The day I forgot about lunch

Dear You,

It was a Tuesday, the first week, and I was answering an email at 2:10 in the afternoon when I noticed the clock. Then I noticed that I hadn’t thought about lunch. Not “I was too busy to eat.” I had been too busy before. This was different. Lunch had simply not come up, the way you don’t think about a neighbor who moved away.

I want to be precise about what that silence felt like, because people ask, and because I think it’s the part nobody prepares you for.

What the quiet actually sounded like

Before the medication, food ran in the background of my day like a radio in another room. Not loud. Constant. At 10 am I’d be thinking about what lunch would be. At 11:30 I’d be deciding between two options. By 12:15 I’d be eating, and by 12:45 I’d be wondering whether there was anything in the drawer for 3 pm. I didn’t experience this as a problem. I experienced it as being a person.

That Tuesday the radio was off. I sat there and listened for it and there was nothing. No preference, no pull, no little negotiation. Just a body sitting in a chair, finishing an email.

I’d love to tell you it felt like freedom. The first word that actually came to me was “eerie.” The second was “oh.” Then, because I’m practical, the third was “I should probably still eat something.”

The hour I got back

Here’s the arithmetic nobody mentions: I’d been spending roughly an hour a day thinking about food, choosing food, walking to food, eating food, and recovering from food. In week one that hour came back to me more or less intact.

I did not use it well at first. I scrolled. I got up to look at the fridge out of habit, stood there, and sat back down like a cat who forgot why it came into the room.

By Thursday I’d started doing something small with it. I took a walk at 12:30 with no destination. I called my mother, who assumed something was wrong because I was calling in the daytime. I cleaned out the drawer at work where the 3 pm snacks lived and found a pen I’d lost in 2021.

I’m not saying walks and phone calls are the answer. I’m saying the hour is real, it’s yours, and if you don’t give it a job it will go looking for one on its own.

What I did about the lunch I forgot

I ate it. Late, small, and without enthusiasm. A yogurt and a handful of almonds at my desk at 2:30, more as an act of maintenance than a meal. That became my first rule, and I still keep it two years later: when the appetite forgets, the calendar remembers. A reminder on my phone at noon that says “eat something.” Not a lecture. Two words.

Because the quiet is pleasant, and it is also a little bit of a liar. It will let you go until 4 pm and then hand you a headache and a bad mood and act like it had nothing to do with it. One person’s experience. Yours may run on a different schedule. If you’re regularly missing meals or feeling faint, that’s a conversation for your care team, not for a blog.

The one thing I’d tell week-one me

Don’t celebrate the silence yet. Don’t mourn it either. Just notice it, and write down what you notice, because by week six you’ll have forgotten what the radio even sounded like, and by month eight you’ll be asking yourself whether it was ever really that loud.

It was. I have the notes.

That afternoon I wrote three lines in the app on my phone: “Forgot lunch. Felt weird. Ate yogurt.” Not poetry. But it’s the first entry in a file that now runs to a couple hundred, and when I read it I can still feel the exact texture of that Tuesday: the quiet room, the finished email, the strange new absence where a whole person used to be waiting for a sandwich.

The appetite got quiet. Life got loud. But that was later. Week one was just quiet, and a yogurt, and a pen from 2021.

Want to tell me something? Reply to any Low Volume email, or write to me here. I read everything.

Getting Quiet shares lived experience, general education, and practical tools. For medical decisions and individual treatment questions, talk with your qualified care team.