#1 - Achieving Nirvana
For our first installment, in an act of martyrdom, I present you with one of my own poop stories.
The monkeys outside were howling and I was too. At 2 am on my seventh early morning in Costa Rica, I finally pooped after being constipated for the entire trip.
I can’t recall if I have experienced constipation like this before, but I do know I have always been a little bit constipated. Growing up, I never pooped more than once every three days. They were always long. Winding. Sometimes they circled the whole bowl. Others, pellets, like a deer or rabbit. I don’t think I ever drank water of my own volition or was told to, and my insides did their best. I survived on the hydration from Diet Coke and instant Lipton tea mixes from age six to eighteen. But I was young and pliable. I fluctuated 15 pounds up and down my entire adolescence like it was my job. My insides remained resilient.
Eventually, on a yoga teacher training retreat in Costa Rica, I spent the week in the healthiest way I thought possible at nineteen. Stretching. Eating vegan meals. Meditating. Sweating, even. I was following every rule in the book to have an utterly normal bowel movement. But it was a total shock to my digestive system, which had been working overtime during my first year of college in the dining hall, processing all too much cereal and french fries.
My constipation became public information the second a few other women expressed a similar problem on day 3. “We’ll get you going,” the teaching assistants swore to us. “Get in happy baby pose, stat!”
In a way, it was wonderful to be with a group of complete strangers who felt so comfortable talking shit. My bowel issues had always been somewhat personal, and private, something I never talked about with anyone. This is probably why I thought it was fine to only poop every three to five days for the first half of my life.
But, on the fifth day of my backed-up colon, Jackie, our resident nurse of the twelve-day yoga teacher training group, got serious with me. “I’ll take you to the hospital myself,” she said, “but before we do that eat more salt.” She had come from the army, where she learned eating salt helps you retain more water, and thus stay hydrated. Marianne, the leader of the teacher training, told me she was legally obligated to take me to get healthcare past a certain point. “I’ve done this before,” she promised me, “but it’s not pretty.” I stared at my pile of rice and beans and another voice in the background yelled “go for a jog!”
“It’s long and smooth, I hear it’s to be just like a banana,” an Irish woman who eventually became a professional bodybuilder told me. “More like kielbasa,” our instructor’s husband chimed in. Others simply bragged, “I’m regular, like clockwork, 8 am every day.” Or “I can’t go to a morning vinyasa class without stinking up the place.”
I did it all and then some. I happy babied. I jogged. I ate salt. I took laxatives. I jumped up and down. I did a rapid breathing exercise for ten minutes and almost passed out. I drank more water than I thought humanly possible. I feared death by drowning. Still, I persisted. One by one everyone else became relieved and I remained full.
I decided the only way I would poop would be to achieve complete serenity. I had a memory of my childhood friend’s dad, Steve, sitting us down to use the bathroom before bed. We were new to the whole “going by yourself” thing and still needed some encouragement. I sat down and he prompted me. I squeezed and clenched and started to try and force it. “NO!” He yelled in protest, “never try like that, it’ll turn you inside out.” I had a vivid image of suddenly becoming a pink puddle of guts in the toilet. “Just try to relax,” he said, “that’s the only way you’ll make it happen.”
On the seventh day of my constipation, everyone started to get very concerned. “That’s it, I’m taking you to town in the morning,” our teacher Marianne told me privately after dinner. “This just isn’t healthy anymore.” I hid tears walking from the dining hut to our sleeping hut, a large wooden structure with bunk beds and a communal bathroom. Not yet 20, I had chosen the cheapest option for this yoga teacher training vacation with the 25-35 year-olds who couldn’t convince a friend to come along with them and split a double. Sharing a room and a few stalled toilets with twelve other women sounded fine until I needed to sit on a toilet for more than the societally appropriate amount of time. I’ll just wait until everyone’s asleep, I thought.
The plan was simple. Sit on the toilet until something happens. I figured if I could relax completely, maybe I would achieve nirvana – which, in a sense, is why I started practicing yoga in the first place. I got into my bunk quietly with everyone else. Some of the gals turned on their reading lamps and got settled in the dark. I joined them and resigned myself to staying up as late as it took. By 11:30, all the lights were out. But I knew not everyone would truly be asleep. So I set a silent alarm for 30 more minutes on my phone and lay in the dark, preparing my body for the task at hand.
After crawling out of bed, I slinked into the bathroom and pulled down my shorts. It’s now or never, I told myself. But also no pressure, this is a good and nice relaxing thing we’re doing here. I sat on the toilet and, perhaps out of pure human instinct, pulled my heels to the toilet sit and sat fully squat on the toilet, wrapping my arms up around my knees and leaning back into the lid behind me.
This was it. It was happening.
I waited confidently, which is perhaps what I needed all along. To truly believe it could happen. The movement I had been feeling for the past week continued its mildly painful slugging, this time around my lower left abdomen. It took everything in me to focus on relaxing instead of forcing anything. One deep breath in through the nose, another out the back of the throat with the mouth closed to make a constricted, breathy sound. My eyes were closed. Had I not been sitting upright I could have fallen asleep.
First, there was a ball. Followed by what I will lovingly call “everything else.”
The next day I greeted everyone at my breakfast table. “It happened.” Then the hugging started. I silently started the next countdown clock until my next poop. After another four days of vegan food, I found myself on my porcelain throne in a fancy hotel in San Jose, finally alone, employing my newly patented squat-on-the-seat method. I pictured my toes in the sand back at the beach, sunset painting the horizon a hushed pink and yellow. Peace.
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Everyone’s got a poop story, but people seldom gather ‘round the campfire to tell them. So I started the Poop Scoop, where I retell and illustrate the best I’ve heard from friends and strangers for your viewing pleasure.
If you know someone who poops or would like to, please share this newsletter with them. And if you’ve got a story you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to give me the scoop on your poop at pollyloudadams@gmail.com.