NEW YORK: IBS & the Vagus Nerve
The Fullness of Food & Friendship
This post discusses incest abuse. If you’re a survivor or supporter seeking resources, head over to Incest AWARE or Sibling Sexual Trauma.
Right, left, right, left, I step into the never silent, ever decorated, dirty streets of New York City. I scurry and hurry like the rats in this place. The ones who have been here all this time but still never find themselves at home here or alone here. Life pours out of NYC like memories from my mind. As natural and as nuanced, as dignified and as desperate, as sacred and as severe, as beautiful and as banal, as glorified and as gross, as vicious and as violent.
On any given day I go to the subway, where strangers sit way too close together. Lovers too. Leaning their heads on each other’s shoulders. Holding hips and hands. Children clinging to their mothers. Intimacy in a public setting. Family. Then there are the musicians, the performers, the people selling candy, and the guy masturbating. This is New York too. And I, as the newcomer, fit somewhere in between the rats, the whirls of love, the wheels of the bus, the children playing, and that one man playing with himself. It’s always a show and I always show up. It always smells…like something.
Today I’m in the Lower East Side seeking to find a bookstore, a bar, and a coffee shop all combined. Also a snack. I love snacks. So I walk. Right, left, right, left, along the sidewalk until suddenly I see a shop before me. El Churro, it reads in big black, block letters on the wall near the ceiling.
The part of me that loves dough and sugar and cinnamon and chewy and crunchy all at the same time and — if I’m really lucky — chocolate dipping sauce, stops. The part of me that knows my body better sighs.
There’s no way that they’re gluten and dairy free. I think sadly.
Then I scurry closer to the glass door just to make sure. I peer through the transparent barrier that stands between me and this spontaneous snack dream and see the sign: “All churros are vegan and gluten free.”
“What?!” I literally scream out loud as my hand quickly lands on the churro shaped handle — long and lean and light brown and cylindrical with divots all around — and pushes it open. I step inside. I’m first in line.
“I’d like one churro, please.” I ask politely to the person across the counter in front of me.
“The minimum is three.”
“But they’re small right?”
“Each churro is like this big.” The server holds out their hands further than I anticipate.
“What am I going to do with three churros that big?”
“Eat them!” They celebrate.
“Okay, I’d like three churros with the vegan dark chocolate sauce.”
The churros arrive quickly in a white paper bag. I hold them in my cold hands as the fried dough delicacies rolled in cinnamon and sugar warm them. Then I find my way to a standing table, pull one sugary treat out of the bag, dip it into the chocolate, and let it press onto my lips. Like a kiss. Like everything I have ever wanted. Ease. Sweetness. Availability. Pleasure. Gentle pressure. So accessible. Just momentarily.
Ever since I can remember I have felt this sense of insatiable hunger. Psychological. Spiritual. An existential need to always be full. Because full is better than empty. Empty feels like a long lost memory plastered to my body. Those stories passed from my mother’s lips to my mind as she tried to explain the slit that stretched from my navel to my left hip. The scars on my ankles and arms. My slightly discolored front tooth.
I was too full too young. Literally of shit. A large section of my colon didn’t function. So everything just got stuck. Filled me up. Didn’t fit. If the intestines burst, I could die. So they didn’t feed me much until the surgery. Hungry. Too full and too empty all at once. I had half of my large colon removed at six months old. Feeding and breathing tubes stuffed into my arms and throat. A damaged front tooth from too much force once.
The external wounds healed, while a lifetime of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and the embodied memories of being stuffed and starved both remained. Then the seizures started. Every six months until I was five. Grand mal. The big ones that last a long time. They stopped too, eventually. But this set the beginning of my relationship with my body. The fear of life causing unparalleled anxiety. Death always following me.
As I grew up, food became a constant source of comfort and discomfort. It settled the anxiety in my mind, temporarily satiated the hole in my soul, but irritated my cut-open-then-sewed-back-together gut. This duplicity of help and harm, nourishment and neglect became all too familiar to me. A repeated reality. The story of my body more complex than just illness. Repressed. I didn’t remember until I was 24.
The father who provided for me, perpetrated me. Incest. The mother who cared for me, forced me to carry her emotionally. Be the center of her identity. Covert incest. The vagus nerve connects the gut to the brain. So when one is stressed it distresses the other. Because both were traumatized, my system found it very difficult to function. Eventually between the surgeries, the seizures, the Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and the sexual and emotional violence, I began to present with Complex-PTSD. Understandably. Too much, too soon, all at once. Too full of all the wrong things. Too empty of all the right ones. Simultaneously.
Slowly I began to let go and to let in. To set boundaries. To reclaim the memories of incest and name the consequences of illness. To remain at a distance from my family. Then to divorce myself from them when they sided with those who chose to make their pleasure the purpose of my body. To rewire my brain, to repurpose my being, to relieve my body from the weight of their weights. To eventually accept that parts of me would never recover. To practice managing my disabilities. To treat my body as my last beloved. The only constant left to me.
To make myself into an heirloom of love after a history of harm. To invite new family to fill me back in. To ask society to do the same. To demand a seat at the table as an author and activist in systems that still stay silent around the topic of incest. To take a stand and say, I should’ve been raised safe! The next generation of children should be too. The entire time food management remained an issue.
