Nurit Chinn
IBS and Other Euphemisms
This piece mentions rape.
I am trying to be marvelous.
& to make my enemies throw up.
—Chen Chen, “Winter”
People who shit like me have to talk about it. I only make friends with people who also talk shit. I put IBS in my Twitter bio and my Hinge profile. People should know what they’re getting into. I talk shit to make strangers feel more comfortable, to hold them close like friends. I have a real disdain for those who respond awkwardly: now I’m embarrassed for talking diarrhea to an ungrateful audience—invited into my body for what? Some shit talk is irreverent: for Shabbat dinners and job interviews. Some shit talk is intimate: for the partner who rubs my swollen belly and says gentle things at the trace of a sour fart.
The shitting is never satisfying. That’s the tragedy of shitting liquid. Everyone knows diarrhea leaves you feeling bad: stinging, dirty, incomplete. Nothing turns me on more than a solid shit whizzing out of my body like a hollow ball through a plastic shaft. Everything tingles. But there’s also comfort in familiarity: the fecal liquid, the blood on the toilet paper, the smell. Evidence of my wretchedness.
I hate when people give me advice about shitting. I yell at them, That’s anti-Semitic! They’re like, Is it? I’m like, Yeah, it is! Inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis are up to four times more common among Ashkenazim than non-Jewish Europeans. I sing a little prayer for my Jewish foremothers. They survived evil. I am their genetic gift, carrying the evidence of what it means to exist incongruously with the world around you. Once, a boy who wanted to kiss me told me the Jews must have done something to warrant centuries of persecution. I kissed him anyway. What happens when there’s violence in the fruit, the milk? Does this seem dramatic and not the point? It’s all the point. All my identities converge around shit.
My foremothers birthed me and I birth little baby turds like dirty fireworks. I am so excited to be pregnant. Want my little bloodsucker to stretch me out and gnaw on my tits as I feed it with lifeblood. The tits part is secondary. I just want it to live in me. Want to feel the full capacity of my body: body as vessel for life, life as euphemism for pain, pain as proxy for purpose. I want my stomach to double-function as a cocoon, and if it kills me then that would be the best way to die. I like the sublation of certain kinds of violence. When my baby splits me open, I will be more certain that it was God who put me on Earth. I am romantic. I write about the body. I await the rip.
At times I think that, as some form of woman—or woman*, as I write on the days person or boy doesn’t fit—I welcome suffering. Shitting myself silly is an act of resistance: I am a beautiful woman*, and I have loudly excused my self from the table to shit. I will come back twenty-five minutes later and enjoy dessert. I am not talking about womanhood as biological, or womanhood as fixed or essential, but womanhood as you bitches get it. I haven’t read enough queer theory.
My womanhood is: Anger, Doubt, Blood, Shit. Let me try again: Playfulness, Pain, Empathy, Love.
Or maybe this has nothing to do with womanhood. Maybe this is just me. Me in fight mode, which is woman mode. But if I am seen as a woman, have been a woman, am a woman, then I am moving through life in a body that knows something about pain.
The shitting started after my rape. Probably not because of it—I had just turned nineteen, the age at which IBS usually kicks in, and moved to a new country, where I was depressed, underslept, and eating terribly. Of course, rape did stuff to my body. I grew up thinking I had a stomach of steel because I never vomited after drinking and liked eating everything. Now I have a kernel of nausea lodged in my throat. It can travel the length of my intestine in seconds. Gets too low and I gag in public. Gag mid-conversation. Gag when I think about sex, when I have sex, when I think about my rapist, when I see a BuzzFeed Tasty video on Facebook.
I will say, on the days I do not feel like a woman—not like a man, either, but an elf, a deity, a baby, a pureness—I feel a great sense of peace. An at-homeness with myself. Do I distance myself from womanhood to distance myself from pain? Or do I no longer feel like a woman? A friend of mine once told me cis people don’t spend this much time thinking about whether or not they’re trans. A question asked is a lid unscrewed. Must refrigerate. I am a beautiful woman* and I spend twenty-five minutes on the toilet. Call me girl, call me boy, call me angel, call me Jew. Call me a body who knows pain.
The loneliest I’ve ever felt was in a beautiful place where my two best friends were falling in love. I was a burden to it, and worse yet, I couldn’t stop shitting. They are both smallish people, destined for love because God made them in size-harmony with each other. I was huge and alone, anxiously attached to the toilet. I pretended I couldn’t hear them kiss, and they pretended they couldn’t hear me shit.
All my lovers have told me to change my eating habits: Eat less, quit gluten, go vegan. I don’t. I’m scared of getting fixated on my body. Writing essays about it. The only time I have shit normally was when I went on a toxic TikTok diet. I started counting calories, exercising twice a day, avoiding sugar, dairy, meat, bread. I shed five kilograms in two weeks. I didn’t have diarrhea once. Missed her like an old flame.
Sometimes I think chronic diarrhea helps me stay skinny. Other times I see it as the root of my perennial puffiness. Still other times I am overwhelmed by my beauty. A smart friend of mine once observed that noticing one’s own beauty is exhausting. On the days she feels beautiful, she is so distracted by it. On the days I am beautiful I am not smart or thoughtful. I am the sun and everyone is lucky to look at me. People stare as I walk down the street. Don’t look for too long! Your poor eyes!
