the post about digestion, constipation + food my past self needed

'it takes guts to be with your guts'

“i guess you could say that my failures were great good luck. the doors and options that closed to me left me with more questions than answers; it’s the questions that have shaped me, and myth has been the key to cultivating a capacity to hold and sustain a kind of radical uncertainty.” — daniel deardorff; interview from ‘leaping into myth,’ probably 2004.

it starts at that tipping point between— i can perceive that my behavior is hurting me, i can perceive that my patternings are compulsive— And, i am willing to change. i am willing to contend with and meet the Utter Impossibility that being willing to change, holds.

*

in late summer/fall 2022 I Was Following My Dream. my dream to live outside the city, outside the home i grew up in, further away from the reach of my family and its enmeshment, perpetuation of toxicity and stuckness. i was letting myself eat, and eat out, in the fun shops of the little riverside town where i was staying, that had enchanted me. And, i was eating things that weren’t mine— staying over in houses stocked with food in ways so unfamiliar to what was usually in my minimalist cupboards or fridge— because if i bought something outside of my staples of veg, or meat, or eggs, or fish— it would be gone, one fell swoop. box of cookies, bag of chips, pint of ice cream. even, jar of jam, fig spread, almond butter. nothing hung around, rationed or saved; or i would eat it.

during my trying-to-move-upstate reconnaissance mission (and when i did end up succeeding, briefly, to do this) i began to observe myself— this scavenging tendency— this lying, hiding, sneaking tendency. and the— quick, do it before someone notices, tendency. the— i need to eat this right now this second or i’m going to have a fucking panic attack. i literally couldn’t bear how slowly the new friend i was visiting was eating when we had meals together— how she left food on her plate, to throw away or compost. i left an ashamed note to the other person whose house i was staying at, that i had eaten things without permission and replaced things i consumed to emptiness. with the woman i ended up living with, i opened packages and ate her food without asking when she wasn’t around— squirreling in her kitchen cupboards and drawers. one morning or evening i opened a brand new box of her cream cheese, ripped the cardboard in my sneaking-fervor, tried to or thought about taping it back together, and put it back into the fridge, saying nothing.

i don’t say all of this to shame myself, to ‘out’ myself just for the sake of it—

something was happening, wanting to be brought to light.

i wrote in october 2022 on instagram, while gazing in candlelight at a bar of handmade soap i had bought shaped like the abundantly curvaceous venus of willendorf: “i have never had Your Shape. i have been the ‘skinny,’ ‘fit,’ ‘athletic’ girl— and because outwardly my disordered relationship to food, pleasure, sustenance, fear/anxiety/safety was disguised— i got to pretend it didn’t exist, either.”

during the years in which your life is constantly in chaos and you are just trying to keep living, there is no safe/contained space in which to fully stop and question and sit in the beholding of patternings and compulsivities like this.

yeah, of course i knew that i was going out regularly {when i was seized, because that is what the feeling is/was like} at 1 or 1:30 in the morning, out to the 24-hour health food store i lived nearby to buy cookies that i would devour on the spot while pacing the fluorescent-lit aisles, often paying sheepishly for the empty package. i remember the one time i lost my debit card and had no cash to buy the something i needed to quell the intensity— the thing the black hole in my stomach Needed, it didn’t matter what— i remember dumping all the change out of my ceramic bank onto the floor and counting it so i could see if i had enough to buy pepperidge farm cookies from the bodega on the corner— seriously contemplated stealing them as it seemed while i was counting that it wouldn’t be enough. once getting the cookies i remember sitting on the floor and shoving them into my face, one by one by one in a trance, past the point where i could taste them, past the point i even wanted them, but was unable to stop— and then flinging the spoon across the room in horror once i realized that i had, for the first time ever, stuck it down my throat to try to do what i knew that people did— purge, to make the bingeing they just did go away.

*

you hit those places where you go too far— and you still somehow don’t know where to go, what to do, how to handle. especially when so much of this is about that sneaking, hiding, shame-radiating energy. no one needs to know. no one needs to know.

