What Chris worries about: money. Ex-wives.

What I worry about: well, it varies from week to week.

This week it's food issues. I have a long history of them. We had moved halfway through my junior year, my never-strong family began falling apart in earnest, my father left for another state, and I was trapped deep in the heart of miles of suburbia for the first time in my life. Before this, I'd been surrounded by wilderness -- literally -- and I covered miles on an average day, but now I felt there was nowhere to go, at least after a few halfhearted attempts to jog down the sidewalks of the ugly strange neighborhoods I lived in now.

I began to put on a little weight, but I couldn't do that, so soon I became a real bulimic. My problem with actually binging in sticking my finger down my throat eased a bit after I left home for college, though it took about a year to start tapering off. After that my weight was pretty stable, except it began to climb during my truly awful first marriage of 10 years, and I forced it off again. Then, when I divorced, I went through detox and also some fasting and probably lost about 20 pounds.

The whole time I would have told you I had food under control now -- I binged and purged once year at most -- but that wasn't true. What was true was that I was managing my bulimia with anorexia. I thought about food far more than the average person. I thought about food when I was stressed. I thought about food when I wanted to become numb. I thought about food when I was in danger of being vulnerable within a relationship. But I didn't weigh a ton because I was also extremely good self-denial, something my father taught me. I felt bad about enjoying food. I felt bad about eating breakfast. I felt bad about being seen buying something that tasted good at the store.

More recently, I decided that if I were going to somehow stop letting food dominate all my thoughts, I needed to let the anorexia part unravel. Which meant I might start gaining weight again. Which is, in fact, happening. And for someone like me, that's really scary.

I have a therapy session tomorrow, and I dread it and look forward to it at the same time. My business mojo has been almost dead in the water since my mother-in-law died. But I see a little more about how I structure my day with activity after activity after activity, so I'm never stuck just being. And as for food -- well, food has always been my great comforter. So much of my life has felt like being lost in gravity-less, lightless deep space. And for me, each and every meal has been a marker that said, here is a little outpost of comfort. Here is a full belly to tell you, if you should die in the next few minutes, that there was something warm in your life.

Not only does food give me this little proof against the total meaningless of my life if I should die, it's like a vaccination that ensures me against disappointing relations with the people in my life. They may give me nothing, I think, but food will get me by. The problem, of course, is that I no longer live with the kind of people who will give me nothing. And ironically enough, in that way that always turns up in therapy, my using food as a crutch to make my life bearable in fact keeps away the real people who are standing there wanting to be part of it. In other words, it keeps me hungry, and now it's making me fat on top of it, which I hate.

So I'm spending these days sinking. Sinking isn't bad -- sometimes it's how I feel when I let go of something that needs letting go. But it feels bad. It feels dark and formless and directionless, like those early years in a loveless family, and I literally feel like I'm in a slow freefall all day long. As for work, I could barely care less. And this morning I had a long and incredibly detailed dream about being dead. It was spring. There was a learning curve involved. There were some dead children who needed some cheering up. I had to learn how to walk over the mud and not sink, because it was no longer necessary to sink, being dead. I was awkward at it. I was seen by a kind woman tending a memorial garden for people like me. Other people sensed me; one angry man wanted to exorcise me; most people didn't see me at all.