And so it begins.

Sunday feels like an appropriate day to start something new. I’m not sure if that’s because it’s officially the first day of a new week, or if it’s because Sunday is the one day out of seven that seeks to remain empty from the word go. Regardless, it’s a Sunday today, and my diary is empty. I’m going to start something new.

Recently, I’ve had to publicly reveal my battles with coeliac disease, IBS, anxiety and depression in order to confront them. It didn’t feel particularly challenging or important in the moment, and I haven’t looked back at how I chose to do it with any regret or embarrassment. It’s something that had to happen. Unrehearsed Facebook posts aren’t exactly an elegant way of delivering news, but they are cathartic. I’m acutely aware that something I’ve forced myself to battle with privately for more than half a decade is now public knowledge, but attempting to shed myself of embarrassment is part of regaining control.

Because control is what my problems have had over me ever since they started.

College trip, summer 2012. I’m in London. Elephant & Castle. There are dozens of us, all from the same school, and all aged somewhere between fifteen and eighteen. Things really start to go wrong during this trip. I’m sitting in the hostel’s communal area at night when something stirs in my stomach. We’d eaten out as a group during the trip at any restaurant willing to take a group of our size. Something hasn’t agreed with me. Identifying the root of the problem doesn’t pause the symptoms, though. I have to find a bathroom, quickly. Thankfully, the hostel’s full of them: outside the communal area, in the lobby, lining the corridors, in our dorms. I’m in safe hands.

And yet, my decisions in this moment are illuminating and reveal so much about my current situation. I like to think I’m a different person to who I was in college — I’ve grown up and matured, I tell myself — but remembering this incident proved that some aspects of me have never altered. It turns out I’ve reacted to my stomach problems in the same way my entire life. I run away. I willingly allowed myself to forget that I was in safe hands and surrounded by accessible bathrooms. Even with the urgency in my stomach increasing by the second I walked past the toilets in the communal area, past the toilets in the lobby, past the toilets lining the corridors, and continued walking until I found a toilet stall in the furthest corner of the building. My desire to hide myself away from everyone else was greater than my desire to not shit myself.

If people don’t know it’s happening, then maybe it’s not happening.

That wasn’t the start of my journey, exactly, but it’s too significant a moment to ignore. Looking back further at moments on the timeline, even at moments that don’t quite hold the same importance, it’s clear that my digestive problems actually started much earlier than I thought. And my inability to deal with potential public embarrassment has always hovered around them. Missing school with “stomach bugs” once every other month, finding that sugar-free mints made mincemeat of my insides, having to hold in ghastly farts for six hours a day at school until I was either walking home alone or behind my front door. To be completely truthful, they were much easier symptoms to manage— I missed a bit of school every once in a while, I avoided sugar-free mints, I held in those farts — but in moments where I couldn’t control the situation, my immediate internal reaction was always exactly the same: “Hide!”

School, spring 2010. It’s midday during one of those bimonthly days where I should have asked my mum if I could miss it. The unwritten-but-often-spoken rule of high school is that you don’t shit there, but there’s no way out for me today. I’ve seen The Inbetweeners’ pilot and I dread that happening to me. I just couldn’t avoid the lure of sugar-free mints last night, and my stomach just couldn’t avoid making a noise about it today. Fair play, I suppose. My school’s policy is to close all but one of its dozen toilet blocks during lesson times, so I have one safe point of refuge to aim for. I stick tight to the walls, quietly descend the stairs in double-quick time, and stay hidden. I reach the toilet, lock the door behind me, and sit down.

It’s not pretty, but it’s over. Unseen. The toilet flushes and I begin the discreet modesty method of spraying deodorant around the room, then into the bowl, then closing the lid. I’m out of the woods. Yep, there’s a lingering smell, sure, but nobody will know it’s me when I’m out of there. But then: three voices. Loud voices. Voices I didn’t recognise then and still can’t place now. It doesn’t matter who they belong to because the words they’re vocalising reveal the horror: they’ve discovered me, in all my shitting-at-school disgrace, and they’re going to investigate the situation. All it takes is a knock on the door, a twist of the lock, a call of “Who’s in there?” and that’s it. I’m done for. My safe point of refuge is now a trap of my own making, my discreet modesty method is now the clear-up of a crime scene. Fuck.

Brain: [Hide, Rob! Get the fuck out of there!]

Me: But they’re out there! There’s one exit and they’re blocking it!

