Chapter 8: On IBS - Who Is Wellness For?

My gut issues started at fourteen. The blistering palpitations, the wretched unruly heat my stomach would generate like a nuclear bomb testing site. It would take over my life when it came, penetrating every pore, causing so much chaos in my body, and pain that would last for days on end. After the first few months of this, I began to see and feel this visceral connection between my mother and me whenever I had an onset of IBS, like she could short-circuit my body, bringing me to my knees, just through her mind. I could feel her even when she wasn’t close because that’s how connected we were. That was the first explanation I had for my IBS, even as a teenager. It didn’t make sense, but in my universe, I guess it did.

When I first spoke to my sister about what was happening, I would tell her it was like I could feel my mother’s rage in my stomach, like a galactic swirl except it was a black hole of cramps. Like a bat signal in my body, it would come and go, at a whim, exiting me in shreds like a hurricane leaving a small town.

The “weak core” my white yoga teacher pointed out is a result of trauma—intergenerational and my own—which is a stored physical energy in my body that was perhaps created as an energetic entry point by my mother. I don’t know how else to explain it other than there were no boundaries between us. I was so porous to her, and because she controlled every action and watched every move, my body became controlled by her moods and needs. My IBS, I believe, became a direct embodiment of this. I felt so powerless around her, primarily because I had been conditioned to believe, by her, that she was an authority figure, a god. So much so that she could punish me even when I wasn’t physically close to her. I was the perfect, compliant captive because I believed her. I believed in her power over me. In the chakra system, IBS is directly located where the solar plexus resides, and a blocked solar plexus represents low self-esteem, shame, and unworthiness.

I mean, you can’t make this shit up.

In the worlds of health and wellness, there’s an inconsistent belief that if you try hard enough at something, eventually you will see results. What’s so dangerous about this thinking is that when a body can’t do certain things, because of its sometimes (un)known limitations, that body is then (subtly or not so subtly) societally ostracized. Just by virtue of the world being catered to able-bodiedness, we forget bodies are still valuable irrespective of what they can or cannot do. Chronic pain became a safe way to engage with my body at a distance. It was an added buffer, a shield for me. When I was focusing on one pain, I wasn’t looking at the other. As the Buddha reminds us, “If the body is not cultivated, the mind cannot be cultivated. If the body is cultivated then the mind can be cultivated.” I wasn’t finding balance because I was in constant avoidance of myself—the body’s pain was a way to deflect the mind’s trauma.

Yet the irony is that your body keeps the score because your mind wants to forget the tally. Even if we are unconscious to it, what we experience becomes stored quantitative data. As a child, well into adulthood, I lived in fear, all the time; I never felt safe. I became hypervigilant to my body’s sensations—yet I was also completely confused by what I felt, the pain didn’t add up to the memory, or vice versa. Such sharp attention and awareness are a product of abuse, as your body is always tuning in to the possibility of attack, but because nothing has identified the root of the issue, you go into overdrive, believing everything could be a possible violator. I had to be prepared to defend myself at any time, whether physically, emotionally, or mentally. Living like this was an impossible reality. The more I thought about it, however, the more I came to realize that the gut is the home of intuition, and therefore I had to learn how to trust mine.

Now I understand that my mother’s abuse had created a bond that had morphed into a portal that linked me directly to her. I hated that she could do this, I hated how thin-skinned I was. I already felt surveilled and on edge constantly, frightened that she was always watching me. All of this resulted in a hazing of my body, especially where my stomach was, and all the sexual parts of myself. If I veiled myself, if I self-actualized into a blob, something out of Hayao Miyazaki’s universe, I wouldn’t have to feel her conquer me. When I started cutting, it became another distraction. If I cut myself somewhere I could control, then the pain would numb the stomach pain. It was a constant cyclical void of pain I existed in. Instead of listening to what my body was trying to tell me, and not knowing I could learn how to listen to her, I turned on myself.

This became a dynamic where I was then mistrustful of myself. Because the pain in my insides was not being validated by an authority figure, I was forced to believe that I was fine. When I would say I wasn’t, my mother would eye me suspiciously, cocking her head, only to tell me all the places she was hurt, but did I see her complaining? My father would deflect, kindly telling me I’d feel better soon. And why wouldn’t I be? I wasn’t starving. I had a home, two parents, food on the table. I knew I should be grateful, so I was. “The good girl believes something like, ‘One day Mommy/Daddy will be full and then they will give me what I need,’” Bethany Webster writes aptly in Discovering the Inner Mother.^[1] The problem is that day sometimes never comes. Instead we become “adults who experience high levels of stress when faced with everyday situations like disappointing someone, receiving compliments, setting boundaries and taking care of themselves.”^[2] So, then, some part of you, the good girl, begins to believe, because you are constantly told that your parents know best, especially more than you, that one day they will see you for who you are. See how broken and frail you are (and yet how hard you try) but how much you really need them. How all you want is their good, loving, safe touch. You want to be a child.