I found few foods that my body didn’t react to. Sensitive to a number of items including gluten, dairy, eggs, nuts. Eventually I let go of my comforts for the sake of healing. I just ate oranges and quinoa and meat and vegetables and potatoes. For breakfast, for lunch, for dinner, for snacks. No cinnamon, no sugar, certainly no fried dough stretched into a big stick crunchy on the outside and chewy within. IBS management can be very isolating. Eating out not often an option. Quick, convenient snacks difficult to find. Everything had to be made and made by me. And this was hard with brain damage and Complex-PTSD.
Cooking requires a lot of steps. From the choosing of a recipe, to the shopping for ingredients, to the washing and the chopping and the baking and the stirring and the frying. To the plating. To the eating. To the cleaning up the mess. Neurofatigue. A type of brain tired that shuts the whole system down and for me causes self-harm. Suicidality. Getting too stressed isn’t safe.
I lost too much weight, but felt more energized. My gut not having to work so hard. But this amount of restriction wasn’t sustainable and eventually — when I wasn’t getting better enough fast enough — I pendulated back to eating whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. So used to being too full or too empty. Always living between extremes. Just like in childhood passed between physicians and parents. Mom and dad.
I gained a lot of weight. Started to feel the old pains of inflammation. The brain fog. The fatigue. The strange sense that my body did not belong to me. That I had to drag it around like a weight bound to my frame. Living some sort of half-life. I needed a compromise between the fullness and emptiness. The comfort with the accompanying lethargy and the disciplined diet with the energy, the too-much-effort, and the isolation.
The low FODMAP diet — a system of eating that avoids foods with too much of specific sugars that trigger IBS — finally became my body’s compromise. I signed up for a more sustainable meal kit program. The need for convenience — the removal of so many steps between the procurement, preparation, and partaking of food by pre-portioned, healthy ingredients arriving directly to my doorstep — trumping the concern for climate change and environmental justice. An acceptance that what’s best for my body and what’s best for the world’s body don’t always align. In time my system is settling. Trying to find a healthy rhythm between too full and too empty. An in-between amount of satiation. Safety.
So, the churros feel like a celebration. Certainly not completely low FODMAP, but gluten and dairy free, they invite comfort and will cause less harm to me. And here they are. Easily available. Accessible. Food I don’t have to shop for, or chop for, or fry for, or plate, or order a week in advance so its deconstructed shape could arrive at my doorstep ready to make. I certainly can’t eat these every day, but just this once feels like enough. So I treat myself. I take a big bite and let that fried dough crunchy on the outside, gooey on the inside, dipped in cinnamon and sugar and vegan chocolate fill my mouth. And with it my soul. For a moment satiating that insatiable hunger. Fulfilling the emptiness just the right amount.
I finish one churro. Still not sure what I will do with the other two. I leave the shop out of the same door I entered with the churro-shaped handle then complete my journey to the bookstore, bar, and coffee shop all combined. I walk in, hiding the food, certain I shouldn’t have it with me. The venue is loud and fun and narrow and absolutely and abundantly full of everything it said it was: people, booze, coffee, tea, and books. Walls and walls of books. Not very many places to sit though. I do a round. No spots found. I take a beat outside, wait a while. Then try again. I walk back in.
I notice a row of small, circular tables with a long bench seat behind them. And smaller round seats on the other side. Each table is taken by a person on the bench side, but the small seats are free. I would never ask to share a table in the suburban cafes in the mostly white neighborhoods I used to live near. There, people were used to privacy and space.
But this was New York. I pondered. Here, we’re so accustomed to being cramped on subways. I’m going to ask for a seat at the table.
“Excuse me?” A woman sitting across from me looks up. “Do you mind if I sit here?” I point to the seat across from her that would force us to share a table.
“Of course not!” She shuffles her stuff so I can sit.
I squeeze in. Sit down. Remove my jacket and place it on the floor with the bag of churros buried into it. Keeping them warm. I read. Then the person sitting next to the woman across from me leaves. I stand up quickly, move my stuff onto the bench and have my own table now. I leave the seat across from me empty in case someone else wants to sit down.
“Thank you so much!” I say to the woman who so graciously granted me space.
“Your book looks great.” She states. “I looked it up.”
“It is great,” I say. “What’s your name?”
“Sara. What’s yours?”
“Jo. short for Josephine.”
We talk. About life and love and what brought us to this long bench in this Book Club late at night. We keep talking. Her home and my home are off the same train line. So, we decide to head out and walk together the 20 minutes back to the subway. I share with her my secret.
“I have two gluten-free, vegan churros with me. AND chocolate sauce.” She gasps.
“Can I interest you in one?”
“Yes, of course!” She grabs a sugary stick from the white paper bag, dips it into the chocolate as we walk and consumes it like I had just a few hours before.
“Delicious.”
The churros end, as our friendship begins. We sit too close together on the subway. Exchange numbers. Choose the next date we will get together. Sara gets off the train, the rats running just below. We meet up again another day. Eventually, I share my story with her. She shares hers. Suddenly a safe relationship built on the surprising accessibility of sweet treats, an open seat at the table, and the forced intimacy of the New York Subway. I breathe into my body, as it begins to practice feeling just the right amount of full and a lot less empty. The start of a new reality and the satiation of sweetness.
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