u/pixelpea

It’s a little funny because I actually hadn’t meant to. Out of habit and guilt (stupid, I know) I just tend to go for vegetarian or halal choices; they still taste alright (plus, many people think I’m still Muslim so it’s easier to just keep up appearances).
But not this time apparently.

So what had happened was I’d been given a small pastry/cake thing I thought was vegetarian and I was about to eat it, when I realised it had marshmallows in it. Out of habit I considered not eating it or taking the marshmallows out but my mom was there (she’s the one who’d given it to me, clearly unaware of the contents) and I didn’t want to make a scene and honestly the cake looked good and, call me gluttonous, but I didn’t want to waste a perfectly fine cake.

So I thought, fuck it, and ate it - in front of my religious mom, who was none the wiser. It was delicious, with cake and frosting and biscuit and, of course, the marshmallows. They were the best bit.

It was quite cathartic, actually: so many times I had had to deny myself sweets that were perfectly fine to eat, or experiences that were perfectly normal to partake in, or clothes that were perfectly acceptable to wear because I had been indoctrinated from birth - and in a small way this was my retribution. I thought it was poetic that the sweet was from my mother, who had put all this nonsense in my head from the start. Don’t get me wrong, I love her so much (she’s my mother, goddammit) but I don’t love the lifestyle I had no choice but to live out, the social bullseye that had been painted on my back.

And yet still I know this brainwashing has its monstrous hold on me. After eating the cake I felt (and still feel) guilty and horrible. Like I’ve crossed a line and there’s no going back. I feel physically sick (a testament to the placebo effect), and some part of me is telling me I’ve made a terrible mistake.

Of course I’d eaten non halal food in the past, or food with alcohol in it, but these were all accidental and I immediately stopped and repented. But here I consciously ate it, and with vigor, revelling in my wrongdoing. And so I feel something has been taken that may never come back.

But simultaneously I know that thing that has been taken is something bad that needed to go.
Perhaps what I may have seen in the past as an unholy transgression is, in fact, a rite of passage to a life that I have control over, as opposed to the other way around.

This may seem like a fastidious overreaction to eating some cake and I concede that point, but all my life I was convinced an infraction of this kind was unforgivable. Rhetoric like it was fed to me from childhood to the point where eating anything wrong, wearing anything wrong, or saying anything wrong would send me into an inconsolable panic and mental shutdown. (I then found out I was neurodivergent, which explained a few things about that, lol.) I was also just in a constant state of anxiety in general.
To put it simply, not a good time. And it’s still there because I know this dumbass cake thing will plague me with guilt for a while. I still feel sick to my stomach.
It will take a while to get used to the fact that it’s okay to do this, because unfortunately I have nobody on my side in this. I am alone, in this sense.

Thank you for reading! I hope my writing was okay and palatable and not too tangential. Apologies if it was.

Also, any advice is welcome. As well as good sweet recommendations; with this new found freedom I’m excited to finally eat the stuff I used to gaze at longingly from shop windows.

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