Seventeen: weight-based trauma, food noise, and the three-handed messy guy in the closet.

19 Aug, 2026

I've lost about 10 pounds this month. It is intentional, especially after my ER visit last month, but it's been a weird experience nonetheless. Let me tell you about it...

I don't think I've had a particularly healthy relationship with my body image. Growing up, it was Very Clear that my weight was a big deal to everyone else in ways that I didn't really grok until middle school. There were three¹ moments in particular absolutely seared into my head.

This may be triggering for folks so be warned that below there be dragons.

"I've seen it before"

First, in sixth grade, the school did scoliosis checks across my grade. Checking today, there didn't seem to be any state mandated testing so I don't really know why t was happening. But very early one morning, they lined all of us outside the locker rooms, separated by sex assigned at birth, and were marched through one at a time to be screened.

Testing itself isn't not awful. You simply bend over and a nurse observes your lower back.

But. You have to do it without a shirt.

All reading Eye, I wasn't super thrilled about it because I had enough social experience to know there would be some form of endless ribbing. As I stepped up to the nurse she, in a way I believe she was trying to make ME feel better, say to me, "don't worry, I've seen it before. Take off your shirt."

The mile run

Later this selfsame year, my mile run time was Not Good Which was a required test for students in the US. Presidential fitness. Get 'em young. Because shaming heslth in front of all your schoolmates wouldn't be an issue.

My mile time was something like 14 minutes. My Gym teacher (Mr. Stone) was unhappy with those numbers and chose for the rest of that week, I would be running a mile every day that week "until I improved." I missed a number of other sports that week, a couple I actually liked playing,

I was the only kid required to run those extra miles. I never told my parents.

If you want, you can do it

Also that year, my mother wanted to motivate me to lose weight. Her efforts focused on cooking primarily but there was one evening after I had gotten into bed where she came and sat at my bedside.

"I want to talk to you about your weight. You're fat and it's not healthy.." A buzzing in my head. I did not hear the next sentences she spoke until she grabbed my waist, a love-handle², and said "if you want to, you can lose weight. You just have to try."

I cried myself to sleep that night.

D

This all happened in the first half of the academic year and was capped with a "D" letter grade in that gym class³.

It's only really now that I'm wondering if all of this was coordinated? Like, did my parents know this was happening before I did? I've never asked.

I have, for most of my life, had a very disorded relationship with my own body culminating in a severe depression in high school where I essentially did not eat for an entire summer. No one who saw me that summer ever said anything about it. I lost something like 30 pounds that year. It was very, very noticeable.

This got “better” at university

Starting over with my identity in University was probably the best choice I ever made. I essentially never went back home after my first year.

No one there had seen the kid who ran extra miles alone or heard the nurse promise me my own body wasn’t a surprise. I got to just be a newer me that didn't have to think about past me, a body just among other bodies. Which, it turns out, is a wholly Different Experience than being, effectively, a Cautionary Body.

I lost weight my first year out of college, on purpose, for the first time in my life. Fewer pizzas, more vegetables, and less sedentary lifestyle afforded by a small collegiate campus. I had no cold hand on my waist in the dark imploring me to be better. Just me choosing. I didn’t understand yet how much the distinction of choosing over imposition would matter. I just liked myself more than I had in years.

The noise

For most of my adult life “thinking about food” aroused the low buzzing I now link to that awful night in bed morse so than regular bodily hunger. It wasn't deafening often but it also never fully shut off either. What am I going to eat? What did I eat? What does eating that mean? Who is watching me eat it? Fourteen minutes flat, over and over, forever.

I started a GLP-1 adjacent drug last month, mostly because that ER visit. Most unexpected is that the food noise just… drops? Not gone (never gone with literal decades of entrenchment), but quiet, for the first time since I was eleven and shirtless with hands at my waist.

Quiet, not silence

I think for twenty-some years I’d metabolized those three moments¹ into a circumstance of my personality, something living among the debris that is me without ever questioning why it was there or how, if it all, it served me. Disorder is happy to move into your closet and not help with the laundry.

It took an actual quiet — chemically induced, sure — to notice the hum had harmony. Three notes: A nurse. A whistle. A hand.

This time I’m "just" losing weight because my body sat on my chest and demanded the attention. But in like a good way for once. The rest - the D, the summer I didn’t eat, the mother at the bedside - is just what emerges from the closet when you have room to try on smaller pants.

Trauma comes in threes, I guess. Maybe clarity does too.

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#blaugust #me #weight