I’m A Good Pretender
TW: Disordered eating
I’m not usually ashamed of who I am.
One of the circumstances that makes me feel this way is when I go out to eat with people. My close friends know that I’m a very picky eater and accept that, but even around them, I feel ashamed. Even though they know that trying new foods is an ordeal for me and I am not always up for facing my fear, I still get embarrassed when I want Italian food, pizza, or ramen yet again.
It’s even more embarrassing when I’m with someone new. I can’t just jump into my life story and explain why it’s so hard for me to eat new foods, and I don’t want to seem high maintenance or weird by insisting on a place I can eat at. Which is why, when I was on a first date recently, I agreed to go to a Mexican restaurant.
I have nothing against Mexican food - except that I’ve barely tried it. I was afraid to try it after my mom said she’s gotten sick from it before, and I had never eaten any Mexican food except chips and salsa. And trying a new food is one of the most anxiety-provoking experiences in my life.
When I found myself sitting down at Broken English Taco Pub, not sure whether to be more spooked by the fact that I was eating inside a restaurant for the first time in so many months or that I was eating in a Mexican restaurant, I settled for scanning the menu QR code on the table.
I was planning to listen to a suggestion from my psychiatrist, who said that in these situations, my best bet was to find something on the appetizer menu that I was comfortable with in different kinds of restaurants. I’d done my research, and the only Mexican food I had ever eaten before was chips and salsa. I was determined to order that, say that I wasn’t hungry if he asked me any questions - but then something happened that I hadn’t thought of.
He ordered chips and salsa for the table, then asked me what I was going to get.
I hurriedly looked down at the menu, actually reading it seriously for the first time. I couldn’t order chips and salsa as my entree if he ordered it for the table, that would look so weird! I had to actually order an entree, I decided, and eat it to the best of my ability.
I bought myself a little more time by asking him what he liked here and what he planned to get, but nothing appealed to me from his list because nothing was vegetarian. I looked down the menu hurriedly and found the only taco labeled as vegan, called Cauliflower Al Pastor. I had no idea what Al Pastor meant, but I knew that I find cauliflower slightly more tolerable than broccoli, and that was somewhere to start.
Luckily, the ingredients were listed on the menu. The taco I was looking at was filled with roasted cauliflower marinated in chile guajillo, charred slow roasted pineapple, pickled onion, and cilantro. All I could remember about these ingredients was that I had roasted pineapple at my Nana’s 90th birthday party, I’d never tried pickled onions but I love onions and pickles, and according to Silmarillion fanfiction I’d read a few days before, some people thought cilantro tastes like soap.
Strangely enough, this last fact got me curious. Was I one of the people who was going to taste it as soap? I was already starting to accept the idea of ordering this taco. I didn’t know what guajillo meant, but when I Googled it, I did my best to convince myself that I had eaten peppers before and this one was not going to make me sick.
So, when the waitress came back, I waited politely for my date to order his chicken tacos and mustered my courage before ordering a single Cauliflower Al Pastor taco.
The chips came first, much to my relief, and there were two salsas: a red one and a green one. I tried the red one, comfortable with the flavor I’d tried many times before when I was trying to get used to different regional cuisines. My date said that the green sauce was even milder, and asked me which I preferred. I said red, but it was soon obvious that he wanted me to try both of them right there and then and give him my opinion.
I dipped a chip in the green dip, not sure what was in it, and my heart hammered in my chest as I ate it. It was milder, and had a flavor I’d never experienced before, but it wasn’t bad. It was actually kind of good, which I told him. I decided to try to work up to the rapidly approaching taco by trying the red salsa, which I was most comfortable with, and the green, which didn’t seem to do anything to me when I ate it.
Before too long, the tacos arrived. My date got two, which was the typical order size; I got one, because that was about as far as my courage would take me. It arrived folded next to his tacos, but when I copied what he did and put my taco on my separate plate, it flopped over. It was made on two round tortillas that were affixed together, and I was determined to get through the experience by using my observations instead of my judgments.
It’s another therapeutic technique I use - if I can observe what I’m panicking about in a rational manner, I can stop myself from panicking, at least overtly. So I looked down at the taco, poked at the seam between the two shells and noticed that as I did so, some orange sauce spilled out. It was a nice shade of orange, and it covered the cauliflower. On top, the onions were a lovely shade of pink, and a single cilantro leaf looked nice against the pink background.
I was so determined to look normal that I watched how my date picked up one of his tacos, folded it, and bit it from the side. I did the same thing, warily at first, trusting the tortilla more than the fillings. I quickly discovered that there is no way to take a bite of a taco without eating the filling, and soon encountered several flavors that I had no idea what to do with.
Somehow, I didn’t panic. I chewed and swallowed, trying to dissect the flavors in my mouth. Thankfully, my date ate slowly, which gave me time to take small bites and figure out that the onions were my favorite part (not unexpected as they’re my favorite vegetable), the cauliflower stalks tasted better than the tops, and the pepper sauce was spicy but not actually bad. Nothing in this taco was bad, and nothing was hurting me or making me sick.
My confidence increased the more time went by, and by the time we left, I’d eaten half of my first-ever taco. It might seem like a small step, but I was thrilled that when I walked out with my date, he had no questions about how I had eaten.
I had eaten completely normally, and nothing I said or did revealed any of the panic or fear in my head. I pretended to be fine until I was fine, and for the first time in my life, I tried a new food in a much more extreme way than I would usually do (I usually work up to things a lot) without getting any questions or comments.
It felt wonderful, and who knows - maybe one day, tacos like this one will be another food I’m comfortable with and fall back on as I try something else new!
Ellie, a writer in the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.