As an adult, this will mean that people won’t even see the strain in your body, and like your parents, all they’ll see is what they deem as success, never once questioning the impact it has on your mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, and sexual well-being to carry this much. To never be able to complain about what the cost has been on your psyche. So, as a coping mechanism, because your parents don’t witness you all the time, something inside of you begins to disconnect from your pain, your sense of reality has to mimic theirs for your own survival. You begin to tell yourself that your needs are too much, and you convince yourself that the more perfect you are—that the more wholesome, morally upright, intelligent you are—you will be loved, cherished, and adored. So, you go on a hamster wheel, trying to perfect yourself. In that process, you forget you are unwell, and that you have needs, too. And you keep forgetting, and keep forgetting. I’ve taught myself to perform in the face of extreme pain, dulling my senses. I’ve taught myself how to numb my body’s quakes and shivers. I’ve hidden my true self, denied my body its right to speak to me and participated in my own silencing again and again and again. Until, very recently, I realized, it didn’t have to be this way.

I took my IBS as a sign of my inherent weakness. As if I was too broken to be given a real body, one that wasn’t always in revolt. The ableist ideas of being healthy were drilled into my brain (as well as my sister’s), and the more our bodies revolted, in different ways, the more we continued to be silenced by both our parents. Or made fun of, as when our food allergies, bodily reactions, were always read as exaggerations, instead of real things that had been determined by our own bodies because we knew them best. My parents would call both my sister and me “extremists” because of our sensitivities to gluten, sugar, and dairy. So, I was forced to continue to eat “normally” or “moderately” so that I could grow accustomed to it, always being told that what my body knew to be true was again, inherently, wrong. Or at the very least, amenable.

I wish I had known earlier that if you compromise your own unknown needs for the tenacity of another’s, there is always a personal cost. So, the more I was that Fariha, the one that was together, composed, kind, but hidden, obstructed even from myself—the less I could be the full Fariha, the whole Fariha, the one that was also tender, angry, frustrated, tired, but desperately, sickeningly, wanting of love. According to Webster, “The ‘used child’ within us longs to be loved for her real self, not just when she is wearing the mask of the ‘good girl’ and demonstrating patriarchal values (productive, perfect, conforming to expectations, making others look good, sacrificing, suppressing, etc.). The used child longs to be loved when she disappoints you, when she is grumpy, when she is inconvenient, when she is messy, when she is confused, when she produces nothing, when she is inconsistent, when she is empty-handed, when she changes her mind.”^[3]

The reality—I also found—is that most adult humans I’ve encountered aren’t very secure. Projections are always being placed. I found that I kept getting into circumstances where I would be intentionally misunderstood, or that I’d be put into positions where I would have to apologize for things I hadn’t done—just to keep the peace. This was my role as the negotiator; I was always the person who compromised, extended a hand, even when I was usually the one being misunderstood. This caused me to further shut down, to get deeper into the performance, out of a sense of defeat that no matter what, I was the one who would have to succumb to other people’s power over me.

In my life healing has been about integrating the fragments of mind, body, and spirit that were shattered by trauma. As I nurtured and braided all these disparate parts of myself together, a more honest version of me began to form. The more I thought about this on a micro level as an individual, the more I began to see a parallel between the Earth and humans. If I could heal myself—and what I mean by this is largely about acceptance, it’s healing to accept a failing body and tell that body I love you, unconditionally—maybe we would have more proof for a way to collectively heal the Earth, too. Because the Earth, like our own bodies, needs so much love, nurturance, and gentleness from us.

