So back in the day, in 2004 or so, when I was married to a Microsoft guy and still had snazzy health care, I finally went to a butt specialist doctorguy to find out why it had bled and hurt every time I took a shit since I was a teenager.
It had taken me about 10 years to realize that it wasn’t actually normal to go blind with pain when taking a shit, but if I am honest, back then, I really just wanted my prolapses looked at because they were embarrassing and messing up my slut groove. I wanted to know why I was developing flowery little bulbs on my asshole and get them snipped off.
I had been misdiagnosed countless times by gynecologists who told me I had hemorrhoids, but once I went to the ButtMan I found out that what I had was an anal fissure; a tear in my rectum that kept breaking open and hadn’t healed for a decade.
I made jokes for a few years after getting the surgery, a lateral internal sphincterotomy, in which part of the internal anal musculature is shaved off to deal with overzealous tension, that my problem was just that I was a tight ass.
And that was, literally, my problem. After years of pain and consistent constipation I had taken to both squeezing and pushing at the same time. It was a weird, futile attempt to both squeeze down the giant unforgiving logs I was passing and attempt not to rip myself open again. It never worked. And periodically, usually from a hangover or the aftermath of a massive meth binge, I’d get buttvomit that seemed to irritate things even more. It was, in a word, prettyfuckingawful.
I remember the first poop I took after the surgery, and how afraid I was that it was going to hurt even more. I was told to stay relaxed at all costs but I was petrified at how much it might hurt. I literally cried when it actually slid out pain free. I couldn’t remember ever having that feeling before. It was magic. It was such a fucking relief. I didn’t even know it could be like that.
Keeping the possibility of pain free shitting in my life was one of the catalysts for the massive undertaking which ended up being years of focused food experimentation and figuring out what actually fueled my body. Part of the reason I wasn’t in agony that day was based on my post-surgery diet.
It also was one of the catalysts for getting into psychotherapy the year after, leading down the lifelong path of ultimately addressing and acknowledging the years, and I now realize, centuries, of collective trauma that I had been trying to shut out with the drug and alcohol binges.
Eventually, my conventional therapy experience along with ‘alternative’ indigenous and grief related work ended up bringing me to where pooping is actually a release meditation for me. I release what no longer serves me through it. I visualize what I want to release or connect metaphysically with it, or choose a symbol to represent what I am ready to let go of and I literally shit it out of my body.
This was a practice that came to me organically (haha), ended up being how I kept my sanity after David raped me before testing positive for HPV and I was having dreams of thick primordial slime dripping off his insect-swarmed dick. I shit those infectious fuckers out every day, sometimes twice a day. My poop was my ally when both of the men in my life had fallen beyond short. It was glorious.
My poop is still my ally, but it’s telling me things I don’t want to hear right now. It’s been a month since I haven’t bled, I’m going every 4 days maybe, and it’s been since the shed that I was consistently regular. It doesn’t matter how much water I drink or how many fucking apples I eat, it’s like passing stones through a fucking esophagus every time right now. Because I am stressed, on the move and transitionary all the time. Like literally all the fucking time.
So here’s the thing. I get that I’m not the most happy go lucky person basically ever, and that right now I’m voicing a lot of the shit that’s really grating on me about the world. There are a lot of people who actually know me/have met me and recognize that the Facebook thing isn’t the totality of my existence, but a lot of you probably don’t understand that not only is this my venting space, it’s also my main source of superficial social interaction and release. I spend a lot of time alone, on here, or with people I don’t actually know. I spend a lot of time stressing and driving around. I spend a lot of time thinking really fucking hard about how I could possibly ever maneuver my privileges, my values, my talents, my passions and my needs with integrity in a world that often seems hellbent on molding me into something I’m not. And, lately, I spend a lot of time how I’m not pooping.
And like some of you who’ve mentioned lately, and thank you for that, what I am doing is not fucking easy. It’s not glamorous. It’s not stable. Freedom isn’t fucking free. There’s a reason so many people never break out of the status quo to explore the truth of themselves or the possibility of embodying something different.
Seriously man I just wanna fuckin’ poop right.