Day 4: Processing

There’s no doubt that trauma does a number to you in all sorts of ways.  One way that it really got me was in my metabolism. I know it sounds weird, but it’s true.  I’ve always been a slow mental processor (and an even slower verbal one), but it hadn’t occurred to me that my body is a physical processor, too.  I think I had a fairly normal metabolism … until I didn’t.

Like most people, I generally carry a few extra pounds.  I always called my excess weight my “happy fat.”  It meant I had enough.  Actually, it meant I had a little bit more than enough.  It meant I could withstand a lean time.  For a girl who is scarcity-minded and yearns for security, more than enough feels good. 

Anyway, I knew my happy fat was there, but it wasn’t too, too bad, and I didn’t much care.  For all of my normal worrying and baseless fretting (and even legitimate problems), I never stopped eating.  But then when the world dropped out from under me, my body knew, and it changed.  My happy fat went away. 

I started eating a LOT of salads.  I had never been able to convince myself that a salad was a full meal before.  If I ordered a salad, I tried to sort of separate it on my plate (or at least in my head) so the protein and the vegetables felt like two different things.  But when my marriage fell apart, suddenly a salad seemed like enough chewing to constitute a meal.  There’s a book called The Body Keeps the Score about how trauma triggers all sorts of physiological changes.  I think my weird metabolism thing was probably some sort of score keeping.

My body seems to have settled back down to its normal processing.  I don’t know if it’s pre-traumatic normal or if it’s new-life normal, but my happy fat is back.  But I’ve kept the salad habit, and I’m glad of that. 

Sometimes the point of something can surprise you. Maybe part of the point of all of the upside down-ness was to make me feel differently about salads. I didn’t see that one coming.