Sitting at the Table Anyway

Nobody tells you how much of life is arranged around eating. Birthdays, Christmas, a catch up with a mate, a work thing, somebody leaving, somebody arriving. It is all food. And when you are not eating, the easy option is to quietly stop turning up.

I did that for a while. I told myself I was sparing everyone the awkwardness, that it was easier all round, that nobody wants the bloke at the table who is not having anything. It sounded thoughtful when I said it to myself. What I was actually doing was making myself lonely and calling it good manners.

Because here is the thing I had missed completely. The people at that table did not invite me for my appetite. They invited me because they wanted me there. My eating had never once been the reason any of them turned up, and it is faintly ridiculous that I decided it was suddenly the price of admission.

So now I go. I sit there with a drink, or with nothing at all, and I am part of it. Occasionally somebody asks, and I tell them, and it takes about ten seconds before the conversation moves on to something else. Far more often nobody mentions it at all, because they are too busy talking. The awkwardness I had been so carefully protecting everybody from turned out to be almost entirely in my own head, and I had spent months organising my life around it.

If you have been turning invitations down, have an honest think about why. If it is genuinely too much that day, then fair enough, rest, and there is no shame in it whatsoever. But if it is because you have decided you would spoil it for everyone, I would gently suggest you are wrong about that. Go and sit at the table. That is where your people are.