Allow me the opportunity to introduce myself and the perspective I’d like to provide to Cadre. As a gay healthcare producer with mental health challenges, it’s a disservice for people to forget the human-aspect of someone regardless of their education or professional title. Let’s talk about how the intersection of gay culture, mental honesty, eating disorders, body image, etc. all create a lived experience that creates a unique provider perspective.
Jay Petruno is a registered dietitian and certified personal trainer. He is a cisgender homosexual man who has crippling anxiety. He wants to talk about working in a healthcare setting that is broken. He hopes to open up conversations about gay culture.
Hello cadres Sphere. My name is Jay Petruno. I use the pronouns he, him, his, and I'm a registered dietitian and a certified personal trainer. But I would rather introduce myself as human to you all first. So I am a cisgender homosexual man who has crippling anxiety. I'm an overthinker. I've experienced PTSD, and I say all of these characteristics because as a provider, it's impossible for me to say that my lived experience doesn't impact the care that I provided. And I'm not talking about implicit biases or my own interpretation of evidence based practice.
But when I read something or hear something and I filter it through my lens in order to provide that care, I can't deny the fact that my experience with being microaggressed or harassed, or how I see the world isn't unique to being someone from a historically marginalized population, or the bad things that have happened to me in my life. And so what I want to do is try to humanize that provider aspect, not necessarily always provide recommendations or say things that you should or shouldn't do as someone who is a food and fitness professional, but to plant seeds of thought and to open up conversations, just expand the horizon of how I perceive other people's experiences based off of my own experiences.
So I want to talk about gay culture. I want to talk about working in a healthcare setting that is broken, honestly. I want to talk about how anxiety and overthinking and burnout and work and all these things sort of manifest and what that does to somebody who gets put on a pedestal or who others might be looking up to. So I'm looking forward to your responses. I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts and comments on such content. And hopefully we're able to slowly just open up our own eyes to a different way of seeing things.
