Beans are a common craving of mine. Whether it’s my British DNA calling out to me, my obsession with warming beans on a campfire in the Canadian wilderness in The Long Dark, or my body’s insatiable appetite for protein, I have been craving beans for ages. I have eaten beans in the ED airlock before, but it wasn’t enough. I gave my body exactly half a can of beans with very strictly portioned cheese and a piece of bread, and my body laughed at me for my feeble attempt to satisfy its craving. What it actually wanted was an entire tin of beans and sausages, a lot of cheese, and at least two slices of wholemeal bread. This post is me, for once, listening to my body.

This bean-and-cheesey meal is a lot of food in one go for someone in the airlock. I sit between two opposing forces: knowing it is a reasonable amount of food and corrupted Clippy telling me it’s, “far too much”. Corrupted Clippy doesn’t like big numbers or feeling any kind of satiation. When it encounters either, it wrongly initiates DANGER protocols and fills my ship with deafening alarms that are hard to ignore. The alarms are so bothersome and fill me with such dread that I want to do anything just to make them stop. Clippy offers me tempting promises of silence if I just follow its rules.

On Thursday, I finally got fed up with my body continually pestering me for beans and being torn between what I knew my body wanted and the alarms corrupted Clippy set off whenever I so much as thought about it. In preparation, I had previously bought my favourite Cathedral City Extra Mature Cheddar, some wholemeal bread I love, and my favourite Heinz beans with Richmond sausages. They were just sitting there, waiting in the cupboard. As food seems to do in the airlock, their presence was a constant reminder that I wasn’t eating them, despite wanting and craving them. Every time I opened the cupboard to get my Corrupted Clippy-approved food instead, I felt so much guilt and fear seeing the untouched food I wanted.

I wanted to change that. I wanted to eat the beans the way my body initially wanted during the original Day of the Beans. Frankly, I also wanted to eat them to tell my body to shut up and stop obsessing about beans all the time. Its continual demands were starting to (cheese) grate on me — this must be what it’s like for everyone else when I go on about Cyberpunk, Mass Effect, or physics. Clippy’s alarms sounded as soon as I thought about having beans for dinner, but whether it was my body already mad at me, my anhedonia giving me an “I don’t care about anything anymore” boost, or the realisation that I had now spent a whole year in my airlock, I pushed through.

I cooked the entire tin of beans with my teen’s encouragement. Then, I cut some cheese chunks to melt into the bowl and didn’t even measure them. I just kept chopping and added as much as I knew my body wanted, and I buttered two slices of bread. I sat and watched EastEnders with my teen, and we ate dinner together. It was DELICIOUS, especially this time, because I had actually put enough cheese in to taste it. I demolished the beans and enjoyed them, as much as you can with anhedonia, and I felt the sigh of relief my body gave after I finally gave it 40g of protein in one go. But after… came the equilibrium.

The equilibrium is my ship reacting to me opening the airlock door ever so slightly by eating beans. Leaving the safety of my ED airlock and returning to the main area of my ship — where everything and everyone I love exists — is the goal in recovery. On the ship, all my emotions wait. If the door to my ship is opened even slightly, the ship begins the equilibrium process to equalise the pressure between the airlock and the ship. I am immediately hit with a flood of emotions that feel suffocating but are actually allowing me to breathe again after equilibrium. Knowing that equilibrium is the process by which I can return to my ship doesn’t help. In the moment, the flood feels like entropy — the end of my airlock universe — everything, everywhere, all at once.

Anyone peering into my airlock through the porthole would have thought I was crying because I ate beans, but the actual reason was the unstoppable equilibrium of raw emotion: grief, frustration, sadness, and depression from the backlog of feelings I hadn’t been able to process since the last time I ate enough. I wasn’t sad about the beans at all — I was proud of myself for the beans, and they were so TASTY, especially with all the melted, gooey cheese. I was sad because of my appointments, for feeling unseen, for all the frustration I have felt this week. I was grieving the loss of joy, feeling angry at the injustice of everything, missing my friend, and dealing with chronic pain. All of it hit me instantaneously, about an hour after eating beans.

I sorted through the emotions, categorising them, sitting with them one by one. I let myself feel them. I just sat there, cried, and grieved. It is remarkable to me that I even allowed this to happen. Well, being me, I did initially try to swallow the emotions — my automatic method of coping — but it NEVER works. Swallowing them lets them fester and gives Corrupted Clippy a tighter grip on me. I guess it felt easier to sit with them this time, knowing that it was still better than feeling so little like I had been.

In a way, this equilibrium was bittersweet. It was both awful and a huge relief. Any emotion is better than none. I have been dealing with the black hole’s gravity of anhedonia for a while now. Whenever I feel this way, I get scared that it might last FOREVER, even though I know it’s not true. This equilibrium proved to me that my emotions are still waiting for me. As painful as the ones that surfaced were, they mean that euphoric joy, excitement, and hyperfocus are still in there somewhere too — just waiting for me to open the door more than ajar.

I can’t believe it’s been a whole year since I relapsed and hid in my airlock. I siphoned myself off from the ship with everything and everyone I love for the illusion of safety because I was so desperate to feel safe again. I knew the airlock wouldn’t give me that — I’ve been through this before. I’ve even recovered before. All I can think is that I accepted the illusion of safety because it still felt much safer than being on my ship, even with all the risks, confinement, and dangers the airlock itself carries.

During my confinement in the airlock, when everything felt so desperate and broken, I still had so much hope. I hoped someone would find me, dock their lifeboat, and help me open the door to my ship. After a year of waiting and sending out multiple unacknowledged SOSs into the void, I’ve realised no one is coming. I have to open the door myself. I’ve learned that the only person who can fight Corrupted Clippy, open the door, step onto the ship, find their own safety, and deal with the equilibrium is me — and I have to do it alone. Waiting for help will only force me into another waiting mode, similar to the airlock itself. I would do anything to get my emotions back, and I want it to be one exceptionally cheesy bowl of beans at a time.

Thanks for reading, I leave you with a beautiful version of Marshmello’s Silence, a perfect theme song for this post.