I'm hungry.

I'm a rather intuitive person, which is convenient, but also gets me into trouble.

I'm excellent at filling in blanks - using whatever little information I have to complete the picture in my head. This has caused me to have a lot of faith in my intuition, which is fine, except when I'm wrong. My intuition and I are such good friends that I will sometimes follow it off of a cliff like a lemming. Or, when I have just few enough details that I can't be sure about something, I have a hard time accepting that I just don't know. I like to know and understand, to be able to connect ideas and information in ways that make sense. I was, after all, a humanities major.

Another, connected part of this funny personality of mine is that I desire very deeply to know myself - what's good for me, what's not, what I need and what I don't. Combine this with my intuition, and it appears that I have been blessed with a very strong and reliable internal compass, except, of course, when I'm wrong.

I say "wrong", but the older I get, the more complicated life becomes. I can no longer walk away from situations, confident that I made the "right" decision. There is still some right and wrong, I think, but the gray bar in the middle of the spectrum continues to widen.

It it no longer "I'm hungry, so eating is the right thing to do."

But, rather, it is "I'm hungry, but I need to be very mindful of the social and economic effects that the food I choose has had in my global and local communities, as well as the nutritional effects it will have in my body. I also need to be mindful of the people around me, being sure not to alienate or offend anyone with my food choice, while still managing to adhere to my principals."

Oh, my.

Enter: conflicted insides. I talked a little bit about this in a post last week about expectations, but now I'm thinking more about how annoying it is that I can't always just do what feels right, without worrying about the consequences. If I am served chicken at a friend's house, it feels right to eat the chicken and thank them, but that doesn't mean I wont think about the horrors of the meat industry.

I like it, though - the complexity. It's like when you're in college and you finish with the general education requirements and finally start to study the things you love. Your mind is blown as you discover things are less neat than you thought, but you appreciate the field that much more.

So, here's to complicated adulthood. May it never get boring.

This post was written, on time, as part of a blogging game. The players are The Creative Collective. Read here what the others have to say about "Hunger."