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We are far more connected than we seem to think we are. To our families, to our ancestors, to our land. The path to healing as a South Asian is a multilayered process. To deny us of our cultural roots, meaning our cultural and spiritual customs, means to rob us again and again. To keep us distracted, forgotten, is to further the poison. To then co-opt, steal, and appropriate our culture is an ugly, unequal, and devastating consequence of a malice so great that to quantify it would mean an endless, Nuremberg-style trial of naming the poison of the atrocities done to us. Repetition is the mute language of the abused or colonized person. The reality of it is that to move through this, to heal, societally, to come to ourselves, then to heal our bodies, means healing our lands. Something that all of us, especially if you are a white-bodied person, must contribute to. It’s your karma and it is your responsibility to help us heal—that is the most significant gateway to your own healing.

“Displacing is a way of surviving. It is an impossible, truthful story of living in-between regimens of truth,”^[4] says writer and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha. So much of this book is about filling in these histories for other South Asians, so that we may claim what is ours, and instill a cultural recognition that we are better when we work together, when we can see the rich majesty of our lands, of who we are. We can’t afford to keep forgetting—it’s time that we remember. Being South Asian has sometimes felt like making work in exile. A lot of us have been taxed to reimagine what our futures are, without knowing exactly where we come from. We are constantly faced with the gaps in our memories, because of our incapacity to face ourselves. But I think it’s time to look at these wounds. “Awareness is not just in the mind, but also includes body knowledge,”^[5] Gloria Anzaldúa writes in Light in the Dark. Grasping my past, my ancestors and their past, collecting stories through my father, has been a way to understand myself, to root myself into something. Through understanding them, I’ve begun to understand myself and why my body has been revolting for so long. My IBS was a way to understand my body on its own terms, not what I, or society, determined for it.

My parents’ attention was both harmful (from my mother) and negligent/nonexistent (from both). In Care Work, Samarasinha reminds us that most of us “had received shitty care, abusive care, care with strings attached.”^[6] And most of us have denied situations of vulnerability, opting for strength as the constant mirage. I imagine a lot of people look at me and see some kind of vulnerability and assume the ease that comes with it. It used to spill out of me like toxic waste, and I would have to embarrassingly clean up the aftermath, vomit on the floor. The number of times my vulnerability has been outright rejected, castigated, humiliated, is endless. In New York, a lot of shitty encounters with people made me think that I had to harden myself. I’ve seen how easily people will blame me for things that have nothing to do with me, and it happens often. How quickly I’ve been relegated to “crazy” by former friends and lovers. That is the pursuit of an authentic life. To become yourself, totally, means you lose a lot of people along the way, because most people are incapable of sitting deeply with themselves. I’ve had to come to terms with that. I wasn’t the problem. Now, I’ve realized boundaries are not only necessary, but that not everyone even deserves all of me. I don’t have to be liked, I don’t even have to try to be liked. I’m enough, just as I am.

When you’re a child of abuse, of trauma, what no one tells you is that you have to look out for yourself. That in itself is a product of the abuse—you are neglected. Let alone your body. You have to learn what a checkbook is, how to do taxes on your own, how to call 911 to save your own life. No one prepares you for the world, holds your hand or invites you to Sunday family dinners, celebrations, anniversaries. Birthdays become a tenuous, heartbreaking thing, and no matter how many people tell you that they love you, there will still be those who won’t understand what it feels like to be in a constant void, to exist in lovelessness because the core of you yearns for that love you will never get. A mother’s cognizant and lucid love. That’s what it’s like to always feel alone. It’s to wonder who would save you if you were in the gutter right now and not have immediate, tangible answers.

Recently a healer told me that I shouldn’t hold on to the pain of my life and childhood. I initially agreed, but then afterward felt a rage brewing. What people don’t seem to understand when they tell me this is that ever since I showed sadness at ten, everyone has wanted to tell me where to put it. Their discomfort with seeing a sad child usurped their desire to actually tend to the child’s needs, to question how I was feeling. I’ve been abandoned by more people than I haven’t. That hurts extra when you don’t have a stable family unit, when you don’t have a mother to cry to, turn to, learn from. This, not so ironically, is all related to the solar plexus. Feelings of betrayal, problems with forgiveness and a lack of safety in oneself, a difficulty with staying in one’s own personal power. Recently, I realized that my IBS had given me the infrastructure to unlock a lot of answers.

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The more I’ve turned toward myself over the last few years, the more I become and reenvision myself as my own being. Learning to understand that my IBS was trying to speak to me, that it was reminding me that the PTSD and panic attacks weren’t a reflection of my hysteria—but rather a communication that I needed to decipher—made me realize the vast layers of knowledge that are coded in un-wellness, in chronic illness. What if we listened? What if we paid attention? What if that’s all that healing is—just listening to yourself? If so, what are you trying to tell yourself?

