Clistere of the State

Going to Italy was the just the purge I needed.

Un Clistere. 

That’s enema in Italian and no, you won’t find that on Duo Lingo.

Your husband will find it on Google translate and your Italian pharmacist lady will look at him, raise an eyebrow, open the box to reveal the ass-insertion tube —raise both eyebrows—to say: This? 

He will nod in relief.

He walked all the way down the massive Tuscan hill to the Farmacia—on a mission he knew he had to complete. I, his wife, hadn’t pooped for three days, and that shit was keeping me from writing my masterpiece. We’d travelled across the world, so I could hang out with writer-strangers, and two teachers I knew, but jet lag had nested into my intestines and wasn’t coming out. 

Clistere.

It sounds better than enema, but Clistere of the State sounds more like a story about a woman in government. We all know that character.

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I named my blog almost a year ago and have written countless introductory drafts trying to frame how enemas sort of saved my life. But the truth is, they didn’t save it, they changed it. What has ultimately saved my life is neural brain retraining for Limbic System Impairment. LSI. Which sounds like I’m going to say I have LSD.

I have both. 

When I titled my blog Enema of the State it was intended to be a blog about dealing with chronic illness. I no longer describe myself as chronically ill, so I thought I’d have to abandon it. Then I went to Italy.

I have challenges and they manifest in my body, but I no longer consider myself to be sick. Not physically anyway. Mentally and spiritually, I am working my way through what is and isn’t trauma, like every one else. A near impossible thing to do if you can’t think clearly, or walk, or eat.

The first time I did a coffee enema, I regained a physical clarity that I don’t think I’d had since I was ten or eleven. Turns out, when your limbic system is constantly in fight, flight, freeze or fawn—you get cloudy. You get tired.

Everything feels like a threat because in fact, your brain is experiencing everything as a threat. The exhaustion comes from the limbic system working in overdrive to protect you.

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My limbic system has been on overdrive for maybe all of my life. It’s a true story that my father asked my mother for a divorce on the eve of my birth, in Taiwan, because he was having a love affair with their roommate, who was also pregnant. (It’s okay to laugh here, I always do.)

To say that my mom cried when I was born—for all of my first days on earth—is too simple a description. Her life, the one she’d imagined and wanted and lived in, for nine years, essentially ended the day mine began. Sometimes when I visit that time, I can hear her muffled cries from inside the womb. I felt worry and fear and abandonment, before I was even here.  Before words— there were just feelings. Hers were mine.

My experience, my health issues formerly known as “WTF is wrong with me” fit into a lot of categories and had real diagnoses: MS, CIRS, Chronic Fatigue, and the list could go on and on. All of them with real symptoms, all of them with labs to back them up. All of them pointing me toward treatments.

Some of those treatments really helped. Some of them changed my life for the better. In fact, for much of my experience I would describe myself as really healthy, only, I felt like shit. Got bizarre reactions. I don’t like to talk about it because I’m always playing a game with my brain:

Enough with those stories and what else is true?

So I’ll try it like this… I felt like a Barbie doll, in the hands of a four year old, being plucked from one reality to another. Each time, something in that reality was so disruptive, so assaulting to my system, that I would go down. Work became near impossible. Thinking. Feeling. It was as if my system was shutting down. (It was shutting down.) I became afraid of foods, buildings, and toward the end of the almost decade-long saga: air. I just kept pivoting, reinventing, all along wondering, WTF is wrong with me?

Deciding: Oh, this is a syndrome train I can’t get off. This is what they mean, when they say “chronic.” I have these diagnoses…that’s whats wrong with me.

I’d do all the things for whatever syndrome was the loudest and regain some momentum. Then BOOM, the tiny hands of the invisible four-year-old moving me around in their Barbie world would toss me into a shoe box. And I’d be lost in the back of a dark closet.

I would lose days and weeks there, trying to “recover.”

I met some good doctors and some annoying doctors and some doctors who just benefited from my desperation.

The whole time, though, I looked at my friends and my co-workers and the world and wondered why? Why can they be in it and I can’t? I was told it was genetics. I got proof of that. I was told it was trauma, I am proof of that. I got angry, I got sad, I got scared, I got defensive when people who meant well looked at me like I was crazy. “Wow, you’ve really been through it.” 

I had to push myself to pretend that the tiny slivers of life that I could maintain were going to be enough.

I felt pushed to find gratitude, because it was all I had. But what I had was getting smaller and smaller.

