This song came on my ipod today while doing my cool down. It made me remember this post by Captain Awkward (I strongly recommend you go read, I read it a long time ago and it has really stuck with me, and incidentally the poem that is contained within that post was printed out by me and hangs on my "happy wall" at work to this day). And it occurred to me that the reason I felt so much better after sharing the work "incident" with a friend was that I was doing exactly what the post describes... I was letting her carry some of that burden for me.
Anyway, so I am feeling better now, but I figured I would tell what happened. And what happened was simple. The VP of Human Resources scolded me for eating candy that was sitting out in what I thought was a common area, because that candy was apparently meant only for HR employees. That is the short story. She did this in front of my own employees, with whom I was in a conference room about to start a meeting. What she literally said was "that candy was meant as a gift to HR so next time you really need to ask." When I pointed out that at the time I took the candy (three pieces) I was bantering back and forth with the Admin who sits right there, giving her every opportunity to tell me not to take it, she said "well, she said you didn't ask, and next time you need to ask."
Now, this is common in my company. Actually, I'm not sure if it is common in the whole company or just my division, and it hardly matters since the division encompasses all of my interactions at work. This sort of territorial and control bullshit is common, is what I mean. To the point that I now have a two year "out" plan at which time I will have some flexibility with my schedule (the boy will be past elementary school age and on an earlier, junior high schedule) and I will be fully vested in my 401K, thus having much more flexibility in not losing out financially for jumping companies. But that aside, what is remarkable about this encounter is that I have been working on this floor, literally not fifty feet from where this woman's office is located, for nearly a year now, and I swear this is the first time she has ever spoken with me, and seriously, the first time I have ever even seen her come out of her office! But apparently, this fucking candy was important enough to her that when she saw someone from outside her department taking it, she jumped right up to scold that person. It's completely crazy, the actions of an unbalanced and clearly incompetent person. The rational part of me knows that this clearly had nothing to do with me, and everything to do with the crazy territorial control freaks that my company tends to hire and promote to positions of great authority.
But my eating disorder does not exist in the rational part of me. It exists deep down in my lizard brain. And all that part of me heard was a person in a position of authority scold me for eating candy. I may as well have been transported back to being eight years old. So then, naturally, the lizard brain rebellion begins, because nobody is telling me what the fuck to eat and when! And, also naturally, the food is comforting, the sugar literally releases chemicals making me feel better and soothed. It's the perfect storm, really. I even remember thinking in my rational brain "hm, this really might trigger something, I had better be careful" but of course, such thinking is basically powerless a lot of the time when it comes to this sort of thing.
Now, my rational brain did handle the incident perfectly well and professionally ("oh my goodness, I had no idea and I am so sorry!") and the incident itself lasted less than twenty seconds (because after all, how can you keep scolding someone who has apologized?), but the disordered eating then proceeded to last three fucking days.
I actually consider this incident kind of lucky..... most of the time when something like this is triggered, I don't even KNOW what happened to trigger it, because it runs so deep. But this time, it was very clear, which made fixing it more clear as well, and thus I think limited the scope of the damage. I'm not always that lucky or that smart.
What I have done to resolve the situation at work is to order from the great internets exact replicas of the boxes of candy that were out, which I will be putting in the exact same spot they were next week when they come in. I also made the decision to never eat one more fucking thing that exists at work, including their rotten potlucks, and their stupid monthly birthday cakes. Fuck it, I don't need this kind of stress.
And even though I am feeling better now, and the disordered eating behavior appears to have ceased, I am still going to share this with the small number of readers I have. So they can carry it for me. So I can put it down and move on.
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