctors who can’t help you, what it does to your relationships and motivations, and most importantly, led me to explore why it develops, how it stays and how to heal from it.