*

all of this has taken Years— not only to begin Seeing. being in the revulsion and entrapment of witnessing myself, in these states— and to even just barely try to do it with compassion. years to even begin cracking open a tiny window in which to talk about it, publicly. to mention it to even one trusted friend. to even have it exist as ‘parts of myself’ in the grand scheme of me, who i am, what i do, what my pains and tendencies and coping mechanisms are.

but/and regarding the Entirety of this experience— my years of eating for comfort; shoveling food into my face; eating in a trance; eating with anxiety; while walking or standing or working; eating with hunched shoulders, or like a prisoner— like i was stealing something or doing something wrong; feeding the black hole in my stomach; eating to fit in; eating when i was nervous; eating when i didn’t know what else to do.. wanting to finish the food on other people’s plates— even when i was bussing tables at a popular café and the person was a complete stranger […] i don’t write all of this here to lead to a crescendo that will tie this all in a pretty bow— i write this all here to affirm that everything is tied to everything else, everything is an ecosystem. and i wish, i wish someone had told me that so many years ago.

that all of this has roots and entanglings in your family system and their patternings that you observed and/or absorbed. the maladjustments just to survive that become normalized and part of the fabric of existence. i wish someone had told me that you can’t shame yourself for ‘food addiction’ or ‘bingeing’ without understanding the Underneaths— why you are doing it. what it has to do with comfort and safety and fear and overwhelm. why ‘just trying to white-knuckle and not do it’ doesn’t (for me) EVER, EVER, fucking sustainably work. because even if i stopped for a little while, or ‘tried to be good,’ especially under the longterm/on-and-off influence of my ex/friend/lover who was a personal trainer/nutritional therapy practitioner. it would always come back. it would always come back.

and i remember one of the last times— after i was assailed with malevolent thoughts while trying to ride to a women’s dance night in january of this year, seeing how that energy seized and made its way through me— turning back towards home defeated and afraid; instead going to the supermarket, buying ice cream and baklava and standing with my bike leaning against me in the wintry streets, eating it all with my hands and no spoon, stickiness all over, ice cream dripping down the front of my jacket— not caring, not caring who saw me, not being able to care.

***

i feel that my life has been this ongoing process of unburdening— unburdening via Understanding The Ecosystem. understanding that there is no way to ‘tackle a symptom’ in singularity or ‘find a clean and tidy cure’ ‘once and for all’— you can’t touch one thing without touching everything else. most of our families don’t know this, schools don’t teach this; the overculture actively and maliciously hides any goddamn trace of this.

it wants, it wants— you to feel that it is All Your Fault.

***

i wanted to write about Digestion— because it has been present with me, but especially present yesterday on the problematic holiday in which we engorge ourselves, ‘partake of the feast;’ upon which i have often eaten myself literally sick, to the point i felt like i couldn’t breathe or thought my abdomen was going to burst— because ‘that’s what you do on thanksgiving.’ you eat and eat and eat and eat. and Eat.

i realize how much i have eaten and especially overeaten, to belong. {and the metaphor of this, which has revealed itself later— in terms of being a highly sensitive absorptive person.}

overeating— especially with my immediate family, or at any kind of ‘free food offering’ situation. like— christmas-time at a job in which the organization/business is sent lots of christmas sweets and treats. guess who’d eat them? and eat them. and eat them. because they radiated to me. just like every time i’d ‘try to bring snacks’ to stash in my desk at my last job— they were boring a hole into my brain as i tried to sit at my computer and type; i couldn’t concentrate; i felt them in the drawer; they had no kind of innocuous presence, at all. if they were there, they had to be eaten, not saved for later.

{{this is a bit overwhelming to continue sharing— i feel like these vulnerable vignettes are tumbling right out of me, And, i feel uncomfortable, and need More Holding; i have been trying to write more succinctly in my last few posts on substack but perhaps this subject is still so ‘new’ in the span of my publicly writing about it, that i can’t do that as easily, here; trying to find my way back to the threads of my original/intended point …}}

D I G E S T I O N.

