Christian Tackett

Shitting

(CW: Discussion of feces, constipation, anxiety, paranoia, and child sexual assault.)

The orange-colored fluorescent light of my nearly brand-new shared bathroom reflected off the off-white wall to my east. It’s 8:45 pm again, and I am doubled over the toilet. It either alternates between that or just waiting for my rectum to make the right muscle movements to defecate. I look at my face in the pus and water-stained mirror, about 8 feet across from me. My upper body pokes above the sink as if I were one of those early proto-Muppets that advertised coffee instead of teaching you the alphabet and getting Orson Welles cameos. My face slowly recovers from the whole-body strain that I periodically put myself through to attempt to get another piece of shit out¹.

Yes, this is about constipation. You are reading about the act of shitting, ha-ha.

I’ve struggled with constipation and just general digestive health issues for a long time, mostly spurred on by stress and poor diets.

Of course, I have autism, so most of my life is stressful just by interacting with the world. It also means I have a very narrow set of preferred “safe” foods that I almost exclusively eat. That narrow set of foods mainly includes:

1. Fried foods, especially breaded, battered, or otherwise dunked in a vat of boiling oil.

2. Gallons of dairy products.

3. Lots of processed meats, carbs, and other things that have probably been on an assembly line before reaching my big, grubby hands.

There may be some deviations from this general list, but you may notice that there aren’t a lot of fibrous or otherwise whole foods on there. This is not a recipe for consistent, soft shits that come out in 5 minutes, 3 wipes, and a quick wash of the hands that leaves you feeling refreshed. No, it’s a recipe for shits that are either entirely liquid or that come out in small little pebbles as if I were a Gentoo penguin building a nest on a cold, Antarctic shore.

Combining my poor diet, my constant stress levels, a tendency to avoid exercise, and probably some genetic issues,² ³ this all leads back to sitting on a cold toilet in a newish bathroom every night for 45 minutes upward. The only new part of this routine is the “every day” part. It used to be orders of magnitude less frequent.

***

In the spring of 2014⁴, I got constipated for the first time in my life. I was 12 years old, or young enough that I was not allowed to stay at my house unsupervised for multiple days. My parents had left to go on a vacation to Washington D.C. for a couple of days. We were dropped off at my grandparents’ house for the duration of the trip.

For a less mentally ill version of me, this might have been a fun time with my grandparents, playing board games and watching PBS in the living room still styled like it was 1975.

But I was, and still am, very mentally ill.

This was the first time I had ever been away from my parents for more than a day or two, and I became convinced that my parents were never going to return from their vacation. I mourned their loss as I anxiously awaited the day we would be notified that my parents had disappeared or had been killed by some nebulous force. Sometimes I thought it was my grandparents that had set them up to be killed by assassins (which was probably a holdover from reading Lemony Snicket). Other times I would simply believe an accident would take place, such as the kind of car wrecks that would leave my parents unidentifiable.

My stomach, which had previously seemed to do so well in processing my terrible diet of fried foods, pasta, and dairy failed me.

The first time I walked into the bathroom to take a shit in my grandparents’ bathroom, nothing came out. No matter how hard I strained, nothing was happening. So, I continued to strain. I pushed and pushed, breaking out into a sweat, my face contorting into shapes surely only meant for an Olympic weightlifter going for gold.

Finally, a pebble managed to navigate its way down what must have been a long and winding path through my body and into the toilet bowl.

I looked down at it.

It looked up at me.

A bead of sweat rolled down my forehead and into the bowl. My body ached, especially my ass and stomach. All that effort, only for a single pebble. The pebble felt like it was taunting me, as if it were Lucy van Pelt pulling the football (of shit) out from under me.

I had become the Charlie Brown of shitting. Auugh.⁵

The next few days are a blur to me. I eventually strained too hard, and I got hemorrhoids, which proceeded to bleed every time I tried to go. I stayed up much too late trying to successfully shit, which led to me woozily walking out of the bathroom at an early hour of the morning and falling asleep on the couch, covered in sweat.

At some point I came clean to my parents and admitted my difficulties. They quickly informed my grandparents. My grandmother tried to slyly hand me a box of medicated hemorrhoid wipes, as if to soothe my embarrassment. This helped the pain, but not the paranoia or my terrible diet. My grandma suggested prunes, which I shot down immediately, and she didn’t try to get me to eat anything else. It eventually got to the point where my parents had to come home early and take me to a doctor.

I spent the next couple of weeks after literally eating nothing but brussels sprouts. As the fiber took hold and my paranoiac dreams of my parents dying faded, the constipation turned to diarrhea and then slowly back to normal.

I obsessively monitored the size of my hemorrhoids, as if they were weird, fucked up little Tamagotchis that I was supposed to kill. I patted them dry after each shower and shit, because I had read somewhere that moisture kept them inflamed. I made sure to minimize sitting on the toilet, and I religiously applied Preparation H.

Eventually, my ass went back to normal, and my body was now freer to process my terrible diet. Constipation would occasionally recur throughout the rest of my childhood and adolescence, but not enough to be concerning.

Then I decided to go to college.

***

I had made the decision to come to Wabash College somewhat under duress.

It was late in the afternoon, in the middle of spring 2021.

