The tell tale sign that I was having a mental breakdown was that I wasn’t eating. While I’m sure the same could be said for others, in my case this was especially shocking. I’ve always been obsessive about food, the making and eating of it, to the extent that the food culture of Florence ironically played a significant part in me choosing it as a place to spend my year abroad. This was a period I was excited about, a chance to spend the third year of my degree practising my language and immersing myself in culture. It was the revelation that I was no longer bothering to feed myself, along with a disinterest in other key activities like speaking to people and leaving my bed, that made my mum decide that I had to come home, that it wasn’t safe for me to stay on my own anymore. Despite the obvious importance of socialising and going outside, I think it was the fact that I was no longer eating that scared her the most, that said that something was very wrong.
Since lockdown, my experiences of food and mental health have been closely linked. Cooking and eating gave me a purpose when I had none, a means to punctuate my day with some semblance of a routine. As soon as lunch was finished, I would start preparing dinner. It was during this period that I started to understand all the roles that food could play in my life. Chopping veg for a soffritto, I’d reach an almost meditative state, kind of grasping the concept of mindfulness that I’d rolled my eyes at so many times. Riffing off a recipe let me feel creative, like I had some control in a world that was falling apart. I was nourishing myself and others, but there was something intangible beyond that being shared. Cooking was an act of love and care, a combination of time and energy and thought that expressed something deeper. I was starting to fall in love with food, and with using it to care for myself.
This was the space I was in when I first moved to Florence, salivating at the possibility of months of la dolce vita. My appetite was endless, overwhelmed but never satiated. My memories of these early days exist in mouthfuls like snapshots - the first bite of a cloying budino di riso that filled my eyes wide with joy; the revelation of every glass of wine coming with a delicious, improvised crostino, assembled right in front of me with whatever appealed to the chef in that very moment; a smoky, courgette risotto, eaten sat in a buzzy piazza with unmistakable Italian charm; the giant bistecca alla Fiorentina, four fingers thick, but still perfectly cooked. At a certain point, though, things took a turn. My mind became a space so full of worry and obsession, there was no room for anything else.
"A smoky, courgette risotto, eaten sat in a buzzy piazza with unmistakable Italian charm; the giant bistecca alla Fiorentina, four fingers thick"
I ended up in a headspace in which I was my own worst enemy. I spent hours obsessing over everything I’d ever done wrong, any mistake I could pull out of my 20 years of existence. This thinking was relentless and all consuming, requiring constant reassurance from the very few people close to me that I let know what was happening to me. Not that I really knew what was happening myself, which made it all the more terrifying. I kept closing in on myself, unable to function as my world became smaller and smaller. The extra roles that food could play, which had made me so passionate about it before, now made my stomach turn. I didn’t like myself - I wasn’t deserving of the care or joy or effort of food. Any moment of enjoyment I allowed myself seemed to prove all my worst thoughts right - I was awful, and worse than that, not even concerned enough about this awfulness to devote all of my time to obsessing over it. The guilty spiral would continue from there.
Unlike when things took a darker turn, there was no distinctive moment of positive change for me, when the clouds suddenly opened and I realised I was coming out the other side. Instead, through working with a therapist who recognised my obsessive compulsive behaviour, I forced myself to go through the motions, however pointless or excruciating they might feel. Two crucial aspects of this routine were eating and leaving the house. I had to pretend to be normal to eventually move towards becoming normal, and where better a place to have to act this way than in public.
This feigned normality drew me into local cafes, bars and restaurants. I was eating because I had to, but what I ate reintroduced me to the joy I could find in food. The pappa al pomodoro and glass of Chianti at my favourite wine bar was good enough that, even at its most obsessive, my brain had to admit that it deserved a second of appreciation. It was in this way that I claimed back pieces of a life. My world became sensory and immediate, anything else risked providing dangerous material for the darkest parts of my mind. I forced myself to think about the warmth of the sun on my skin, the texture of the gelato melting down my fingers, the fizz of bubbles on my tongue from my glass of Prosecco. The viscerality of the world of food became a means to escape the twisted fiction my brain had constructed for me, and to assert, however counterintuitively, that I deserved to eat, to be cared for, to be nourished.
"The viscerality of the world of food became a means to escape the twisted fiction my brain had constructed for me"
The places in which I ate helped my desperate crawl back towards the person I had been, too. When I sat and ordered a glass of wine or a coffee, I was at once both anonymous and included, drawn into a community of those eating and drinking and preparing food, however temporarily. No one knew what was going on inside my head, and in a way that freed me from it too. My core belief had been that whatever thought I was fixated on must be a fundamental and urgent truth, but in sitting in a cafe, watching those around me, I was reminded of a world outside myself. Visiting these places became a kind of ritual for me, with its own rewarding regularity. The longer I spent in each place, the more I would recognise its individual characters and, in turn, begin to leave my own impression. In a local cafe, I would be greeted with a kind of caring indifference by the two old ladies who owned the place, served a simple penne al ragù, or occasionally told that I had come too late and nothing was left for lunch. A bookshop cafe a short walk away became a regular retreat for me, despite the fact that I was still too unwell to listen to music while I walked, since it gave my brain too much space to obsess. After forcing myself through a podcast, I would be greeted by a woman who remembered my order of a cappuccino and cornetto. A football themed bar around the corner, bizarrely open for breakfast and stocking croissants filled with Chantilly cream, became another spot I would visit regularly. The place would always be filled with old Italian men, drinking glasses of wine and pints of beer from 8am. In my own strange way I felt I fit in with the place’s vague sense of desperation, or maybe they sensed I was too fragile to question my presence and just went along with me being there anyway. In a pizza place round the corner from my apartment, I would always be welcomed by the same smiling woman, who remembered my parmigiana pizza order from the first time I went.
In this way, the experience of eating in these places brought me back to myself, slowly. Changes to my relationship with food were both a symptom and a salvation; first alerting me to my illness, and then helping me to map my way out of it. The things I ate came with relationships, however imperceptible they might usually be considered to be. In those moments of desperation, each interaction seemed to say something to me. The care with which a crostino was put together, the fact of being remembered, the recognition between regulars. All of these, to me, were small ways of people saying I see you. You are a part of this, no matter how small or insignificant. You belong here, with us. And that turned out to be exactly what I had needed to hear.
…
Once I was back from Florence, after four restless months at home before moving away again, I made my local greengrocer deeply uncomfortable by telling him how much I appreciated his chats. His asking how I was, what I was cooking, telling me when my favourite hummus was back in stock, offering me creamy, salted pistachios to try. I explained to him that I had been home for so long because I’d had issues with my mental health, and that his care and conversations had often been the best parts of really difficult days. He turned red and mumbled some thanks. I hope it was the right thing to do. I hope he heard what I was really saying. Thank you for seeing me, I see you too.