when 'comfort food' no longer provides comfort

When you've gotten to the point where you know that practically EVERYTHING you're doing is a substitute for what you really need -

Then what?

I slept a long time today, knowing that I'd have to spend most of today's waking hours avoiding thinking. And so far I've managed it - I've kept the demons at bay by reading and writing, curled up here in front of my electronic umbilical cord.

There's this sort of constant, low-level physical hunger - I feel a bit like the prisoner or the terminal cancer patient who KNOWS she's going to die, and who chronicles her last moments with excruciating clarity. Like Emma Thompson's character in Wit.

***
A useful (?) concept occurs to me: In one of Terry Pratchett's stories, one of the witches, Granny Weatherwax, teaches one of her dying, elderly patients how to 'put the pain outside himself'. I think that's what I'm doing. It must be a survival technique. I feel a kinship with those guys who crashed their plane in the Andes, though here I am, supposedly in the middle of 'civilization', other 'humans' living less than 50 to a hundred feet away from me on all sides, the closest one less than ten feet away right this minute, through the floor in the duplex unit below. Might as well be on Jupiter.