One week later, I am having a hard time really getting started. It's partly because after that initial bout of enthusiasm, the thought of what I was about to try to do made me want to gag. But there's something else. Maybe this sounds strange, but I have actively hated raisins for so long that it feels like giving up my hatred of raisins would be giving up a part of my identity.
Once, during a Relief Society lesson, one of the women in my ward talked about a surgery she had had as an adult. It was a brain surgery, to stop the epileptic seizures she had been experiencing since her childhood. The seizures were debilitating. She couldn't control when they would hit, and consequently could not get a driver's license and operate a vehicle, or even watch her children by herself. Having the surgery stopped the seizures entirely and drastically changed her life for the better. Suddenly she didn't have to live in fear of the seizures. She could watch her children without worrying, and drive them around just like any other mother. But in spite of this, she found herself depressed after the surgery. The depression didn't make sense to her, until she realized that she felt like she had lost a part of her identity permanently. The loss was a positive one, but a loss of identity nonetheless, and she had to go through a long period of mourning.
My own raisin-hating identity is trivial by comparison, but I don't think it's uncommon to struggle to give up something that lies somewhere along the spectrum from inconvenient to debilitating, mildly harmful to destructive. By virtue of having lived with that thing, be it a food aversion or epilepsy or a bad habit or an addiction, for such a long time, it becomes a part of our identity. Losing a part of ourselves is hard, no matter what kind of part it is.
Still, I'm doing it. My mom set out trail mix with white chocolate-covered raisins a few days ago, and those were a nice raisin gateway because there was so much white chocolate I could barely taste the raisins at all. And last night I made oatmeal raisin cookies for family night treat, and they were actually not half bad. I even made myself eat a raisin or two plain while I was mixing up the dough.
My goal is not to like raisins, just to tolerate them, and I suspect it might be easier than I think.
4 comments:
When I was a little girl, I HATED cantaloupe. Just the smell, let alone the taste, made me physically ill. Yet every summer I saw adults gobbling it up and actually LIKING it. I felt left out and in an odd sort of way, incapable of becoming an adult myself if I didn't like cantaloupe. So I made the decision to learn to like it. I started forcing myself to eat cantaloupe when it was served. At first a very little bit at a time to try to control the nausea. And I did it! Eventually I learned to like cantaloupe and now I consider it one of my favorite summertime treats. So I sympathize. Keep going, you can do it!! And maybe if you're lucky, when you overcome your raisin loathing, I'll buy you a Chunky Bar. ;-)
So proud of you, Amy! I remember how much you loathe(d) raisins!
And you can do it! I abhor yogurt BUT lately I've been eating plain yogurt with granola and liking it! It's a miracle!
At Yahoo! we had to use this terribly outdated software everyday to get our work done and everyone complained endlessly about it. When they finally replaced it with sleek new software everybody complained bitterly about having to give up the old software. The manager told us shortly after the change, "It's hard to change something, even if you hate the thing you're changing." I thought that was pretty profound.
I like raisins in things, but I have never had the urge to just eat them plain. Until a few months ago when I was doing a sugar fast and was looking for an acceptable sweet treat...I was watching my kids devour raisins out of the bag, so I tried some. They were surprisingly good and just the sweetness I was looking for. Apparently raisins can be a hidden gem that some of us are only now discovering :)
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