Ep. 8 - Selamat datang di Indomaret

I’m stuck in my memory loop again. This time I’m in my childhood home. Grandpa emerges from the kitchen, grinning, an empty jar in one hand. “Could you run to the ga’de and get some sugar, please? We’re out.” He takes the money out of his pocket and hands it to me. “You know that old saying?” He begins to sing. “Cappu’ golla, cappu’ kopi, cappu’ teng!” 

First you run out of sugar, then pretty soon you run out of coffee, then you run out of tea. Then a house stops being a home. 

My obsession with food hoarding perhaps came from the experience of lacking food, and because there is so much precedence, my brain is very, very good at scaring me into compensating for this lack. I hesitated to tell you this story, but I think it’s important for context. I was a teenage runaway in 2011. One time, I was so broke that I hadn’t eaten in two days. My roommate took pity on me and gave me Rp20,000. She, too, was broke, but she had a job as a part-time tutor so she was less broke. Still, it was the end of the month, and Rp20,000 was probably all she could spare. I spent half the money to buy cigarettes (Neslite menthols were Rp6,000 a pack at the time #priorities), two packs of Malkist crackers, and water. It was days until I could eat rice, months before I could afford to nongkrong at 7-11, and a whole year until I could finally eat two meals a day.

I didn’t question it when my mind started telling me to stock Ritz crackers at home just in case. Moving to a bigger place meant I suddenly had all this extra space, so buy five of everything, also just in case. I held on to this lulling, authoritative voice the way I held on to memories of my Grandpa to get me through dark times. But unlike his calm, reassuring tone, my inner voice grew bolder and more urgent over time. Buy twelve energy bars—because I once survived with only water and biskuit for twelve days, get another shelf for your Indomie—I jokingly refer to this shelf as my own personal Indomaret, and ten boxes of tea. I don’t even drink tea (???), but I was more terrified of being starving again, so I shut up and did what I was told. 

During one of my earlier sessions I asked my therapist how I could possibly CBT my way out of actual, real-life trauma that happened to me in the past (also while we’re at it: how do you CBT your way out of poverty, exploitation, oppression, injustice, homophobia???) I insisted that my “obsessions” didn’t just come out of nowhere. They weren’t “irrational”; they were my reality. I was demanding her to convince me (I later learned that challenging your therapist is classic OCD behavior). According to her, learning to understand our trauma, or even just to survive it so we can leave behind our old reality, is all up to chance—for people with OCD it’s not supposed to matter where these obsessions come from; what matters is to “fix” them (which makes me so ANGRY). “We can work to find patterns of living that suit your current reality better. I know the stacks are against you, and it’s not going to be easy. But you can do this.” That she was willing to somewhat admit to the shortcomings of her own recipes was a breath of fresh air. It made me stay.

So there I was, on my kitchen floor, trying to “live in the present reality”, sobbing as I sorted my precious stash of food into boxes labeled THROW AWAY and DONATE. My girlfriend was on the other end of the video call. She was quiet, solemn, out of place: like a distant relative coming to a funeral, knowing nothing about the departed yet staying through the entire procession to pay her respects. She didn’t know me in my previous life; I wanted her here as a reminder that I have so much to look forward to so I could finally, once and for all, cross over to this life. 

She said to me once, “I think we become the adults the child-version of us would feel safe around.” You know people who collect toys as a hobby, how we often tease them about some “unhappy childhood” to make up for? This is nothing like that. I wish it were. I derive no pleasure out of stacking Ritz crackers and filling my whole cabinet with tea bags and cereal boxes. Hoarding food has only ever brought me shame. So much shame it hurts.

In my previous post I referred to my inner voice as evil, mean-spirited, a voice who will stop at nothing to make my life miserable. But what if Tiny Evil Wawa was just Tiny Wawa, a terrified little girl who’s been through hell, and she was trying to feel safe the only way she knew how. I haven’t been doing my job as an adult to make her feel safe. Perhaps it’s time to let her know that we are okay now. We will never go through another night hungry again. Those days are behind us now. Those days are behind us now. I promise. 

Yours,

Big Wawa