i wanted to write the post that i had always wanted to find on the internet— over all these years searching for ways to fix myself, my ‘chronic constipation,’ my gas, my bloating, my distended abdomen, my pain. in march of this year on instagram i wrote that “all the targeted ads on IG mock me constantly with some other supplement or powder or modality to try that will Cure IBS, Cure Constipation, Heal The Gut.” i have been the one. i have been the one to jump at Any and Every Fucking Thing people have mentioned has helped them. {this is admittedly an exaggeration when it comes to the ‘every’— but that’s what it feels like.} i have bought the powder, the supplement. googled exhaustively. researched exhaustively. moved from a place of desperation. followed the links in the targeted ads. and i have experienced first-hand the terrifying consequences of trying to force my guts to move ‘all at once’ when it wasn’t time for them to move, and especially in that way.

and this is The Thing i want to posit, here:

what if your body is the way it is For A Reason?

what if ‘optimum body functioning’ and ‘normalcy’ don’t really exist?

what if ‘slow’ is relative and subjective?

what if there isn’t a one-size-fits-all version of Healthy to strive for?

what if there’s nothing wrong with you?

what if there’s nothing wrong with you?

***

the sheer brain-breaking capacity of these questions that would usually elicit nothing but reinvigorated hopelessness, entrapment, locked doors, high walls, more self-hating and neverending-seeming-shame-spirals— has been aided a-thousand-fold by the convergences of several life-changing things. including: a 12-step-esque facility to ‘turn it over’— to open a doorway in your ‘Impossible Cause’-ness— to turn to prayer, to turn to Asking— as i did with the novena to saint jude i made in 2018 after receiving a bipolar II diagnosis and pills i decided not to take— a prayer to be able to ‘manage bipolar II without medication’ during a time in which i said with resolve to myself that i ‘lacked the discipline necessary to save my own life.’

truly, it is this— window where there was only a wall— a meeting with the Utter Impossibility with a tiny, tiny bit of cracked-open space— something has a chance to Happen here. surprise has a chance to flood in. surprise, and wonder, and Change.

this has been only bolstered, strengthened, and vivified by my immersion in myth and storytelling over the last 4 years, the validity and necessity of (as this substack is named) wrestling the Angel. especially having a coyote-guide like the late great daniel deardorff, who introduced me more fully to the understandings of trickster wisdom, of the mythic both/and, of holding the ‘3rd space’ of the mandorla, the alchemic coincidentia oppositorum, what can impossibly be generated from the tension of two complete opposites; that if it’s not impossible it’s not worth doing. these teachings have become part of the marrow, re-membrances in psychic blood and bone, now inherent to me, Evident in Every Way i think and move in the world .. all of this cannot be understated, including the continual communion with mythic and ecologically-thinking kin i have had during my time on the path of the oral tradition storyteller, meeting and partaking in the writings of people like sophie strand (her essay ‘i will not be purified;’ her upcoming book ‘the body is a doorway’…), and hearing lectures from someone like bayo akomolafe, trailing fugitivity and monstrosity […]

it opens up a potentiality that literally did not exist, anywhere else.

earlier this year when i unexpectedly approached the threshold of the colonoscopy i had been running from in literal and actual terror since my early 20s— i was brought to this place of Choice and integration. was i going to leave my perception of my body, my ‘chronic constipation,’ my chronic abdominal pain, my ‘fucked up digestion’— was i going to leave it Exiled, and Separate, and Unintegrated with the lushness of the New Baseline i had forged over these years— the one rooted in the natural and imaginal worlds, in stories and the mythic, in the shelter and teachings of The Great Mother? was i going to do that, to myself? was i going to refuse to look at this, to Be With This, in a way i had extended communication and welcome to other parts of myself— in a way i had begun to increasingly help other people, to bring the mythic, and the Truth held in Images, and the sensibility of what is Underneath— was i going to continue denying this to my self? and particularly— to the parts of myself and my story that seemed calcified and immovable and actually Doomed, the parts that seemed they Could Not Change, the exact parts that Really, Really Fucking Needed It—?