When I shit, I am at my most repulsive. A former partner—a kind, gentle man—once stood outside my college bathroom while I shat because he couldn’t stand the smell. I cried. I cried that he did not love me enough. That to stand outside—not just outside the stall, where we could talk through the crack, but outside outside, behind a heavy door—was the greatest insult to my personhood, because what am I if not a body in process? I process. I process my shit all day. When you shit this much, your body is always doing some part of it. My body is at work. My underwear has stains. I take pictures of myself on the toilet, my thighs pooling off the sides of the seat. I pose with my mouth open. My body is always at a maximum. I bruise easy. I cry easy. I come easy. That same partner once squatted behind me on the toilet, wrapped his arms around my torso, and helped me push. At the bottom of the body, the skin is a different color.
The first time I had sex with a woman, I had diarrhea after. While I was shitting, I followed her on Instagram and fell in love. I clogged the toilet and had to put my arm inside to grind up the shit with my fingers. When the water finally siphoned down the toilet’s invisible tunnel, I felt like an adult for the first time. I took a picture of myself half-naked with shit-covered hands. It was a day when I was beautiful.
On a day when I’m just cute, my dog shits all over the house. A friend helps me clean it up, donning plastic gloves and filling a bucket with hot water. He cleans with a fervor, competing against the clock. I take a phone call while he cleans the shit and I fall in love with him. I joke that my dog—a chronic humper who barks at his own reflection and shits everywhere—is a manifestation of my subconscious. When we finish cleaning, I have a craving for chocolate. My friend asks me how I could eat chocolate at a time like this. The thing is, I am fearless. The thing is, everything in the body blurs with everything outside it. The thing is that the mouth breathes, loves, kisses, is violated, and is connected to shit by an invisible tunnel. To have openings in the body is to know they will be filled. I’d rather things come from within than from without.
I have a body that disagrees with itself. Sometimes love meets you at a hole and you open it. Sometimes I imagine a lover cupping their hands beneath my butt and I shit and cry and they say, It’s OK. I have shit myself as an adult while my parents watched. I have cried like an infant drunk on a toilet seat. My mother has showered me after testing the water with her hand—not too hot. I have had my butt washed, and by that I mean I have been treated with tenderness.
After years of putting it off, I finally go to a gastroenterologist. He’s a dad type and keeps making the same joke: Bottom line is—pun intended. He wants me to get a colonoscopy, make sure everything is OK before we go the diet route. The kernel of nausea starts flinching. The worst part is before. You’ll drink this liquid and spend all day on the toilet. The procedure is fine, you’ll be sedated, you’llwear a backless robe. Uh, poop doctor, I am a shitter. That’s what I do. I don’t come into your place of business and tell you how to be a poop doctor. Actually, I do. Don’t make me wear the robe. Don’t let someone put something inside me.
I go downstairs so the nurse can take some blood. She’s sweet, pressing her round belly up against my arm as she ties the tourniquet around my bicep, flicks the veins in the crease of my elbow, shows me the needle. Fuck, I’m crying like a baby. The worst part is before. She keeps missing the vein. Droplets of blood bead up on my arm like pretty jewels. She presses them down with an ungloved finger. Ouch, she says, like a mother. Don’t look! Don’t get nervous! You’re sweating, your blood pressure is dipping and I can’t see the veins, they’re shrinking, disappearing. I look away and when I look back, it’s coming out of me in dark spirals. Filling tubes. The nurse has a mole between her eyes. She’s talking about old people. They can barely make it to the toilet. They’re bodies for ghosts. I shouldn’t have said that.
I tell everyone I’m getting a colonoscopy, then cancel it a week before it’s meant to happen. I’m impulsive. I do everything in bursts. I eat meals without stopping. I shit liquid. I write essays in one go.
One time I was on a Greyhound from Michigan to Chicago. The bus stopped for five minutes at a McDonald’s, where I bought nuggets and had diarrhea in the bathroom. I realized I was going to miss the bus, so I stuffed toilet paper up my butt and rode for three more hours in my makeshift diaper.
Why am I telling you this? I mean it—people who shit like me have to talk about it. I mean it—all I ever want is to be close to people. I am terrible with secrets. Whenever I meet someone, whenever I see someone, I want us to be at our closest. I want you to know everything. I want you to know that there’s toilet paper stuffed up my asshole. I want to hold you close even though it’s hard because my first boyfriend said he loved me, then raped me, then said he loved me again after. I expel everything in my body every day. I regenerate.
I’m back from the toilet. You hold me. You say, I hope it was a good one. We both know it wasn’t.
Some days I have a whole evening to myself and a toilet meets me with a kindness so simple I cry. As much as I talk shit, there is no greater comfort than total solitude and a true release. The lighting in my bathroom is perfect. I could spend hours in there. What home do I have other than this small room that shines? Other than this body whose emptying is so dramatic that each shit feels like a beginning?
I lock the door. I take my time. I always look before I flush.