The Gut-Brain Demolition
My gastroenterologist appointment is tomorrow.
Last night I was farting uncontrollably to the point where I had to keep switching beds—from the main to the guest—so as to reach fresh air while the gas dissipated in the other room. With each fart I woke up, scowled at myself, and retreated to safety. At one point, the interval between farts was not long enough, and so I found myself trapped between two rooms filled with gas. I am not sure what I ate, exactly, because I ate all of the same things as Mijael, except one thing is suspect: a bowl that smelled like eggs that probably was not properly washed. I think Mijael probably washed it too fast, so there was still raw egg bacteria (or something), and then I proceeded to grab it from the dish rack and eat, quite sloppily, a grapefruit out of the bowl, slurping up the leftover juices. I considered telling Mijael this, but chose not to, since I am usually the one who wash our dishes poorly.
The question of what was irritating my gastrointestinal system got me thinking about the gut-brain connection, which I always think about because I studied it one semester at university, and the class was considered experimental and prestige, reserved for the top students in psychology, and so whenever someone mentions that the gut has a brain, I say: I studied that in school!, even though it was only for a semester. Though the research was limited back then, it made a lot of sense to me—that the gut had a brain—having had an eating disorder when I was younger and experienced bodily sensations that continued into adulthood. Even though I graduated from disordered eating to what I consider, today, as a healthy relationship with food, whenever I eat more processed foods, fats, and refined carbs than I am used to, I feel an emotional state of dissociation and anxiety arise from within my gut, as though my gut, suddenly inflamed and injured, sends signals of distress to the rest of my body. That feeling was often paired with a belief I have learned, over the years, to shed like the skin from a snake, though it sometimes still revisits me. The belief sounds like this: I AM SO FAT. (I used to be a chubby kid). I wonder which came first, the belief or the biological response. The same thing happens when I go for long periods without exercise, and regardless of which came first, the end result is a state of irritability, depression, and confusion. And in the rare moments in which I am not thinking about what life changes I need to make in order to feel less irritable, depressed, and confused, I sometimes think: Oh, maybe I do not need to uproot my entire life. What about my gut? What’s going on there?
The gut is such a complicated quest, though. We put so many good and bad things into our mouths (no pun intended; and if any clarification is needed, cock is neither good nor bad, but holy) that I wonder what the end sum is: Vegetables, fruits, meats, sugars, chemicals, caffeine, alcohol, purified air, contaminated air, tap water, bottled water, microplastics, VOCs, particulate matter…It is difficult to believe that I have the shiniest, healthiest gut, despite eating a produce-heavy diet and exercising on a regular basis, when it has been proven that the majority of our food and beverage companies have been poisoning us for a profit. Every day I take a probiotic strain that may or may not be doing anything to help my enteric nervous system. How do we know what is actually working? How do we know if our guts are good?
Of course, if I am simply asking why my farts smell nuclear, the answer is probably just dairy or garlic or something not cooked or cleaned thoroughly enough, though I will continue to ignore that I am lactose intolerant. Restrictions are thieves of joy.
Or maybe it is the alcohol. Every other month, I make an event in my calendar that reads “SOBER :),” an event that has waned from the optimistic three months to the realistic one month to the embarrassing two weeks, and every week after that, I delete it, because I find myself wanting to have one glass of wine or a hazy IPA (or if it is a Saturday four or five), and although I know that my relationship with alcohol is not destructive, I find it embarrassing that I continue to attempt at leaps of sobriety, namely when I am hungover, only to then go to the gym and eat lots of vegetables and live my normal weekday life, feeling as sprite as a fawn on adderall, debuffing my original ambitions into a silly promise that no longer makes sense. There was a span of three months in New York where I did go sober, expecting it to transform me into Superman with super-productivity and super-no-depression, which would inevitably lead to major life changes like a multi-million dollar book deal and becoming close friends with Ariana Grande, but no such transformation occurred. Instead, I felt the same. So then I started drinking again. I do, however, wonder to what extent my social beverage rituals affect my overall gut health, which affects my overall mental health, which affects everything. But then I flick open my LED device, the modern enslaver, and digest today’s data about war and death and abuse, a reduction of horrors that seem to always originate from the country I call home, and decide that it is better to enjoy our lives with our friends while we can.
So here I am, once again, secreting a gas that could end us all, attempting to crawl across the sofa to escape the vicinity of the cloud I have created, except I collapse halfway across its green belly, defeating myself, for the sour farts have evolved into more: liquid stool, exhaustion, and feeling generally unwell. I do not have the energy to escape my own demise. So I inhale in the smallest breaths I can manage and wave my arms in a makeshift fan, accepting that this, too, is a part of the human experience. Or perhaps this is just the condition of our time, a symptom of being a human in 2026. The world is sick. So we get sick, too. Or perhaps I ingested the wrong bacteria and now I need medicine. My gastroenterologist appointment is tomorrow. ☷
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With love,
Your favorite capybara ☼ AKA Travis Zane
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