It was probably around week 2 of my personal deliberations about which college to go to. I was split between the strange, tiny, and all-male Wabash that I had recently visited and looked nice on the surface, and Northland College, a small, environmentally focused liberal arts college on the shore of Lake Superior.

Wabash was close to home, and its admissions counselors had seemed to pull out all the stops in trying to get me to go there. They put me in contact with alumni, sent me a bunch of elaborate letters that I could put on my fridge, the works. The all-male thing wasn’t an issue, I told my queer old self, ‘cause I love dudes!⁶ It’s a place caked in tradition on every surface, and they try very hard to make sure you are indoctrinated into the culture. Of course, the fact that Wabash still regularly produces people like Indiana Attorney-General Todd Rokita, who sued a hospital for providing an abortion to a ten-year-old, flew over my head.⁷

Northland is in a scenic location and isn’t as conservative as Wabash, with its heavy environmental emphasis and focus on empowering local indigenous peoples. They even have a small sporting goods rental “library” on campus so you could do something like renting a sea kayak and rowing yourself to the Apostle Islands.

However, Northland was nearly 10 hours from my hometown while Wabash is only a little over an hour.

Oh, and Wabash offered a scholarship that covered half my college costs.

Faced with the prospect of having to live completely independently given my previous complete dependence on my parents, the loads of basically free cash from Wabash, and with the idea that I could have all the gay sex I could possibly want at an all-male college 8 , I hurriedly paid the enrollment deposit on that cold spring day in 2021.⁸

When August came and I was dropped off at a fraternity house, I quickly found out that:

a. Wabash wasn’t nearly as gay as I thought it would be.

b. I had to share a bathroom with everyone, as well as shower with everyone.

My previously healthy shits came to a grinding halt when dealing with the sudden loneliness of being probably the only openly queer person in that house at that time, homesickness, and the anxiety of having to share a bathroom.

Whenever I tried to take a shit in that labyrinthine restroom/shower, there were always stains, toilet paper on the floor, and worst of all: people in the next stall over. I quickly retreated into attempting to only take shits when I went home, which was once a week.

Even after leaving the fraternity house for independent accommodations, I still had to shit in a public bathroom full of the most annoying yet simultaneously intimidating (in my head) freshmen possible.

My schedule of shitting literally once a week eventually caused my hemorrhoids to flare up, and the constant stress made my digestive system very slow. Even after being moved into a single the next semester, it still did not improve. In all likelihood, my ass was probably legitimately damaged.

Would this have happened at Northland? Possibly, but maybe not. There’s not a single way of knowing.

***

Now for those of you who have stuck out the multiple graphic descriptions of failures to shit, some of you are probably asking: have you seen a doctor, or more importantly, a specialist?

No. I’ve had appointments with my GP, but not a proctologist. Jumping through the hoops only to likely end up at a high-cost, long recovery time surgery just seems like more than my body and mind can handle under the current circumstances. That paired with the fact that every time I bring up the issue with my mother (who was raised with a farmer mentality about these things), she just repeats the mantra of “better diet and exercise” over and over until I sulk back into my room in defeat when I talk to her. Hard argument to beat, I suppose.

Another question might be: why are you writing this?

Embarrassment was a hell of a drug.

This is pretty much my current status quo. I’ve been working on my diet, eating high-fiber oatmeal out of my dark red bowl I heat up in my microwave in my new-ish single room. I eat broccoli and spinach and some other green vegetables now regularly. It helps a lot, especially with a lot of water to go with it.

Occasionally I slip up, but I’ve been trying.

Most of my daily life reasonably accommodates what I’ve now come to essentially regard as a chronic illness as well as the preexisting autism and anxiety. It’s still harrowing, but that’s all I can really get in a world that endlessly wants you to be more efficient, more able. The grind never stops, even as you stand right in front of it, screaming for it to stop or even just slow down so it doesn’t kill you.

But I’ve been managing it so far.

Anyway, you just read an essay about shitting. Or maybe not. Ha-ha, again.

___________

¹ I will almost exclusively refer to the act of defecation, pooping, crapping, etc. in this piece as “shitting.” Due to my long-standing penchant for swearing, it’s the only term that really feels comfortable for me. Everything else feels juvenile or doesn’t do justice to the act/substance itself.

² A quick note before I regale you with graphic tales of the toilet: I also am (probably) genetically predisposed to shit difficulties. My girlfriend and I’s love of portmanteaus would probably combine this into “shifficulties” or “shitticulties,” but the family already has a name for it: “Schwer gut.” This is the family name of my mother, whose entire family has digestive issues so bad that there is an actual multigenerational term for it. It’s important to point out that this is not the only such term in our family but is certainly the most well-known of all of them. For those of you who know German, it’s also a pretty hilarious pun if you don’t read the “gut” in German.

³ The other such term in our family is the “Schwer melancholy,” in reference to our penchant to get clinically depressed very easily. The good traits we have don’t tend to get names. Not catchy or memorable enough to remember those, I suppose.

⁴ I can’t remember the exact year that it happened, but this is my best guess. My brain was understandably not really focused on the date and time when it occurred.

⁵ You know the iconic scream, probably.

⁶ Yes, this was actually part of my reasoning.

⁷ Other Wabash alumni include Senator Mike Braun and Will Hays, of Hays Code fame.

⁸ In my defense, I was a very horny 18-year-old.