Mageirocophobia

I have never liked to cook, but I noticed this past weekend that it was somehow worse. I have always had cooking disinclination, but not so much cooking avoidance.

This past weekend I noticed that I would walk into the kitchen, sort of lurk by the fridge near the edge of a counter, and then walk back out of the kitchen again and go lie on the couch watching TV. I tried encouraging self-talk, tried daring myself, tried tricking myself into going in there and preparing something, but I would walk in the kitchen and just walk back out.

I thought it was maybe a general lassitude in the universe, because I'm not practicing guitar much or unpacking any boxes either, but now I think it was something more. I took steps on like Monday to solve the problem, picked up the stuff for spaghetti at the grocery, brought them home with good intentions, but no. Put stuff away in the fridge, walked out of the kitchen.

Tonight, same thing, and I really did need to act on the groceries in the fridge or risk having to throw them all away, unopened. Walked into the kitchen. Walked back out.

Yeah, this was more than disinclination. I decided to kind of delve into the thoughts and feelings a bit more. What bad will happen if you go in there? Over the weekend I had thought it was the time involved, that cooking a proper meal and then dealing with all the dishes would take too long, and I had other priorities that were more important uses of my time, like practicing guitar (or lying on the couch watching TV). So I tried that tonight, but my internal inquisitor was not convinced and pushed further.

And I realized I was afraid of danger. And I think this is because of my recent burn. On that occasion I was already resistant and kind of self-medicating it, because I'd had quite a bit of white wine and because of that kind of mis-aimed and touched my arm to the hot rack in the oven when putting in some frozen pizza, and then didn't react immediately to put the burned place under cold water and so ended up with a pretty severe injury that has left a eucalyptus-leaf-shaped scar, right on the top of my right arm where it's quite obvious all the time.

You know from a previous post that this scar has bugged me and is associated with all kinds of things about aging and hurt and the passage of time.

But also, tonight the emotion was, I hurt myself really badly and because I live alone I just had to go, "Oh," and get the proper ointments and bandages, and just deal with it. I was wearing huge bandages on my arm all week at work, and not one person asked me, "What happened to your arm there?" I even had the bandage at guitar lessons and he didn't ask me anything.

So I had a pretty bad and kind of scary and painful (and permanent) injury, and I never got the chance to kind of collapse and be vulnerable about it, and have someone say, "Oh you poor baby" and comfort me.

And that set up a fear, a dread of pain and fire and heat and boiling things, of sharp knives and deep alarming bleedy cuts and smoke and ruined ingredients, and all the things that can so very easily go so very badly wrong in a kitchen, and I didn't even know that it had. But I'm sure, now, after that excavation work, that's what it was. I was afraid to cook anything because I might hurt myself - the memory of the recent hurt lodged there and turned to avoidant fear maybe because it never got comforted.

This is going to sound like I'm fishing for sympathy. I'm really not, I don't mean to make any of you feel bad, I'm fine and surviving quite well on my own. And then also, I broke through my phobia tonight - put a pot of water on to boil, cooked up the spaghetti and sauce, did all the dishes, put everything away. I got through it by putting the iPod speakers in the kitchen and playing some music that I loved when I was in college, that filled the space and avoided the sense of wasted time in case that was still lingering on top of all of this. And now I'm well fed, have leftovers, and did not have to discard spoiled food. So I got past it. But it certainly was there - if there's anything else like this that comes up, more than a block but a real avoidance, just a physical walking away, I will do this same kind of exercise and see if there was a past sharp unresolved hurt that might be causing it.