***

what has happened in my life this year in regards to my digestion has been Unprecedented and Miraculous.

what has happened in my life since september 2022 when i wrote this post on instagram and began to formally and utterly trepidatiously enter the space of this inquiry, whilst staying at that beautiful industrial loft upstate in which i was covertly pillaging all the cupboards:

“how willing am i to Heal, as megan watterson wrote, all the way down and all the way through? what Lifelong stories coiled with pain, anguish, agony am i Willing to give up? about my digestion, my body, my bowels, my guts, my belly, my health? Pain.

it’s almost overwhelming how much Pain is here, ideationally, emotionally, physically, and otherwise. but i have That Map I Made. the map from my ‘mental illness’ journey that lit All the fires in the dark.

all the destructive patterning, not listening, lying, hurting, running, running, running. all the things i believed about myself, that i was a horrible hurricane of a person, that the world would never stop tremoring, that i would never find peace. that i would never understand self-love. that i would die before i found any kind of resolution.

if i can find my ways through that.

i can find my ways through Anything.”

this journey, this Continual Journey, this Continual Process and Deepening— has been Unprecedented and Miraculous because it has, yet again, Opened Up my idea of what a Miracle is.

What Has Opened Up Here is Communion.

*

i didn’t find the magic supplement or powder or herb or potion that ‘solved this.’

i didn’t find the one great doctor or practitioner who held ‘the key.’

i don’t have the ideal diet.

i don’t have infallible discipline.

i didn’t find the perfect ‘cure.’

i have not unequivocally ‘healed my gut.’

i’m not taking shits ~every single day like clockwork~ like ‘everyone goddamn else.’

i’ve been led back into the spirallic dance of What Is Particular To Me.

*

i’ve been led into Listening and Receiving my guts, my digestion, my body, my subtle energies and body signals— in a way i literally, literally, never have before.

i have been led into communion and communication with parts of myself that were walled off to me— that i kept walled off— that were in my blindspots— that were being abused and imprisoned— that were co-opted by compulsive energy, black-hole-vortex energy— that i kept overwhelming with self-hatred and old stories and food my body didn’t want to eat/wasn’t actually hungry for, and Fear.

i have been learning and observing patternings and continuities that are wholly specific To Me— that couldn’t be googled. that a doctor or practitioner couldn’t tell me. that weren’t found on the first GI map i ever did (this year, which took several months to pay off due to my low income; and which seemed semi-impossible to fulfill because my bowel movements can sometimes be so ‘irregular’/’infrequent’).*

{{ * even, this though— those words— i remember the first time i extensively tracked my bowel movements earlier last year; the story i had held to for so long was that i’d go ‘weeks without going to the bathroom’— but/and my on-the-ground tracking for months, absolutely incredulously, showed me otherwise … there’s So Much here.}}

***

and so I Return.

what if my ‘slow digestion’ and my patterns of elimination are indicative of the energetic states of my body, are sending me messages about things i would otherwise not see or perceive? is presenting to me A Rhythm wholly mine, that i have been trying to bang and force into the rhythms of everyone else?

what if i have spent a lifetime trying to rid myself of this thing that is Completely Inherent to me— a need for Spaciousness and Slowness— a need to really take time and gentleness and massage and listening, to Digest. a tenderness and gentleness that previously eluded me.

a reminder that i am taking on, perceiving, absorbing— So Much— as a highly sensitive person and empath with extrasensory gifts— and my digestive process isn’t going to look like anyone else’s. that i need extra time to empty out, to gather information from, to synthesize and integrate. to feel safe and contained/held in that process. that ‘trying to force my guts to move’ (even with something as ‘regular-seeming’ as a big ol’ cup of coffee) is UNNATURAL, for me, because my body and spirit are processing at the speed that they can. that when my guts move, my held emotions move. and if i do this too fast— the result is fucking terrifying and overwhelming.

what if my guts were always reminding me, showing me— this eventual path to who i really am, what i really need that is supportive to me? things i could never find in an overly stressful full-time job or the breakneck pace of the overculture or an enmeshed family home or a codependent relationship or unrealistic standards of normalcy or in running-running-running, always, away from myself?

what if it took ‘All This Time’ because ‘This Is The Time It Took’— to continue committing to moving through all the layers of the neverending spiral, learning how to love and care for myself, honoring my Individuation and Differentiation— laying down, All The Time, the falsity of Normal, the quest for Fix, for Cure?

