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I eat fast. This is a fact. It's one of the few things about me that bothers me. I feel gauche and disgusting eating like a starved dog. I also feel sick inside that people feel the need to comment about it, because it makes me ashamed to eat outside my home and makes me self-conscious, which is something that I otherwise never am.

The bad part? I can't tell people honestly why I have the tendency, because I don't want to lay that on them. How do you say, "As a kid I happened to be shuttled around to some bad places when the state thought that other people could care for me better than the nice elderly couple that adopted me?" How do you tell someone that thinks they're being helpful that you learned to eat and gorge yourself as fast as possible so that the bigger, stronger kids didn't steal you food? How do you tell them that you eat fast because some guy liked to snatch your plate away from you when you least expected it and then not allow you to eat for a couple more days? How do you tell them you once took a beating for stealing a couple fingers of peanut butter and considered it a good trade since your stomach stopped cramping? How do you make them understand what that does to the mind of an eight-year-old?

How can you say that in a way that doesn't sound like, "Walk a mile in my shoes and then die?" I don't know either.

It's horrible that even after all that and so much that I never burden anyone else with, I became relatively genteel and well-adjected. How terrible that strangers can still find the one behavior that I've never managed to correct, a behavior that doesn't really affect anything, and still feel the need to have their pithy little opinions.