Sunday blogs - birds of a feather flock together, women of distress share crippling IBS.

At a French restaurant in the lower east side, my friend and I had been hilariously bonding over our stomach troubles.

“You know, it's totally a Jew thing,” I remembered along with a slew of other genetic Ashkenazi disease predispositions we may share in our mildly Jewish lineage. I grabbed her iced coffee glass and sipped off the rim, a normally anti-covid move had she not just fully recovered from having it.

“True that. But it's crazy – I feel like I never used to have anything up with my stomach! And I'm so fucking jealous of my partner's fast metabolism. He literally eats five bacon egg and cheeses a week and pork tacos at 12:00am. He could never gain a pound. And here I am, never being able to shit more than a couple of nuggets.”

I ripped a mussel out with my tiny fork. “Sounds like me anytime I'm on tour.” We both start dying laughing.

“No, but really,” my friend said, gathering herself. “Our bodies really have just internalized anxiety to the point of it affecting our gut microbes! Serotonin is formed in the gut, you know.”

“Oh yeah.” I dipped the last of my fries into my bowl of post-marineiere mussels sauce, hooking on to a floating shallot ring. “I think my psychiatrist told me that once. He was also kind of a skeez so I had a hard time taking anything he said seriously.” I also remembered shallots were one of the foods I wasn't supposed to eat with IBS. I ate it anyway. Way past bloated now.

“It's just hard when it comes so easy to folks who treat their bodies like shit.”

And yes - I exercise. I can do glute bridges at 165lbs and I'm only 5'3. Strong as fuck. (This is one of the only good things, mind you, that TikTok culture has ever done for me). I eat pretty healthy - minimal fried food, mostly organic, leaning vegetarian and low sugar. But can I really say I treat my body well? Not all the time. I may be relatively healthy, but clearly I prioritize a unique cuisine experience over a little stomach pain. And there shouldn't have to be any shame in that! That is, until you go to the doctor's office all for an x-ray that says you're blocked up to the nines with poop, and if you don't do anything about it, it could get ugly.

“Yeah, 100%,” I say anyway. It's true – at least I don't eat five bacon egg and cheeses a day. I did enough of that when I was 19 and lived with drug addicts in Bushwick. I guess the difference is that I can at least say I'm trying.

The more important point being made in the silence that followed was that we shared more than Ashkenazi lineage. We also shared a history of mental illness provoked by emotional abuse from loved ones, sexual trauma, and crippling perfectionism. She may just be reaping the consequences later than me. It hurts me to think about how many women, particularly in our doomsday existence that is marked by generation z (climate change, impossible rent, need I go on?), carry their stress in their gut. It is fun to make poop jokes about it and all, but I always wondered if there was something to be said about the prevalence of stomach problems in our generation. It seems all of my closest friends are racked with it, and yet choose to enjoy the moment of a mussel with onions and cream over the momentary relief from our twisting insides. And maybe it's enough to have simply come out on the other side of trauma – bacon egg and cheese in hand, saying fuck it all.

I woke up this morning with intense anxiety after a mere four hours of sleep, sending an all too familiar shooting pain through my abdomen. It's second nature for my stomach to turn on me as a stress response. It's a constant reminder of habitual learning, trauma that my body will struggle to forget, responses without a clear catalyst. I didn't have any reason to be anxious this morning. I didn't have an early obligation, a gig, a lesson to teach, a procession of daily events ahead of me. On the other hand, I've also learned to tune out the constant white noise in my head that is my buzzing subconscious, actively uncovering and digesting long term projects, lifestyle changes, growing older, next week when I do get busy again, if I'll ever really find love, if the laundry room is still open...I may not be a mid-20s guy with a light speed metabolism, but I'll eat like one if I need my mental comfort back.

Signing off, a lifetime commitment to IBS.