For ten years, the first thing that happened to me every single morning was that a person I loved handed me a warm cup and I drank from it, and that cup was harming me the whole time, and I did not know.
When you learn something like that, it does not stay contained to the cup.
It spreads.
For a while after, I could not accept a glass of water from anyone without a flicker of the question.
I could not fully trust food I hadn’t watched being made.
The poisoning had taught my body a lesson underneath my conscious mind — that the hand that feeds you is the hand to fear — and un-teaching it was slow, deliberate work.