Trauma Work Summer Has Actually Been Kinda Lovely, Part One

(Except I'm not dead! Nor am I wrapped in plastic!)

I want to say livid with desire, though that isn't the right word at all. Radiant. Radiant with love and joy--there's a day like that, many paragraphs from now. Dizzy with love and sunshine for someone who's not a match, but a friend. No one wasever so crushworthy. She cracked open my heart with her openheartedness and generous spirit, and of course her pretty face. So many sentences before Summer Princess (The first princess to steal my heart!) but this story is grim so I wanted you to have something to look forward to. I'll try to make some pretty art along the way too, we'll see.

The Trauma Work Summer sprung from fatphobia (the world's) and codependency (mine). It starts one late spring morning when Rachel Maddow's podcast broke my faith and ruined my day--she said she felt "ooky" for talking about the president's obesity treatments, and I really wish she would have followed that "ook" and not DEVOTED LIKE TWENTY MINUTES OF THE ACTUAL NEWS TO A DIET BOOK.

I don't like admitting I depended on a newscaster to keep me sane  during the start of evil 47's evil second term, but I like the way she focuses on the protest movements and her sense of humor is a balm. It's mortifying to say I felt abandoned and betrayed, that someone I looked up to and who gave me so much strength over the years could be part of the "obesity epidemic" assumptions that bodies like mine need to be solved, done away with, disappeared. I don't want to be disappeared.

Ever since Lizzo slimmed down (Which is her right! Nobody's business, least of all some middle aged lady who doesn't have to get on stage for anything!) I've been grieving the body positivity era--hot, fat Lizzo! Regular Maintenance Phase episodes! Shrill the TV show! Fat Girls Dance Movement! She's All Fat! Danny Lavery as Dear Prudence, giving fatphobes the what-for at every opportunity! It seemed like Maddow's diet book moment was the final death knell of my hopes for Fat Liberation.

So that's the mood I went into work with that morning, and it was about to get worse.