Dear Prudence,
I keep running into a problem that is either my being ableist or my just not being particularly generous (without being in a specific bucket), and I’m not sure how to overcome it.
A long-time friend of mine has always suffered from mental health issues, even as a child. A lot of the issues were anxieties related to health. Her health anxieties have obviously gotten worse since the pandemic.
The dilemma is that her specific anxieties are bleeding into other topics, and onto me. She has food anxiety that only applies to food from other cultures (she is of French descent, so we only eat French food), which feels racially/ethnically complicated. She also feels like she is developing allergies she is not developing according to medical professionals, but only to things me and my boyfriend are actually allergic to. She also has some food stuff in the form of disordered-looking eating where she won’t eat a lot of food, particularly oil-heavy food, etc. The result is we can only eat at one restaurant, ever, and it is one that is an hour from my home, and three minutes from hers.
Part of my brain says: This is a mental health issue. She doesn’t trust food from other restaurants/cultural backgrounds, and she is the one actually suffering here because she is so genuinely scared, and in our area of many delicious and interesting cuisines, she cannot enjoy them because of her illness. I should be generous, and gracious, and obtain some “there but for the grace of God go I” energy.
And another, less cute, part of my brain is resentful. I don’t like eating only at this restaurant. I don’t like traveling two hours roundtrip to see her for an hour-long dinner where she won’t eat anything. It is expensive, and it feels like she disrespects my time and energy when she won’t bend on any of her stuff. It is also—to this ugly part of my brain—intensely obnoxious when she convinces herself of an allergy that is actually quite intense for my boyfriend, and for which we have to take a lot of precautions lest he needs to be hospitalized.
I know, I swear, that she is not faking it. I am also engaging, clearly, in some cognitive dissonance if I also find this annoying, which I do. I might just need someone to yell at me to get it together and stop being a dick.
— Cognitive Dissonance