Brain: [Well, the only other thing to do is sit in here with the door locked and wait for them to leave. But you can’t do that, you have a lesson to go back to.]

Me: Actually, you know what, thanks. That’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Brain: [What? You’re joking, aren’t you?]

Me: Nope. I’m gonna keep my mouth shut, wait for them to get bored, and run back to class when the coast is clear.

Two minutes pass on my watch but an hour passes in my mind. The three voices from outside have finally grown bored and have presumably gone back to wherever they came from. I stand up, open the door like I’m threading a needle, and bolt. Not fast enough and not quietly enough, apparently. The three voices hadn’t gone away at all, they’d just waited around the corner for the door to open so they could dart back to inspect the scene. I’m halfway back up the first set of stairs when I hear it: “Has he had a…? Oh my god, he has as well!” My vision blurs and I instantly forget what day it is. A shot of adrenaline goes up my spine and into the back of my brain, dumping tonnes of anxiety in my lungs as it passes. As I spin back up each flight the three voices are quickly absorbed by my imagination to play out scenarios where they deliver the news to my peers of how they caught me red-handed. A thousand-strong chorus tags me as The Boy Who Did a Bad Shit in School.

That’s how I’ll live now. I just couldn’t resist those mints.

The plan isn’t just to get back to class anymore, it’s to get home. To hide myself away. Home is the true escape, the perfect alibi. How can I be known as The Boy Who Did a Shit in School if I wasn’t even there? I lie to my teacher and exaggerate my illness to get a note from him, and then I lie to the school support staff and convince them I have a stomach bug. I walk out of that building in under five minutes, passing my crime scene and all the evidence on the way out the door. That’s the dangerous first step. That’s the moment I chose to associate diarrhoea with anxiety, embarrassment and shame, and allowed anxiety, embarrassment and shame to take control of my life. And this was just an off day like everyone else has. This was two years before I was regularly struggling with this kind of condition. Point is, that fear has always been there.

Today, summer 2018. I wasn’t in control when I fled from school that day. I wasn’t in control when I tried to find the furthest corner of the hostel in Elephant & Castle to hide. I wasn’t in control when I missed entire university lectures so I wouldn’t have to stand up and have everyone look at me if I needed to excuse myself. I wasn’t in control when I had to excuse myself during a lecture one day, and was promptly called out by the professor for “always going to the bathroom”. I wasn’t in control when I whittled my diet down to white meats, rice and green beans for nine months just so I could have a functional life without experiencing constant waking anxiety. I wasn’t in control when I ducked from seeing friends for months, stopped going to concerts for years, and avoided public transport altogether. I thought I was in control when I was arranging counselling sessions for myself and on the days where I was able to see friends, go to concerts and use public transport, but I wasn’t really. Truthfully, I never was.

It’s feels ridiculous to be frightened of being known as The Boy Who Did a Bad Shit in School when I could now easily be known as The Boy Who Did a Bad Shit in Manchester Piccadilly Train Station (And Then Had to a Bad Shit on the Train Itself, And Then Again in Stockport Station), The Boy Who Did a Bad Shit in the Etihad Stadium (and One Time at Old Trafford), The Boy Who Did a Bad Shit in a Public Toilet in Glasgow, The Boy Who Did a Bad Shit in Every Toilet of Salford University, The Boy Who Did Several Bad Shits in Several Pubs and Coffee Houses in Manchester and Salford, The Boy Who Did Two Really Bad Shits in Fifteen Minutes in a Chinese Restaurant, The Boy Who Had to Run Through Passport Control in Philadelphia Airport So He Could Do a Bad Shit, The Boy Who Thought He Was Going to Do a Bad Shit on a Tram and Got Off in a Panic but Then Didn’t, The Boy Who’s Done More Bad Shits in His Friends’ Bathrooms Than His Friends Have Done Bad Shits Combined.

I am the boy who does bad shits everywhere because he has to.

Recognising this and making an attempt to own it doesn’t suddenly change things. It’s a first step to recognise problem, yes, but it’s another thing entirely to attack it and solve it. This isn’t an uplifting end to this entry. It’s taken six years, three rounds of counselling, memories never formed, and years of enduring depression and anxiety just to recognise that I gave up control of my life to them. Everything I’ve done, everything I’ve achieved, I’ve done and achieved in spite of what’s happened to me. The last six years aren’t something I can just shake off because I’ve decided to try and approach life with a different outlook. They’re still there, they still happened, and they’ll still inform and affect my future. They’ll still define me.

But this is about control, and this is an attempt to take it back.