teenage angst

At around 11:30 every morning, I start getting hungry. Every morning I eat a sizable breakfast but that is apparently not good enough for my hunger as it always starts to nag me an hour before the lunch break. And it is usually in that hour that I start looking at the clock and counting down in miliseconds to the time I can then gorge myself in all the glory that is lunch. Today, I was hungrier than usual, and symptomically, this resulted in tummy rumblings louder than normal.

Tummy rumblings have always been a source of anxiety, especially during my teenage years. I would be in class and then my stomach would go off like a gregorian chant, and i would try to mask the sound by coughing, but there is only so much coughing you can do before people start thinking you may be choking to death or spreading some SARS. And the worst part of all this was the fact that i was a teenager and of course, back then, every single bodily function including the sound of my own voice was a source of anxiety which meant that at this point I was ready to DIE and thinking OH GOD WHY MUST YOU ACCURSE ME WITH SUCH AN AFFLICTION !!!! WHY MUST I BE THIS FREAK OF NATURE WITH AN ABNORMALLY AUDIBLE STOMACH??? And of course I wrote all this in my diary complete with drawings of dead stomachs and stickers with anti-stomach slogans. On good days, I would daydream of a life where my tummy didn’t rumble and I could be like the other teenagers, ones who lived through their hunger in quiet dignity. Or, I would write poems that would metaphorically liken my stomach noises to cries coming from the Depths of My Soul and how it is a lone voice calling out to the world, the likes of which will never understand the woeful melancholy my internal organs are going through. Okay, i’m just making shit up.  But seriously, growlly stomachs use to make me a little anxious; now, they just make me glad i am not a teenager.