Trauma Work Summer Has Actually Been Kinda Lovely, Part Two

In case you didn't know! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNWZoZnRFhA

So I was in a Living-In-RFK's-America mood, trying not to think about the wellness camps, when one of my coworkers, obsessed with her own Noom journey, started doing a thing she does--listing off all the "obese" people she knows and cataloguing what she thinks what they are/shouldn't be eating. This included her own husband, from whom she hides food. She also begs her husband not to take GLP1s for his diabetes, because "Those are like giving drugs to a drug addict."

All  year long, I'd avoided any disagreement with The Work Ladies, leaving the room whenever I was tempted to argue. Being good about practicing my codependency recovery. But this time I didn't feel like leaving the room or even putting my headphones in--I just wanted to be in a workplace where my body-size wasn't seen as shameful, where, OMG, body size wasn't my coworkers' business. So I spoke up, tried to explain why "obese" feels like a slur to me, why this conversation felt bad to overhear. She continued her hiding-food-from-her-husband story, so I again asked her to stop, less nicely but still pretty civil.

There were three or four weeks of meetings about how "confrontational" I had been. My colleagues had been having a "normal conversation," said the HR director. The HR director was only a little bit smaller than me, and said she never experienced any anti-fat bias. Her boss reserved the right to enjoy talking about her South Beach Diet journey and ask anyone and everyone how they are eating.

I might write more about the scary meetings someday, but for now, that's enough to see why I landed in a profound burnout afterwards. I'd spent the year making myself as unobtrusive as possible, and I'd still ended up feeling like I was a threat to be contained and a problem to be solved. This is about the time my OCD therapist suggested a round of PTSD treatment.

The pattern of trying to stand up for myself and being treated as the problem is deep in my trauma bones, and I knew just the memory I wanted to work on. It was nothing directly about food or fatness, but about fighting for what's right and getting (literally, in the memory's case) kicked around and blamed for it. I was about to live in a nightmare over and over all summer in the name of healing. I'm almost done now, and I think it's working.