If you're in the business of learning really disgusting things about another person's bowels today, have I ever got a story for you.
I'm a bit weird about poop. I don't play in it or anything like that, but I've always been deeply ashamed of the fact that I do it. Or fart. Generally, anything that comes out of my asshole is enough to send me into a shame spiral that is hard to get out of. For instance, I have never farted on purpose in front of anybody but my sister, and even then, it was just because she lived in the same room as me and I was not going to spend all fucking day holding in my farts. That's just unhealthy and uncomfortable, so I pushed that behavior off for a few years. Amber and I have been best friends for almost twenty years (twenty next year!), and I have never farted in front of her, or pooped around her. It took me fifteen years to be able to tell her I was pooping and texting her at the same time. I can do that now and it's not a big deal, but it took a LONG time.
I never mentioned pooping to Chris, and we lived together. He farted and shit with the bathroom door open, there was no privacy boundary there for him. Allen was the same, though I eventually got to the point where I could tell him I had to poop, and he needed to vacate the area because I didn't want him to hear it or smell it or give any other clues to the fact that my anus served the same purpose as everyone else's. I didn't fart on purpose around him, but it did happen on accident in my sleep. Because of COURSE it did, I was a human woman holding in farts. Same with Dan, though with Dan, it was reciprocal. Neither of us talked about farts or poops, or bodily functions at all. And I will say, in the...I'm muddy about how long we were actually together...Anyway, body habits were not a thing we discussed when we were together. Dan never farted in front of me (he did on accident once, but as a person with good upbringing, I pretended I didn't notice by saying, "for what?" when he excused himself. I am perpetuating the problem of dwindling bodily intimacy), though because we "lived" at his place, he of course pooped, and his walls were so thin that I could hear EVERYTHING and I would sit in the living room with my ears burning out of embarrassment thinking to myself, "no fucking WAY will I be pooping at this abode's commode". And I never did. There was one time, my friend Anali was trying to get a dating feel for Dan's friend David, so we were over at Dan's watching movies and eating pizza, and I was struck by some kind of shit emergency, and I made an excuse about my period coming, and then ran to walmart and shit for a decade in their public restroom, sweating and packing myself full of self-loathing. And then REALLY going full gusto by buying a pack of tampons and shoving some in my purse.
Of course, I live with my husband now, the romance is gone, I know he shits, he knows I shit, and while I still do not fart in front of him, it's something that's no secret. We're human people that are married and live together.
I'm still weird about poop, though, and today, when Amber needed a little bit of a pick me up, I decided to tell her about my most embarrassing poop story, of which I have a few, but this one takes the shitty, shitty cake.
I was plagued by nervous guts as a kid. As an adult, this is less of a problem, but every once and a rare while, when I'm REALLY nervous, my tummy will seize up, and my asshole will demand that I find a hole to squat over, because I'm going to shit, whether I want to or not. As a middle schooler, I could usually hold in my first day of school nerves until the end of the day, when I was home and on my own turf, and could shit without shame. But the first day of ninth grade was different, for some reason, and this is the first in several truly embarrassing stories where my body was a vile betrayer in such a public forum; where the slightest sprinkling of bad verbal press could make or break your happiness for the next four years, my body decided it didn't give a fuck about my popularity. And let's be honest, my popularity was a lost fucking cause. I was fluffy headed, I wore glasses, I was tall and oddly built, and as we previously learned, my mom dressed me in the most painfully odious clothes. Also, she didn't let me shave past my knees, and as I'm Italian and Armenian (I recently learned that, and I think it's so cool), I am as hairless as a gorilla, so I was walking around with an afro, bad clothes, Sally Jesse Raphael glasses, Garfield shorts, and legs that were half smooth, half Robin Williams. Now that I've repainted that amazing picture of me as a 9th grader, it'll make the rest of this story even worse.
I couldn't hold my tummy nerves. My body made it clear that I was going to shit, the only thing that would change in that scenario was where I did it. I could either keep trying to hold it and shit my pants, or I could find a bathroom, get over myself, and shit where I was supposed to. so I rushed to a bathroom, and it should be noted that our high school was too full, so we were in a valley of portables off site. Our restroom was a portable, too. Without a door. So it was three stalls, completely "open" to the outside. But I was lucky, nobody was outside, nobody was in the restroom, I was totally free to shit as noisily and stinkily as I could. And I REALLY fucking needed to, so I did.
For what felt like the next twenty years of my life.
It sounded like what I imagine the gates of hell sound like, and smelled worse. It was an all around unpleasant time, but it was desperately needed. After however many eons of raucous shitting I did was over, I felt AMAZING. Like a brand new person. I had stopped sweating, my body wasn't shivering and cold anymore, and most importantly, I had managed to not have anybody come in and disrupt my exploding asshole moment that so desperately needed to happen.
I was washing my hands, feeling so much better about my life, and my bowels, and the school year in general, when I looked outside the open door to the bathroom portable.
There stood two of the most popular girls in school. Like statues. Statues that had obviously been standing there, silently biding their time to see who those horrible ass noises and smells and plops belonged to, and oh god oh god oh god, it was me. The noises belonged to me. I couldn't pretend someone else was in there, or that I had happened upon the noises, too, and yeah, popular girls, what kinda monster has a stomach that makes sounds like that, ammiright??? There would be none of that. It was plain to these two beacons of popularity and social grace that I was the culprit. I was caught brown handed, a pooper among the elite. The three of us stood in our spots for a frozen second, me panicking, them taking it all in, and then the laughter started. They were laughing at me. Incredulously, earnestly, judgmentally. They were laughing at me, and I stood there and took it, because what was I going to do, defend myself? Scream at them, "Hey, you fucking perverts, who the fuck sits outside a bathroom and listens to someone feverishly squirt out their emotions AND their horrible breakfast? Gross, you guys are gross, and you have the gall to laugh at me, you sick, sick, sick, sick fucks!" Well...yeah. Yeah, I should have done that. Because it's true, it takes a really weird person to want to sit and listen to someone shitting. While we all laugh at poop and farts, this was going above and beyond. It's a level of curiosity that I do not understand, as an adult, but I was utterly ashamed by as a child.
Was the entire school going to find out? I was so fucking nervous. I hung back in the stall and sweat for an entirely different reason now, and the girls never came in. They just walked off, laughing at me, talking about me pooping like normal mean girls talked about my hair and my Garfield shorts. They never said a word to anybody outside of themselves, thankfully, though for the rest of the week, they would giggle and whisper to each other and look right at me when I crossed their paths. They probably talked more about my shit that week than any of my doctors have in my whole life, and I literally shit in a doctors hands a decade ago.
I have never moved on from that embarrassing moment. When we go out and I have to poop, I make my husband take me home, and he gets frustrated and asks me, "Can't you just fucking go in the restroom? NOBODY CARES!" Sure, nobody cares, but the ghosts of the popular girls will always always always be waiting for me outside of that bathroom, judging me and laughing at me. i'll stick to the bathroom at home, thanks.
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