I feed myself properly tonight

Something is cooking and the whole place smells like it. I made this on purpose, for myself, tonight, with nobody else anywhere in the equation. Nobody is coming over. There is no occasion and there is no audience. I am going to do it again this week, because it took fifteen minutes and it changed the entire character of the evening.

There is steam on the window and a pan making the noise a pan makes. Nothing here is impressive and all of it is warm. There is one bowl out and it is mine and I am going to sit down with it rather than eat it standing on my feet. The radio is on and I am not really listening to it, which is exactly the right amount of attention to give a radio.

I feed everybody else properly and then eat standing up over the sink. I would never let somebody I love do that, and I do it to myself without thinking, which tells me something I have been carefully not hearing. The standard I hold for other people and the standard I hold for myself are not the same standard. I have spent years calling that gap selflessness. It is closer to a habit I have never once examined in daylight, and habits do not need my approval in order to keep running. They just need me not to look.

Cooking one real thing is not about nutrition. It is fifteen minutes of treating myself like somebody worth the trouble, and that is a difficult claim to argue with afterward while sitting in front of the evidence of it. How I treat myself when nobody is watching is not a small private matter. It quietly sets the floor for what I will accept from anywhere else, and floors get built out of ordinary Tuesdays exactly like this one. Nobody else is ever going to raise that floor on my behalf.

So tonight I cook one real thing. It can be simple. It only has to be made rather than opened, and I am not allowed to eat it standing up. I sit down with it. That second part is not a flourish, it is half of the entire intervention, and it is the half I would quietly drop first if I let myself get away with it. Simple is completely fine. Sitting down is the part that is not optional.

Fed. Properly. By somebody who was paying attention.