So much of my life I lived with this narrative that my body had failed me, but I mainly felt this way because I had been fed enough crap about the imperfection of my body since I was a child that at a certain point those criticisms adapted into my own thoughts. My mother would castigate me, calling me dhumshi, which is analogous to “fatty,” something my sister would also call me. Imagine a society that didn’t feel the need to critique everyone’s outward appearance, imagine if we cared less about judging others and focused more on how we can be active participants toward bettering our collective humanity . . . imagine. These days I rest on this hope, because I take solace in my own reckoning, in my own leaps of faith and consequence.

I keep thinking back to when I was eighteen, a few days before my nineteenth birthday, realizing I was pregnant. I had known for a while, or at least suspected it, and that was the next stage of disassociation from my body. I didn’t understand why it couldn’t be normal like other girls. Why was I always bloated? Always uncomfortable in my skin? I didn’t want to live like this. I wanted to learn how to accept myself, I wanted to love what my body was, not what it wanted to be. Which was a journey in and of itself, because my body, itself, has potentially always been in flux, and maybe that was OK?

The IBS, as it has stretched out for almost two decades of my life, has recently become an exemplary signal that I follow. This chapter, in fact, has been the most difficult one. As I write these pages, I’m feeling them out, too. It’s been over a month, close to six weeks, since I’ve had an IBS flare-up this time. It’s made it hard to digest (quite literally and figuratively), but the lessons that are revealing themselves are immense. It feels strange to admit this, but my body, these days, feels like a blessing—completely my own in her imperfection, completely my own in her complexity. The lessons she gives me are designed for me. How lucky that we all get the machinery to liberate us from our ancestral patterns. Your body is speaking to you. I just had to learn to understand my own language first.

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There’s a humility for me in unfolding the mystery of my body that reveals itself a little bit more each day. The chronicling, the tracking, and the achievement of listening to myself with openness and care has been profoundly healing. Because, with this, I’ve also accepted myself. It’s a continuous journey of not assuming that I know an answer when I haven’t even checked in or asked my body first.

Just before the onset of this latest bout of IBS, I began to compost again after my dear friend Zenat advised me to reintroduce it back into my life. As a child who was raised with composting, I felt sad that I had forgotten my ways. I felt sad for my mother, and I realized one way I could honor her was through remembering her for the good, valuable things she taught me. Since I was a child, she’s been composting, gardening, tending to Mother Earth’s body, but not her own. Maybe it’s easier, safer, to do so when you’re unwilling to prune the gardens of yourself. Not surprisingly, my own ritual of composting began to shift something inside of me, as did paying attention to the cycle of the plants in my apartment or the freshness of fruits and vegetables in my fridge. The more I attuned myself to my environment, as well as the other living beings in my environment, or even the dying plants that I was now no longer facelessly discarding, something inside of me also became more attuned to my patterns, and thereby the pattern of life. The cycle that connects us to the rhythm of the wind, the quiet purr of fire, the ways seasons change, and the surf of the ocean’s whip.

There’s a softness and agility I’ve adopted through the cycle of composting—it has an intentionality to it, one that I crave, and a remembrance attached to it. Finding small ways to turn inward, every action, even a small one, can become a ceremony. I’m learning that there are so many ways to honor the physical, and a part of it is honoring its voice. I’m learning that the Ayurvedic diet is my people’s diet, and that ghee and kichari (two things that have helped my IBS) are both integral parts of my culture’s healing that I’m now accepting as my own. The ways of my people are bringing me back to myself. Balancing ecosystems, whether on the land or in the gut, was an integral part of the cosmologies that grounded our ancestors and an important reminder we need now. Disconnection from the land is disconnection from our gut. It’s important to know how your body responds to the food you feed it so you can be cognizant to yourself, and the world, holistically. I’m remembering this, through the act of healing I’m reclaiming my DNA. I’m remembering my people had it figured out. After a millennium of civilizations quashed under colonial tyranny, it’s important we remember what we were forced to lose.

So, I’m turning to them, my ancestors, I am learning to prioritize the ancient knowledge that determines the importance of the sacral center and the wisdom of my gut. These days, I remind myself that all I can do is be present with the situation at hand—to trust the cycles. I do as Bri. Maya Tiwari, Ayurvedic teacher and writer, did—I make a silent vow never again to sever my ties with the Mother’s rhythms. I commit to myself, to this body, and this Earth.