Gastro Pub I: A Reader’s Digestion
I’m 39 years old and I don’t digest well, but that wasn’t why I was in therapy. I started looking for a new therapist in the winter of 2019 because I wasn’t sure I wanted to live anymore. For a year and half, I had been battling the deepest depression I’d ever known.
(“Battling” doesn’t really feel like the right word, either. I wasn’t participating actively enough in my life at that point to be imagined as someone waging a battle. I couldn’t have lifted a sword. I was… persisting, but not, you know, “nevertheless, she….” I was just going.)
When I first started seeing Greg, he struck me with his intelligence — he wielded a mind that was literally incisive. He cut right to the heart of the matter — to the matter of me — and we would open up together what he revealed.
This makes me sound like a surgical patient. And I don’t know — I’ve never experienced it and wouldn’t want to project the idea that I know what I’m talking about — but it makes me think about those surgeries where the patient has to remain awake. The patient helps the surgeon avoid tender areas. Only in the case of Greg and I, we were looking for them.
Anyway, I’d been seeing Greg for a couple months, and I always had trouble figuring out where to start in our sessions. I would sit down and be overly formal, as if I was being interviewed and had to establish the niceties. As though I had to come up with something good, something impressive (perhaps this indicates some good reasons I’m in therapy in the first place). But that day, I didn’t struggle. I didn’t try to smooth or ingratiate. I started talking right out of a tender place, like I picked up my own scalpel. And what I started talking about was digestion.
A couple days prior, I’d been to my doctor to get the results of an expensive lab we’d run. I’d peed in a cup, frozen the sample, and mailed it to a lab, who spun it in a centrifuge and did all kinds of tests to send me dispatches from the various outposts of my body. Things I might be allergic to (detected by the presence of antibodies); ways in which I was or wasn’t making use of vitamins and minerals; ways in which I had or didn’t have toxic things building up inside me.
The report I got wasn’t encouraging. Not because it returned some awful, acute illness. But because, as always, it returned a grey area: reports that I’m not making full use of vitamins and fats and minerals and that I have low levels of toxic substances like metals, yeast, and bacteria. Nothing, however, to explain the severity and longevity of my symptoms. Overall, what it told me was that this is a body that’s not feeling well. This is a body that’s struggling to make use of nutrition. This is a body that isn’t digesting what’s fed to it. What it didn’t tell me was why.
And so my doctor and I devised a plan of supplements and treatments to try to get rid of the yeast and bacteria, to build up a surplus of the resources I wasn’t able to extract from food. But it all felt so unsatisfying and scary and defeating. For five years, I’ve been trying to figure out why my body changed in the last year of writing my dissertation. I’ve also tried a lot of things to help. I’ve traveled across the state to see diagnostic wizards and spent thousands of dollars on tests and treatments. I’ve radically changed my diet, to the point that for a while I was no longer eating sugar of any kind (I was absolutely bewitched by the scent of blossoms that spring — humans are positively mad for sweetness, or I am at any rate). I still don’t eat gluten or dairy. I’m told to avoid stone fruits and certain vegetables. Eliminate nightshades (which sound like magic — why would anyone want to avoid them?). I’ve been very careful.
None of it has seemed to matter much. I mean, I probably feel better than I would otherwise. I am, after all, eating a pretty spectacularly healthy diet as a consequence. But my body still hurts: pain in my joints, grinding fatigue, headaches, blinkering brain fog, and an obvious inability (I’ll try to be somewhat delicate here) to digest food. I’ve tried to make food my medicine. I’ve tried to rest and heal. But nothing much has changed.
I brought all that into the room with me that day, and I just started talking from that place. These simple sentences: “I don’t know what to eat anymore. I don’t know how to feed myself. I live in a body that doesn’t know how to take in nutrition. I can’t absorb the things I need. I feel stuck. I’m worried. I don’t know how to digest anymore. Did I ever?” Into the quiet of that question walked Greg: “What is it to digest?”
What is it? Well, you break things down into manageable pieces. You use your teeth. Your stomach helpfully offers up some acid. Hopefully, in the process, you take in the aromas, textures, and tastes of what you sample. In that mix of violence — the rending, tearing, and dissolving — and enjoyment, you feed yourself. You take in nutrition and fuel. You move things along. You keep going.
Literally, I struggle to do that. But figuratively, it’s not so easy either. Greg and I have started to talk about my approach to a kind of life digestion: the taking in and working through of experience itself. This is also a bit of a kerfuffle. It’s stuffing things down, swallowing them whole. Binging or allowing others to binge in order to keep things quiet.
A lack of digestion becomes a silence in the body — that’s how I experience it. When days aren’t going well in there, it feels like I don’t have a gut at all. No movement, no noise, no life. I have these silences in me, and in my family, and in the histories of my family members. These stones in our guts. There are animals that swallow stones to help them grind up food. They lack adequate teeth of their own. But mine? No help there. They weigh me down. And more than a few doctors have started to suggests, after all the inconclusive tests, that these silences might also be the missing gaps in the story of my health — the things my labs are unable to say. How do you pulverize a stone when it’s in your own body, when it’s of your own blood? Another question from Greg: “How could we locate the teeth? Where is the acid?” Every dental hygienist I’ve ever seen has cooed over my beautiful set of Iowa-bred, fluoride-supported choppers. I have more than adequate teeth. It’s time to use them.
One of the many reasons I keep going to see Greg (in addition to the fact that I feel seen and heard in a profound way) is that every time I leave his office, I want to write. I leave inspired, literally having taken in air. So early on in our discussions about digestion, I came upon the idea of writing this series. Because the more I thought about it, the more questions and stories and topics occurred to me. About sweetness, about humor, about teeth, about what happens in our mouths when we eat. About what happens in our lives when we’re instructed to swallow things whole. About what happens when we chew.
What Greg and I are doing together now is always looking for the chew. I’ve lived too many years of shoving things down, too many years of spitting them out or avoiding them entirely. And it’s true — I was a dreadfully picky eater as a kid. What I took in narrowed down to mac and cheese, peanut butter, corn, and potatoes. But you know, my palate has grown — as has my capacity for sinking my teeth in.
Those are the things I want now — I want the hunger, the acid, the teeth. I want the noise and the violence of breaking things down. I want to seize the opportunity to honestly confront what’s on my plate. And this is one of the places where I plan to practice. My goal is to post something once a week, no matter what. Welcome to the Gastro Pub(lication) — more on that title in a future post.
I find myself uncertain how to end. Or how to begin. You can’t conclude a piece about digestion — chewing, dissolving, considering — with an easy-to-swallow platitude. That would be to give it away. That would be the cookie I give you to avoid the question, to avoid having to struggle in order to occupy the moment. So I will say that I am trying, now, to build up the stomach acid. I am looking at long last for the teeth. I mean, I announce here, to chew. Who knows what will happen?
