After 11 long months of therapy, Boulder, CO resident Michelle Damon has reported that all of her therapist’s hard work was for naught, as the 27-year-old was recently forced to use the communal mirror in an Aritzia fitting room.
“We’d been making some real progress working through her family trauma,” Michelle’s therapist, Dr. Shauna Williams, told reporters. “She had literally just decided to forgive her mother. But now all of that’s down the drain because she glimpsed herself in an ill-fitting pair of jeans in front of a communal mirror while surrounded by a bunch of sales associates telling her they look amazing on her.”
“I actually did end up buying the jeans,” Michelle told reporters. “My susceptibility to suggestion and my overwhelming people pleasing tendencies are probably things I should discuss in my next therapy session. Unfortunately, I’ve had to put it off for a few months. Those jeans were, like, super expensive.”
Michelle added that, upon entering the fitting room, she immediately went into a fight or flight response.
“By the time I realized that the fitting room didn’t have its own mirror, I was already halfway into a jumpsuit, and the sales associates were encouraging me to ‘come on out,’” she said. “It was like a knife-wielding killer in a horror movie being like ‘I know you’re in there, come out and play,’ except the ‘killer’ was two nice girls and the ‘knife’ was one large, hyper-realistic mirror.”
In addition to being stressed, Michelle said that she was also aggressively sweaty but somehow cold at the same time, and that she felt as if she were viewing herself from outside her own body.
“My soul definitely departed my body for a second there,” Michelle said. “And I’m not sure all of it made it back…like I definitely feel spiritually emptier than I did before.”
Dr. Shauna said she has her work laid out for her.
“Not only are we going to have to rework through her social awkwardness with animals, we’re also going to have to tackle her burgeoning body dysmorphia,” she said. “That was like the one thing she was good on before.”
At press time, Michelle had not yet returned to therapy, but had instead taken to trauma-dumping on anyone who would listen about this experience.
“Everyone else would glide out of their dressing rooms in beautiful silken gowns, and there I was struggling to find my way out of the velvet curtain-door, clad in a pair of workmen’s pants that apparently they don’t even sell there? Like, the girl working there told me they don’t and have never sold pants that look like that? Who the hell’s pants were those, then? Whose were they?”
