How Getting Poop In My Mouth Saved My Life
I’m inclined to be anxious, or at least I used to be. Partially, this was a me problem. My childhood was punctuated by episodes of intense, almost paralyzing anxiety. Most of the time I felt totally normal — but in intervals of months or sometimes years, I would find some new phobia creeping into my mind. Oddly, I’m not sure to what degree this was observable to outsiders. I was usually well-liked, and if anything my reputation was as a jokester, not a nervous wreck. Internally though, I went through several chapters of fears and intrusive thoughts that could take weeks or months to banish.
Each episode had it’s own focus — death, illness, sexuality, my personal agency… the list goes on. My temperament is one of obsession, and if something is bothering me I cannot get it out of my head until I resolve the problem. This has pros and cons, but I think that one major benefit is I tend not to sweep anything under the “psychological rug”. As a child with an expanding psyche, that meant coming into contact with new experiences and concepts, but sometimes lacking the tools to integrate or accept the new feelings that came with them. I have to imagine everyone goes through this growing up, so I’m not sure why I was so deeply bothered by things in comparison to my peers. Maybe I’m weak to stress? Either way, that weakness has forced me to examine my stressors very closely so that I can reduce them. Today I want to talk about death.
When I was 5 years old, death was the scariest thing in the world to me. I feared my own death, the death of people I knew, and I was convinced that my own demise would ambush me at any moment. In particular I was terrified of germs, pathogens, and poisons. Sure, sharp bits of metal and fast-moving machinery weren’t my favorite either, but the invisible assailant was the thing that struck fear into my little heart.
I was suspicious of food that might not be fully cooked, afraid of anything dead, worried that clouds of filthy dust would sicken me, and always convinced that I needed to remain alert to keep myself free from these poisons. This is embarrassing to admit, but there was a period of time where I would regularly spit out my saliva because I was afraid to swallow whatever invisible toxins I may have accidentally gotten in my mouth. How did this happen to me?
I should probably explain what triggered this sudden psychosis. Until I was five years old, my family lived in a sort-of rural suburb. Quiet, clean, and well-ordered. I loved working in the garden with my mom, and being outside, but the outside was a friendly, soft place at that time. There were definite hints of my anxious nature — I worried about smoke from campfires, any clue I might be getting sick made me nervous, and I hated “mixing” different foods on my plate. But I was almost entirely normal and functioning until my parents decided to become dairy farmers. The shock to my little system was immense.
The farmhouse was in rough condition when they bought it. Certain rooms were infested with fleas. I was warned not to touch the walls that might have lead paint. Most of the house was unfinished, coated in dust and cobwebs. Outside the house was even scarier. Burdocks, thistles, poison ivy and nettles lurked off the beaten paths. Everything inside the barn was coated in dry cow manure or had been at some point. Worst of all, things died here. Feral cats died of combat wounds and disease. A weak calf might die within hours of its birth. And even the occasional full-grown cow could be taken down by coyotes or keel over from simple bad luck. The sight of previously living bodies in their rotting, desiccated, occasionally maggot covered state put a pit of fear in my stomach. If it happened to them, it could happen to me!
I need to be very clear about something: my parents fixed up the house, and our farm wasn’t some festering pit of death and disease. Actually, the animals on our farm had far lower mortality rates and much longer life-spans than most. The average life of a dairy cow is 4 years at most. Their cows were healthy and productive for more like 8 to 10 years (the benefits of grass-fed animals will have to be another article). Life and death taking place in full view is simply the reality of farm life, and I was totally unprepared for it.
The rapid shift in my environment caused a sort of prolonged panic until I adjusted. But you know what? The problem was not my environment. It was me. And if I had never been exposed so thoroughly to the unclean, the unsafe, and the shock of death taking place in front of me, I am convinced that I would have remained an anxious, flighty child, and possibly never faced those fears so I could put them to bed for good. Certainly, growing up would have forced me to develop some level of fortitude, but to what degree?
As I spent more time on the farm, my fears began to dissipate. I didn’t develop any horrible infections from cuts on rusty metal. Decomposing bodies ceased to symbolize the terrifying advance of entropy; They were simply another step in the circle of life. Animals that died usually had something terribly wrong with them — they were either born sick, or had lived long enough that it was time to go. Gradually, I felt less like I was a ticking-time bomb of own mortality. Instead I could realize: “I feel healthy, so I’m probably okay.” Its very rare for a healthy person or animal to suddenly drop dead.
I remember the moment that my parents were certain that I had transformed. I was helping my dad in the milking parlor, which is a concrete pit that you stand in so that you don’t have to crouch to access the cow’s udders. I was wiping a cow’s teats before milking, when it decided to drop a massive cow-pie directly in front of my face. It splattered over my chest, face, and even got in my mouth. I reeled back and looked at my dad in horror, then spat the poop out of my mouth, and went back to wiping teats. I mentioned later that the manure actually had a grassy flavor. My mom still tells that story as evidence of how much good farm-life did for my previously fragile psyche.
