At War With My Own Gut

"Time to freak out."

I'm at my computer, watching the deadline tick ever closer. I'm running in the red. An article's due in two days, work is in one, and the tournament I'm anything but ready to run is in three hours.

I've done this before. The mind is a haphazard tapestry and it doesn't work on command. It spits out lines of nonsense, and then like an infinite amount of monkeys with infinite typewriters, fires out production on hot cylinders for hours at a time.

I've sat at this desk before. Years of the same task are supposed to numb you to overthinking it, and streamline the process. Get up, go to work, do that for forty years then die.

I've been in charge before. It's always a grand time. The community and camraderie are the reason I graduated from competing to organizing. Despite all the hiccups, it's something I'd never trade.

So why, in the face of the same old stories, is my gut going haywire? Why does anxiety not come in the mind, but in the pit of my stomach?

There's no threat here, nor anything beyond my own ability or consequence. Just work to finish and a body that's overreacting. I don't need stomach signals, I need to put my head down and finish the work. Do the thing. So why is the body sabotaging itself, freaking out over nothing? Why is my head trying to get in the game and my insides tugging me out of it?

I'm locked in a war with my gut.

--

"Hey buddy, you got a dollar?"

I'm at the side of town I was raised to never walk through.

I step one block, looking for a friend who's living in a hi-rise right at this edge. The consequence of being sheltered in the suburbs is that walking through the grit of the streets trains you to be obliviously awed, not on edge.

A stranger asks if I'm lost. I reply with a jolly "sure am!" He asks where I'm going. I spill out the answer because I like the attention. Never put me on the witness stand.

He points me on my way, and with a smile and a flash of the knives in his jacket, asks for some loose change. I've got a few bucks in my pocket, the guy was helpful, why not?

The whole time, my gut's been silent.

An hour later, I find my friend. He hops off his bike, sweating up a panic. "I thought you were dead."

I laugh, the idea of my own death always being funny. It wouldn't be the first time I'd been under threat and I'd had the awareness of an LA driver on a call amid rush hour.

We enter his gated community. He locks several doors behind him and tells me he was legitimately worried. I still don't see the problem. Somebody starts screaming bloody murder in the street. I ask him if that's unusual.

"Pretty much every night," he says, turning on the monitor to fill our junkie fixes, by playing some Guilty Gear. Fighting game players will travel to combat zones just to run sets. We're there until two in the morning, and he offers to walk me back to my car, bike in tow. I'd parked at a "better" side of town, it just happened to be a thirty minute walk back through the streets of people who might consider going for the jugular for a fiver.

I'd been wandering through a skid row for an hour, and if I'd been there a minute more and a dollar less, I might be a slurry down in the sewage drains rather than here telling you a story. The threats weren't in my head. They were standing at the corner, and in some cases, talking niceties and draping arms over my shoulder, calling me "buddy" and "friend." And for whatever reason, neither consciousness nor unconsciousness recognized that fact.

Now I have to look over my shoulder every now and then. My eyes are the only ones looking out.

It just had nothing to say on the battlefield.

--

"How spicy do you want it?"

I'm at a ramen shop built for masochists. The chart on the menu gives you the option: do you want to wuss out and go for mild, or do you want to melt your face off and go all the way?

On a scale of 7-1, the 1 being the spiciest, I go for the 2 to test the waters. I'm not completely insane.

Not until thirty minutes later, where I'm a collage of sweat, snot, and spice clouds. We've emptied the napkin dispenser and they want us to hurry up and finish the soup so they can get in their next customers. It's not like they're rude, they're just busy.

My gut is busy biding its time.

Capsaicin is the compound in chili peppers that burns your mouth when you eat it. It's a defensive irritant, meaning that plants with it evolved to ward of predators. There isn't even a "taste bud" for spicy, it's literally nothing but inflammation. In a word, pain. Humans, being natural freaks, decided it was fun to set their mouths on fire, and thousands of years later, you have the people who say they can't handle spice, and the ones who ask "what's the point of eating it if it's not a fire hazard?"

My mind's on the latter team, my gut is on the former. Opposing factions within the same borders.

Neurodivergent folk are up to eight times likelier to have gastrointestinal disorders. IBS, constipation, guts gone wild. The moment I read that statistic, I said "Oh. Of course. That explains everything." Thirty five years of this bull.

Capsaicin isn't known to cause gastrointestinal distress, not unless you've already got a stomach disorder, or you're eating it to the point of vomiting. Au contraire, spicy food is beneficial to the body. Lower mortality rates, reduced heart issues, ramped endorphins and metabolism: pain really is weakness leaving the body.

The brain and mouth love what my gut doesn't. Where have I heard this story before?

This time it's a flashback that's going to hit in the future. I already know tomorrow's me is going to be suffering from today's enjoyment, even if it's good for me. The last time I ate something ridiculously spicy, I had to pass on a Guilty Gear "grudge match" with the same old friend, because the moment I got home from work, I was in the latrine combat zone until I was able to go to bed.