[…]

i think this is as far as i can go with this, right now. it has to start somewhere in order for someday it to become more succinct.

there feels like there could be so much more— more memories, more stretching back into time, more things to share— but as ever and always, entwined with this journey, is the most painful and life-giving lesson i’ve probably ever learned— That It Is Enough. even when you don’t think it is, or think you can push and do more and more and more— it is okay. it is Safe to Be Enough.

it is Okay.

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~ referencing for myself ~ the instagram posts in which i started more specifically/intentionally writing about this journey: sept 27 2022, oct 8 2022, oct 9 2022, feb 3 2023, jan 14 2024, march 3 2024, april 14 2024.

#ittakesgutstobewithyourguts

*

i also want to say, which is one of the places where the genesis for this post first began:

that i see my well-meaningness in looking up psychic/spiritual/energetic emotional ‘causes’ for bodily symptoms like of course in louise hay’s you can heal your life which is still somewhere on my bookshelf, and the many websites and testimonials i came across over the course of these years. but/and, i want to say that— for me, there’s still a kind of oversimplified 1-to-1 harmful shadow-causality here, a ‘this worked for me so it can also work for you!’ narrative that can unintentionally bar the way to more expansive and genuinely surprising associativities and revelations THAT YOU WILL NOT FIND ON THE INTERNET OR IN SOMEONE ELSE’S STORY—!!!

for a person who, for years, is having chronic trouble going to the bathroom, never-ending shame-spirals around it, and everyone throwing cures/tips/tricks their way— being told that the reason they can’t go to the bathroom is because they ‘can’t let go’ has only created more anxiety and recapitulation of that characteristic sense of forcefulness of— well then just fucking let go, audrey! and let go RIGHT NOW! why can’t you just let go?! … it’s the ecosystem that all of this is part of, and entwined with, that needs to be looked at. how the fuck can anyone read something like that (and what my punitive self often reads between the lines: ‘this is all your fault’ because if you could just ‘do this’ all these problems would ‘go away’ … ), and find a legitimate entry-point through all the resonating, entwined years of shame and pain?

the doors to All Of This are hidden and so complex.

i wanted to read more posts that talked about the genuine surprise of this process, and honored its Continuing-ness and natural evolution. that didn’t end in something saying scroll to the bottom to enroll in my course or get this supplement and here’s all the shining reviews of how wonderfully it works and how quickly everything changed. i wanted to read a post or find a website that wove digestion/constipation/eating/‘food addiction’/etc with things that are seemingly unrelated— including, for me, doing somatic experiencing work, going to codependents anonymous (CoDA), embracing/identifying as/communicating with The Other, expanding my capacity to See even what i don’t want to see, giving validity to my instinct and the language of images, the differences between coping mechanisms and what can actually feel/be supportive and safe, learning about boundaries [as i explored in my last post] and making different choices from my past self, my family, the overculture.

this is not to diminish you can heal your life or anyone writing about or doing work in this vein— it is rather to voice that maybe there are others like me out there for whom reading in a book or on a website that i need to ‘talk to myself positively’ or ‘learn to let go’ wasn’t helpful, as a singularity, especially in times of desperation and grasping or wherein self-love was just a shimmering on the horizon-line … that it was instead in the gritty, bloody, wild, wyrd Stuff of Life that i found the shape-shifting daimon, the North Star to follow; the joyous and difficult and crooked-ass-path particular to the exact seemingly Impossible Cause-ness of Me […]

<3

foto credits: my ritual-reworking of the text of ‘reliquary: the body’ in my third book, WILDLIGHT; sign that’s been on my door almost for as long as i’ve lived here; one of two landscape-labyrinths my body found/led me to in the sibley volcanic preserve in california; screenshots of an IG post from the_energetic_ecologist i really needed to read; last foto: unamuno quoted in daniel deardorff’s classic text, the other within: the genius of deformity in myth, culture and psyche.

{{{ thank you to myself for the bravery it takes to make this public; for the dedication to the journey it has taken to write about and synthesize this; for all you have done to be kinder to yourself, to make space for Change; for The Impossible. <3 }}}

edit from the future///

i actually didn’t realize until later that i had written about some-of-the-latest-happenings re: this topic here on substack back at the beginning of this year, so i’m linking it here: the edges of revelation and madness— an applied mythopoesis; or: tangling with hungry ghosts, from jan ‘24. <3