Admittedly, this is an extreme scenario. How many people really need to be able to look at corpses without their stomach turning? Should we really be ok with getting poop in our mouths? I’m proposing that yes: developing this type of fortitude is important for everyone, likely exposure to poop-in-mouth or not. Today, I’m not bothered by any of these things. I’m an adventurous eater, which means I’m a healthier eater — I can enjoy things like liver, bone marrow, and food from different cultures, which means more nutrients and more variety. I don’t get upset if my meat is a little undercooked, and I know its okay to eat food a little (or a lot) past it’s expiration date. I can remove a clogged drain pipe and not freak out when it spews human feces all over me (yes, this really did happen, and I certainly wasn’t happy, but it didn’t ruin my day either.)
People don’t have to worry about my fears or worries, and treat me differently because of it. I know what it’s like to have people think that you can’t handle something, and it is not an empowering feeling. My fear is that many Americans have never been given the opportunity to escape their own neuroses. My life experience has taken me from one extreme end of the hypochondriac spectrum to the other. Not everyone needs to make that journey, but I do have to wonder how many people are trapped in overly sterile mindsets and environments, and how that might impact their health and behavior.
We all know a picky eater who makes meal-time difficult for everyone else. Unfortunately this isn’t a phenomenon limited to children. How many adults have never learned to cook or eat nutrient dense foods because they are afraid of the “icky” factor? If more people were exposed to “grossness” would they be healthier overall? Leaving aside personal preference, science has confirmed that sterilized environments lead to more allergies (Du Toit G et al), not less.
American culture notoriously takes great pains to hide and sanitize the process of death. Very few people witness the transition from living creature to meat on a plate. This may sound cruel or judgmental, but I have known many people who are traumatized for months by the death of a family pet. There is undoubtedly a time for grieving. But I have to wonder if those people would be better acclimated to life’s tragedies if our society lived closer to the circle of life. If we are unable to process the deaths of animals, how can we come to terms with human mortality?
The importance of our relationship to pathogens, death, and sterilization has taken center stage in the on-going response to COVID-19 pandemic. Public policy has swung wildly with the feeling of the moment — sometimes out of understandable caution, but all too often I get the distinct feeling that we are not acting out of rationality, but fear and neuroses. We are highly complex animals, programmed biologically to avoid toxins and pathogens, but our “evolved” brain needs to be calibrated as to what constitutes a threat by environmental exposure. When our entire lives have been swaddled in sterility, the sudden threat of an airborne pathogen being broadcast through every media outlet, every moment of every day, is bound to produce fear and panic. I don’t know if the media has mentioned it lately, but I think it’s worth noting that chronic stress compromises your immune system (Segerstrom, S. C., & Miller, G. E. (2004).
This article is intended as a beacon of hope to parents with anxious children, or people who feel that their own anxiety is unconquerable. Or perhaps as a wake-up call, if you suspect that you are over-sheltering your children or yourself. Exposure therapy is real thing, and it has a huge body of scientific support for its use (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2019a). You don’t necessarily need a professional to apply the science (though it may help!) By being thrust into an intensely uncomfortable situation (for me anyway) I was able to fully transform — without even realizing that was what my parents intended. I am beyond grateful to them for the opportunity they gave me to grow beyond what could appear to be my immutable “self.”
When I was avoiding something I was afraid of, my dad’s favorite motivational phrase was, “just lick the toilet seat.” He meant it metaphorically. He was referencing an episode of Oprah that my mom made us all watch, in which a hypochondriac had to voluntarily lick a toilet seat to overcome their fear. I don’t know if it helped the hypochondriac on the show, but I suspect it did. I know it helped me. Later in my life, my dad bet me $20 that I wouldn’t actually lick our toilet seat. He has a habit of offering children what feels like an absurd amounts of money (to them) to do things that he is that he is dead-certain they won’t actually do. It gives him pleasure or something to watch the emotional struggle painted on their little faces.
Exposure therapy works, and it saved my life (and earned me $20).
For more rambling, misinformed opinions, and stories from my travels, follow me on Medium, or check out my website: yarrowandoak.com (I publish to my website far more often)
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Sources:
Du Toit, G., Roberts, G., Sayre, P. H., Bahnson, H. T., Radulovic, S., Santos, A. F., Brough, H. A., Phippard, D., Basting, M., Feeney, M., Turcanu, V., Sever, M. L., Gomez Lorenzo, M., Plaut, M., Lack, G., & LEAP Study Team (2015). Randomized trial of peanut consumption in infants at risk for peanut allergy. The New England journal of medicine, 372(9), 803–813. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa1414850
Lukianoff, G., & Haidt, J. (2019a). The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (Illustrated ed.). Penguin Books.
Segerstrom, S. C., & Miller, G. E. (2004). Psychological stress and the human immune system: a meta-analytic study of 30 years of inquiry. Psychological bulletin, 130(4), 601–630. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.130.4.601