I still eat my food spicy. Just not super extra, and with the knowledge that tomorrow, I'm going to be holed up with an organ that's overreacting.

My gut is fighting its allies on all fronts.

--

"How many times are you going to screw this up?"

I'm being chewed out. An employer. An instructor. A coach. My own consciousness. Something's off. The gut goes haywire.

The only danger is failure: the stepping stone to success. Stoicism taught me to abandon my ego and naivety didn't even realize it was an issue to begin with. Don't give into the anger again. You know what happens and you swore it wouldn't go again. Yelling begets yelling, and that's not a war worth winning. I, like others undefeated, step out for a reason.

I am the angriest person in the room, and it took untold violence to reach this level of tranquility. I am gentle because I am afraid of what I have seen in myself. I am no animal, I am the one in control, no matter how much the body wants to rebel and rip itself apart.

There's a rollercoaster going on inside my stomach. My head is flaring, but that I can keep under control. I know how not to snap under pressure. Fight or flight instincts are triggering at the battlefield of the office desk and the sanctity of the at-home-mental-tornado-shelter. The flurry of threats aren't real. Nothing's in danger. I know this, you know this. We all live in this world where the fortunate members are far from the battlefield, the stressors a product of a heirarchy of societal dances.

I'm being verbally berated for missing a swing of the tennis racket. For misunderstanding the homework assignment. For misplacing a decimal. The whole team is watching. The entire workforce. Every cell in my body, staring at the failure at my feet.

My gut never got the memo. It's telling me to get up and fight. You're in danger, it's shrieking. Get up and defend yourself.

I know that the gut's looking out. The mind is playing mediator, the gut is screaming bloody murder. A cocktail of anger and shame and embarrassment and stomach knots. It's a mixed signal minefield.

This is the battle where the gut is justified, completely correct, and it still isn't right.

--

"Call it. Are you going to play it safe, or roll the dice?"

I'm on stage, in the driver's seat. That same game we played in the apartment is now being shown to those in the crowd, cheers and chants behind me. I'm playing Guilty Gear under the show lights, and the only thing on the line are fanfare and bragging rights, which are enough to set the stomach lining into a eldritch Interweave.

He's going to do it again.

The rational part of me tells the unconscious that would be silly. Nobody would be irrational enough to do the same move five times in a row. Especially if it didn't work four. Or maybe it worked once. Or maybe the last two, and here we are, playing rock paper scissors at the speed of neurological firings for the equivalent for sofa cushion change.

I told myself I would have learned by now. My gut's told me the answer before, and when I open my ears and listen, it works. I'm right. It wins me games to trust what it's telling me after decades of playing to win. Intuition is just condensed experience.

I yield to reason, and once again, I am made the loser, awaiting a self-beating berate once I'm off the stage.

Just listen next time, I justify. Flukes and bad beats and wrong calls. Forget all the times that playing the odds and gambler's fallacies have been proven wrong, where reason trumps pride and all-or-nothings. Players will tell themselves anything to make themselves feel better about failing.

Sometimes the gut is on the lookout, and sometimes there really is something biding in the shadows, ready to tear my throat out.

My gut's just as uncertain as life, but when it knows what it's talking about, the signal is loud and clear, and it's up to me to listen.

--

The deadline's still ticking. Brackets are starting and it's go time. Once I'm in my element, and we're live, it calms down. My gut's telling me ready up, to figure out what to write later.

I'm getting up from my desk. Another day, another dollar. I've done what I can for the shift and out goes the punch card at the timeclock. There wasn't anything I couldn't handle: a typical day of work. My gut's pretty stable, calm as the first part of Bruce Lee's mantra: "Be Like Water."

I'm hovering over the publish button. All I know is that in the end, I've done the best I can, and there will be better to come. My gut's a little active, but that's the sympathetic response. A little anxiety, but that gives way to excitement and acceptance.

The war rages on. Like any battle, sides change. Truces are formed and broken. Borders are redefined, torn down, built up, and toed again. Reason trumps everything except when it doesn't. The gut, the center of intuition, where all that truly condensed knowledge lies, bereft of the roadblock known as rationality, gets to spread its wings. Ready to fly within the confines of your abdomen. It bashes around and disorients you and flips you upside down until you decide.

Either you trust it, or you wrangle it in line.

Even when it is betraying me and acting out of line, the branch of government with the maturity of a five year old, the gut looks out for my best interest.

Even when it is wrong, misleading, overreacting, like any other part of the body, it is looking out for the herd. Just another part of the system with a justified level of governance.

Even when I don't always listen to it, I am oft glad I did, because it is sometimes the way to go. The instigator of the right outcomes. Don't think. Don't stop yourself. That risk is far less scary if you know it is right.

This skirmish in front of me, where I sit at this keyboard and determine what to say, and how I'm going to do it, I have given it the right of way,

because my gut told me to.

--

This is the last piece I have written for Write of Passage: Cohort 13. Although it diverted from the original topic, of course, my gut told me to write it.

Special thanks to CansaFis Foote, for ALL of his editing help throughout this entire cohort. I wouldn't have made it here without him.