I’m breaking my rule now for clarity:

One day a cracker I’d been eating for a year suddenly gave me hives. A house I lived in sent me to the hospital. I was in so much pain that night I would’ve gladly taken death. This shit is not a joke. And if you know someone whose world has gotten smaller and smaller, whose choices about what to eat and how to live have become more and more limited, I hope you’ll pass on the core information here: Brain retraining works, and I’m living proof. It wasn’t the house, or the cracker, or air, it was my brain stuck in an over-protective and over-reactive response. 

*

Enemas did something really specific in my journey, though.

They weren’t the answer, and I’m not selling that here. They were part of the “below the head” treatment regiment that had a profound effect on me. That physical clarity, from that first coffee enema, reminded me what it felt like to feel good. That was enough for me to realize that my body could feel good. I got the tiny gift of hope. I got a few days of energy and clarity. I became a disciple. 

Un Clistere.

Everything in Italian just sounds better. 

I’ve been on Duo Lingo for years. Started it after my son died. Got addicted to that little birdy prompting me to complete my daily lessons, so I could keep my streak. I gave it up here and there, went back to it for Portuguese. I fell in love with Brazilian Jazz while in my first few months of limbic system retraining. I wanted to learn the words to the songs, so I could sing them. Singing is great way to chill out the nervous system and find safety.

Portuguese is a beautiful language that I am determined to study, but I switched to Italian when my limbic retraining progress enabled me to eat fruits again—the pinnacle of my food recovery being Wine. 

I don’t think the creators of the neural retraining programs would recommend that your first food challenge be champagne, but it was mine. Champagne is synonymous with celebration, and I needed that sparkling goodness so much.

It represented freedom to me.

I’d spent the last eight years dreaming of having wine with food again. So when this writing workshop came up in Italy, I wanted to challenge myself. I wanted to celebrate my recovery so far. In order to train for Italy, I spent months drinking wine and champagne everyday, working my way up to three glasses.

I do hard things. 

*

I began to combine my brain retraining sessions with Duo Lingo lessons. Using the “streak” to mean more than one thing. I figured that would help me in Italy. To connect my brain to healthy bio-chemistry by just hearing the language. Sort of like a Pavlov’s dog: Italian? Release dopamine. Italian? Release serotonin.

In Duo, I’ve never gotten past section one.

Mostly, I know how to say that I am eating an apple, or that a monkey is eating an apple. La Schimmia mangia la mela. In Certaldo, during one of those first constipated mornings, I looked at my multi-linguistic hotel hostess and asked for one of the juicy apples in the display.

I plopped down on the couch in our morning writing session and said “Mangio la mela” which seemed to tickle one of my writing teachers. “La donna mangia la mela,” he said, and we both felt Duo delight. 

I don’t know why Duo focuses so much on apple eating and not pears—which in Certaldo, were maybe the best pears I’ve ever had. I used to not like pears, but then I couldn’t eat any fruit for a decade.

Now, I eat any fruit put in front of me to prove that I can. I didn’t know how to say “pear” so I had to point. Bianca, our caffe and hotel host, was not only multi-lingual, she was able to translate even when we didn’t speak. She knew her audience.

I probably could’ve asked her about getting a Un Clistere and she would’ve been able to tell me, but then I would’ve had to see her again and ask for a cappuccino and an apple and I know what happens to people when you tell them you enema. It’s all they can see. (A close friend of mine and I broke up over enemas.) I didn’t want to be the girl in room five who needed advice on pooping in Italy.

That’s taking enema talk too far. Obviously. 

*

People have strong feelings about the whole enema area of our bodies, made stronger when that area isn’t working as it should. I know most people are more comfortable with taking an over-the-counter laxative and praying for the shits. I guess this is what divides us.

I’d much rather put Italian spring water up my ass and spend a few minutes on my side, on a towel, in my hotel room, listening to a relaxing podcast about myths, than put something else in my mouth and pray for it to come out the other side—hopefully not on a tour bus on the way to a vineyard. My very first vineyard. My recovery vineyard.

Un Clistere is a much safer way to go and everything lands in the toilet, where it should. In Europe you even have a bidet, because those people have engineered a splashing- cleanliness-protocol as a bathroom standard. 

*

My mother was a clinical care nurse, which you should translate here as she had OCD and so much trauma I think she blocked it all, in her gut. In some ways, I am the bane of her post-war-live-in-denial existence. My body doesn’t give me a hall pass.

