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.

It's always a trip when my brain starts reprogramming itself, because the dreams get crazy... and exhausting. Not bad, just tiring, so that by 5 a.m. or so it's easier to wake up and just wait until I get tired enough to really conk out. Last night the dreams were about being in a small clear pod with a few other women, tumbling out the back of a pickup truck at high elevation, and plummeting far, far down to the ground while I screamed, "God protect us! God protect us!" right before the others informed me that we'd already hit the ground.

And then, the one about being in the same pod, rolling down a conveyor belt in a dark tunnel toward a sign that said, "RADIATION." And I dug my way out of the pod with my fingernails and press the alarm button to make the conveyor belt stop, again and again... which it did...

That sort of thing.

This all started when my mother-in-law died, on February 21, I think. It started off a long chain of processes which forced me to compare how people in my family died. They died bitter and alone, and scared, and without fanfare or any loving ceremonies -- unlike my mother-in-law.

Before that I had literally been praying for my compulsion to work on my business to be lifted somewhat, because I felt imprisoned. I felt like a horrible taskmaster. Not only did I work all day long, I worked all night long and on weekends, too. This was all accompanied by the horrible feeling that if I stopped even for a minute, my competitors would overtake me.

Then my mother-in-law died, and we were there for over a week (it was a full Catholic funeral), and when I came back everything was topsy-turvy.

Right now, I'm taking a break from work. I haven't seriously worked for going on two weeks now. My excuse, when I bother to have one, is that I'm doing taxes, which is true, and laborious. But that's not really it. I'm just making space for my brain to rewire itself, which is hard to do what I'm constantly scurrying after the next project like some robotic gerbil with no end to the hamster wheel in sight.

Instead, I sit at my computer, or on the couch with a book, or outside with an edging spade in my hand, and I ask myself over and over, "What do I want to do? What do I want to do?"

There's a pleasure with asking that's there no matter how often I do it. And this too makes it hard to go to bed. It's easier to sleep without that nagging sense of possibility and opportunity hanging around the hours.