The Importance of Comfort
As a child, a picture of pancakes could make me smile. A memory of the taste would take over my mouth and for a moment I thought of nothing but goodness.
Comfort is a commodity. Ask advertisers how important comfort is to consumers. We click on things to provide us with what is hard or impossible to get from other people — the representation of care.
During a pandemic, when those at increased risk for severe consequences shelter-in and others are minimizing exposure to slow progression of the disease, person-to-person comfort is difficult to achieve. Prior to Covid-19, positive physical contact was already at a historic low point; most also avoiding social eye-contact. People reached this level of non-engagement with the assistance of social media and marketing approaches that stimulate endorphins — feel good hormones. These distant “relationships” and inanimate objects soothe the parts of us missing a vital piece of the human experience — emotional and comforting interactions.
I’m not a touchy-feely person even though I’ve been a massage therapist for seventeen years. A counselor introduced me to the career when she suggested I “get a massage” to begin addressing negative touch issues arising from an ugly childhood. During that first massage, lights dim, the room quiet aside from Enya playing in the background, I realized that aside from Enya, this could be a great job. On most days, the loud brashness existing in other forms of employment wouldn’t be encountered. I signed up for classes the following week. All these years later, I’m still dealing with an avoidance to touch. It could be the neural pathways in my brain will never fully recover the ability to be soothed by someone holding my hand.
In a country with skyrocketing cases of child abuse, rape, bullying, and other forms of maltreatment, positive touch isn’t on the rise, nor is the awareness of a need for it. All mammals require touch. Even dolphins rub against one another, transmitting something we humans have yet to fully understand — the importance of connection and comfort.
In the middle of a pandemic, when social interaction isn’t recommended and a global community with millions of people living with historical trauma, we must learn to self-soothe. Doing so, I believe will illuminate the first and perhaps most vital step to building a better society — healing ourselves.
Aside from touch, taste is a form of comfort. The messaging that currently invades our society is that food is comfort which isn’t a mentally-healthy way to approach nourishment. Taste, along with sight, positive touch, and the gentler spectrum of emotions provide human beings with the plus-side to this often overwhelming and negative world we’ve created. Taste buds bloom when something is identified as pleasurable or nourishing. This concept was introduced at birth, milk replacing the salty blandness of amniotic fluid from gestation. From there, our taste buds begged for new and familiar flavors unless they were programmed to restrain.
It’s taken me over five decades to understand the comfort that comes from taste, not food. I thought I ate to be soothed, my belly filling even when my mouth no longer salivated. I have yet to remember the exact moment when I no longer tasted food. It might’ve been in my twenties, after having a macadamia nut ice cream cone on a warm afternoon in Hawaii. I was raped that evening. Perhaps it was when my twins were babies, them needing nourishment and me on short supply. Or it could’ve been much earlier, as a child, after someone denied me dinner when I burned a tortilla on the stove. Salivating is torturous when no food is meant to come ’til breakfast, even if a fried bologna sandwich suddenly appears near midnight.
Years later, I make pancakes and remember the comfort of taste. Instead, as has been my practice, of eating without noticing, I pause and ask if a part of me wants to taste. As I wait, my mouth surprises me by watering. When the myriad of flavors eventually hit my tongue, my taste buds remember how to bloom again and I feel the bittersweet tendrils of comfort.
It is these small things we can do for ourselves during the rest of the days of this pandemic. Small, but important things that may lead us to a reminder that as humans, we have the right to comfort and we have the right to heal.