She once said, “I never needed therapy,” and then I watched her abusive boyfriend gaslight her, then me, and chalked that up to my first real “aha” moment. Thank you, Oprah. I was 45.

I mention it because, as a child, we had an enema bag in the house, along with a myriad of pills that I was given regularly. I understand this was her way of caring for me. I had pooping issues as a kid, and obviously, with a nurse, there was a procedure for that. No kid has any idea what they’re getting into when their nurse mother suggests that they need an enema.

Luckily, I don’t remember all of the details. But the bag, I do remember. For the record, I don’t have a bag, I have a glass jar with measurement numbers on the side— as if I’m going to document that shit. I eye it.

It’s instinctual. 

*

When my current, very brilliant doctor suggested I try coffee enemas to lower my year-long-high-liver enzymes, I was not happy. My brain immediately went to: “Oh no, this is bad—my mother, myself.” Rather than, “Hey, let’s try this, your doctor is really smart.”

A year later, I call the whole process “my sanctuary,” and I have a beautiful amber light that I turn on. Essential oils I smell. I roll a CBD dooby. I lay on a luxury towel, and listen to a really relaxing podcast. My mom’s enemas were nothing like mine.

No, I don’t talk to her about them. Poop talk with you is one thing, with my mother—no fucking way.

*

The coffee enemas have the effect of clearing away the cobwebs, which still surprises me. I simply feel renewed. (Writers, behold! They are usually my best writing days. I wonder if Hunter Thompson would still be with us if he’d found coffee enemas before cocaine.) 

In Italy, all of this was put into a wonderful context, when a week after my clistere, my step-son’s 23 year old girlfriend also got jet-lag-constipation. My husband outed that I had the appropriate instrument. Un Clistere.

Apparently, her constipation cutoff was also three days. (You can relax. I’d cleaned the instrument thoroughly with soap and hot water.)

I showed her the botiglia di clistere, and how I figured out how to sort of coil-squeeze it in on itself. How to pop the lid off and refill it, because you want to get as much liquid up there as you can— this was a travel size clistere. Either that, or Italians have much smaller colons. She was so happy that I had it, and didn’t flinch.

“I’ve just got to poop, you know?” she said.

I was thrilled she wasn’t weird about it. Suffice it to say, my family really bonded in Florence. We almost got my step-son to do it, too, when he realized he hadn’t gone in several days. But his limbic system is like his dad’s, and all it took was talking about it for his brain to remember what to do.

Some people get all the good wiring. 

*

Personally, I think Duo should have an entire section on jet lag woes and interacting with a pharmacist. Although, I have to say, from what my husband reports, you don’t need to spend hours learning Italian. You just need Google Translate, and the generosity of the Italian heart.

I love that the pharmacist, uncertain of my husband’s Italian—he kept saying Un Clistema—opened the box and showed him the device. Two complete strangers glanced at the three-inch tube and nodded.

Like they were passing top-secret codes. 

Stress about pooping is probably the worst thing anyone could do for pooping. You get on a loop about how you’re never going to poop again. You start making up stories, and the thing is, the brain doesn’t know what’s true and what’s not. It just knows how you’re feeling and what chemicals those feelings are firing. Then it lays down tracks for you to go over and over and over.

In my recovery, I have to care for my stress reactions, and nurture.

Luckily, I knew what to do.

“It’s okay,” I told the four year old wanting to throw the Barbie, “I’ve got this.”

I focused on all of those Duo Italian words I’d studied, and named as many animals or fruits or phrases as I could— because those are the pathways that I want to grow.

Now that I’m home, I’ve put little cues into my new visualizations, into my retraining sessions. I tell my brain stories about how great it feels to travel and then rest and then poop. I see myself in Italy. Feeling good. Mangio la mela. Mangio Certaldo pears. I laugh again and again at the exchange at the Farmacia, flooding my brain with the good stuff. 

It’s all training. 

Because it does feel good. To let it all out. To be able to be with the old, constant worry—in a new way. To take my worry with me, for the good stuff. There’s a lot more that I still have to do, but this one? My limbic system doesn’t have to worry about.

I know how to take care of my shit.

Now I know how to take care of it in Italian. 

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Believe it or not, I have more stories about Limbic System recovery, because this shit runs deep. If you like what you’ve read, I hope you’ll subscribe. Grazie Mille.