AITA for having an eating disorder and not catering to everyone else's discomfort over it?

NT NTA NTAAAAAA emphasis on the yelling You have protect yourself in these kinds of situations

I recently went through something similar with my MIL. She’s elderly (so perhaps isn’t keen to the cultural overhaul regarding body comments over the last 20 years), and she means well because she’s a good person who raised a good son, but she is constantly talking about weight, what she eats, when she loses weight, and why she gains it back up.

Now, I could handle that alone, because I see it for what it is (body image issues and discomfort with aging), and I empathize. It sucks having a fallible human body.

HOWEVER.

She exerts just as much energy and attention discussing my husband’s and my diet whenever we visit. She watches us like hawks when we eat (or don’t eat), she wants to cook for us constantly, even though we are vegan and MIL and FIL are very much not, and criticizes the bodies of FIL and SIL both to their faces and behind their backs. (In fact, within five minutes of all of us reuniting for the first time since lockdown, MIL starts whispering to me about how “pregnant-looking” SIL because all she eats are sandwiches all day long. Reader, MIL is heavier than SIL. And I honestly don’t care about either women’s sizes. But it’s uncomfortable to have to endure these spiels!)

It has become A Thing.

I had eating disorders all of my young adult life, so being around this is B E Y O N D T R I G G E R I N G.

The reason I’m commenting on all of this, with so much personal detail about my experience, i spite of it being something I do not readily share, is that my husband doesn’t have my back.

He doesn’t think his mother’s behavior is worthy of remarking upon, let alone be the cause of upset, emotional distancing, or even discussing. He made me feel like the asshole for mentioning it, and pretty much made me question my own paradigm. When I said I was triggered due to my past issues with eating disorders, he almost convinced me I was self-centered.

When people don’t understand what is is like to be under the control of the cult of thinness, they will never be able to be advocates against it.

9 times out of 10, people won’t know what to make of your eating disorder. A lot of human defense mechanics shoot up, even in the best people, about narratives that aren’t even about them (!). So you will see things like denial, shaming, gaslighting, deflecting, projecting, etc.

Your friends won’t have your backs, even if they’re decent people, because they won’t know HOW unless they’ve been through it. You have to be your own emotional body guard, so to speak, you have to counter it all with your own sense of self-preservation, and cling on to those instincts with dear life. Expect to be misunderstood. Expect to be gossiped about.

Literally, nothing matters more than saving your own life.

/r/AmItheAsshole Thread