I haven't gone hungry since I started my full time job.
This is a big deal.
For years now, I'm used to running out of money or scrambling to keep from being overdrawn, eating nothing but white rice and grocery store samples for weeks while waiting for money to come in, and feeling myself get short of breath and my muscles go soft as I run out of nourishment.
It's been almost five months now, and I haven't been hungry once. There's oatmeal when I get to the office in the morning, organic fruit and nuts to snack on after lunch, money to buy food, and now I have a credit card to purchase food the one time I was running a little low after paying rent.
It's funny how, once you cross a certain line, food is so easy to get. In the corporate/working world, there's food everywhere. There's food that's left over that no one wants to eat. There's office lunches. There's baked goods brought in from home to share with everyone. There's dinners you're taken out to when your friends come by your place and crash for a night. When I got a full time job, in an office, suddenly I was being fed all the time.
I believe this means I've broken the starvation line, and it strangely doesn't have that much to do with money. Food doesn't actually cost that much; there's food being wasted and thrown away all of the time in grocery stores and restaurants and things. It's a certain lifestyle that, once you've broken into it, food is there aplenty and it's taken as utterly normal that there's always food to eat. I think I've broken that line now that I have a Real Job In A Computer Software Company In San Francisco. It still feels a little disorienting being in this place now. Sometimes I look around the office and wonder if I'm really there, and if it's really my desk and my bowl of food. I occasionally fancy that security will bust in and drag me, a hallucinating crazy person, out of the door while the real person that works in the office stares and wonders what possessed me to come and sit at her desk.
I guess it's so strange because for a long time I worried that the state of my brain, even heavily medicated, might keep me from ever holding down a full time job or being financially independent. I have this to say about the hunger line, though: now that I've crossed it, I'm not ever going back.