On Eating Uncrustables
The frozen aisle, somewhere around 3 PM on a Sunday.
I was standing there staring at a box of Smucker's Uncrustables. I put them in the cart. I took them out. I put them back in. My wife must have thought I was crazy.
This is, I realize, an absolutely ridiculous thing to agonize over. They cost like six bucks. They are, by any reasonable measure, fine. And yet there I was, doing a whole moral wrestling match in the freezer section because I had absorbed, somewhere along the way, the idea that grown people do not eat circular crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Grown people, apparently, eat sheet pan dinners. They meal prep on Sundays in matching glass containers. They have a signature salad. They have opinions about olive oil. They don’t just save recipes in the New York Times recipe app, they actually make them!
I have opinions about olive oil too, for what it's worth. I just also, sometimes, want a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that comes pre-sealed in a little frozen disc, and I do not want to think about it.
Y’all, I bought the Uncrustables.
I ate one for lunch the next day, at my desk, in about ninety seconds. And then I did the thing I do where I sit very still afterward and try to figure out why I feel weird, and what I noticed was: I felt good. I felt like I had eaten lunch. I was not hungry. I was not stressed. I had not spent forty-five minutes deciding what to make, deciding it was too much to deal with, thinking about the dishes in the sink, and then not eating anything.
The amount of mental real estate I had been spending on lunch every day, year after year, suddenly became visible to me the way a sound you have been hearing your whole life only becomes audible the moment it stops.
I have been learning, slowly and with a lot of stops and starts, that I am autistic. I am still in the part of the process where every realization arrives wearing a small disguise. The Uncrustable was wearing a disguise. The disguise was: "you're being a baby about lunch."
The thing under the disguise was: "the executive function cost of making a 'real' lunch every day is enormous for you, and you have been paying it for years, and you are allowed to stop."
There is a version of this lesson I keep having to learn, which is that accommodation is not the same as giving up.
For a long time I thought accommodating myself meant lowering some kind of bar. What I am starting to understand is that the bar was never the lunch. The bar was the life I wanted to actually have: the writing I wanted to do, the people I wanted to be present for, the energy I wanted to have at the end of the day. The lunch was just a thing in the way of it.
So now I eat Uncrustables. Not always; sometimes I make a real sandwich, sometimes I have soup, sometimes I am hosting people and I do, in fact, deploy the sheet pan. But on the days when my brain is loud and my schedule is full and the difference between eating and not eating is whether the food can be obtained in under a minute, there is a box of frozen peanut butter and jelly in my freezer, and I love it.
It turns out the first step in accommodating my autism was not some grand reorganization of my life. It was a six-dollar box in the freezer aisle, and the decision to stop arguing with myself about it.
If you needed permission today: here it is. Eat the Uncrustable. Put it in the cart. Leave it in the cart. The grown-up thing, the actually grown-up thing, is figuring out what you need and giving it to yourself.
