I’ve had diarrhea since the fifth grade. The year was 1998/99 when my parents’ long-failing marriage finally crumbled and the brooding anxiety I’d felt since the onset of my sentience really began to rob me of my childhood. Don’t worry, this essay isn’t a sob story about my parents’ divorce. This essay is about shitting in a urinal after Sunday school. I was put on antidepressants to deal with the stress of the divorce and freshly-diagnosed childhood OCD. From age 10 to 16, I cycled through myriad SSRIs and TCAs that numbed my personality, disturbed my sleep, made me gain weight, delayed the onset of puberty, and made me want to die in general. But there was one drug that, while providing me no relief from the chaos inside my head and broken homes, did allow me a full year of respite from what has become lifelong IBS.
The “relief” came in the form of grotesque constipation. I won’t name this drug outright to avoid being sued, but I will tell you that it rhymes with Flomipramine. This TCA turned my insides into petrified wood. I was so dried out that my psychiatrist wrote me doctor notes to be excused from my middle school’s no-gum policy. I had to chew a pack of Trident every day while constantly sipping from a water bottle to keep from foaming at the mouth. My breath smelled like industrial waste, and every morning I would wake up gasping for air through a crusty windpipe before running to the bathroom to stick my head under the faucet. Taking a morning dump was almost never part of my routine.
Taking a dump in general was never routine, because I had lost all autonomy over when and where I would take a shit. Three days between bowel movements became my norm, and seven days was not unheard of. (I assume that) most people with healthy bowels maintain a pretty predictable schedule ie. taking a morning shit somewhere between that first cup of coffee and a shower — interspersed with the unpredictable diarrhea that makes life interesting.
My dumps came on like panic attacks. I’d be in class, riding my bike, watching a movie at a friend’s house, or just living my life when terror would descend upon my body and mind. I’d turn stark white and start sweating, my heart pounding and circulating all blood flow to the only 2 parts of my body that mattered in those moments: the parts of my brain that locate bathrooms, and clench my sphincter.
The shitting itself was excruciating — imagine having a Maglite Flashlight force its way out of your ass at an age when your feet barely reach the bathroom tiles. During the Flomipramine years (roughly 2000-2001), I clogged every toilet I ever used. As I write this, I’m recalling that I’d had to completely stop using urinals during this period of time because it was simply too risky. You know when you’re peeing and it loosens everything up enough for you to let out a satisfying little fart? Imagine having a brown marble rolling pin on the other side of that fart. I used to pee sitting down to keep from inadvertently setting off a chain reaction that was impossible to control once set in motion.
I did complain to my psychiatrist about the constipation. I was told to keep chewing gum, drinking water, and eating Cracklin’ Oat Bran. It wasn’t until a specific incident transpired that I demanded to be taken off this sadistic psychotropic.
Two years into my SSRI era, I was 12 years old and in 7th grade. It was early one spring afternoon and I probably hadn’t taken a shit in a full week. After sitting through morning church service and Sunday school, I was invited to hang out at a friend’s house to play some video games and jump on the trampoline. He was 10, and our age difference sometimes showed, but we had a shared interest in Goldeneye on N64 and backflips on trampolines. My friend’s mom, who was also the Sunday school teacher, had to run an errand at the local Micro Center on the way home from church.
While my friend’s mom was walking the aisles and looking for a store employee to find an item, my friend and I hit the video game section for some 1-on-1 at one of the consoles they had set up to play games before you buy them. In the middle of a game of “Graffiti” in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, a familiar sensation hit me particularly hard. I dropped my controller to the ground, arched my back like little Reagan MacNeil in The Exorcist, delicately rotated on my heels and began my clenched penguin walk toward the store’s bathroom, which is always located in the deepest, darkest corner of those stores.
My friend was alarmed by the dramatic shift in my demeanor and asked what was wrong.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I replied softly — my mind incapable of doing anything but walk and clench.
“Me too. Are you sweating? You have to go #2, huh?! You’d crap your pants if I poked you in the stomach!”
I wanted to exact violence upon him. I did my 12-year-old best to convey to him that this was the most consequential moment of my entire life and to stay out of my way and just give me some privacy.
Recalling what this kid did next will never fail to make me irate. As I gingerly opened the bathroom door and made my way toward the decrepit single stall next to a urinal with metal guards corroded by decades of piss, my “friend” pushed past me and locked himself inside the stall, for a quick piss.
“HURRY. THE FUCK. UP.,” is all I could say. I was a mild-mannered kid and probably hadn’t even used the “F” word 100 times at that point in my life, and the kid made me pay for it. For cursing at him, he said he wouldn’t come out until I apologized. I put my pride on the line, as my butthole was dilated at a good 3cm by this point. I was late-stage prairie dogging and rapidly approaching the precipice. He decided to make it a game and claim that my apology was disingenuous. I had to say it again and mean it this time. I was on the verge of tears and pleading for him to get out of the stall.
“How much money will you give me?” he taunted.
It was as if my butthole had been listening in on the conversation. It understood that this 10-year-old psychopath lacked the empathy and life experience to understand the gravity of the situation. Losing the battle, I did the only thing I could. In a singular motion, I pulled my ass out of my pants and aimed it in the direction of the urinal. This is not an embellishment: a rock-solid turd the length and diameter of my current 36-year-old forearm fired out of my ass like an RPG. There was no need to wipe. This thing had parted my butt cheeks like the red sea and exited at mach 1. No contact was made with my ass cheeks once it started moving.
The following silence, and the realization of what that silence implied, led my friend to cautiously exit the stall to my left as I pulled my pants back into place. The stall door to my left creaked open at the same time that a man in his early 50s entered the bathroom to my right. The expressions on those two faces will remain with me until the day that I die. As both processed the scene, I witnessed their immediate revulsion turn to wonder, and then to abject fear with undertones of respect.
The urinal looked weak, dwarfed by the magnitude of the turd. I am not exaggerating when I claim that this thing ran from the urinal cake up to almost the top rim. It was at least 14 inches long and 2.5 inches in diameter, it stood upright against the back of the urinal in defiance of gravity and everyone in the bathroom.
“Oh my fucking god…” the man whimpered to himself. I could see him trying to gather the strength to be the adult in the bathroom, but it was clear to everyone that the brown behemoth and the pasty, pre-pubescent punk in a puka-shell necklace who birthed it were the alphas. With a quivering voice, he did his best to take control of the situation and scold me, “you know someone has to clean that up, right?”
“He did it!” my friend said, pointing at me, eyes still transfixed on the turd.
With trembling rage, I stared into the soul of that man in the bathroom doorway and delivered the coldest, most sincere “Fuck. You.” a 12-year-old child of active divorce is capable of. I made my way to the door as the poor man flattened himself against the open door as I walked past him and back into the Micro Center — the store that became emblematic of childhood trauma in my mind from that day forward.
My friend and I did not speak until we found his mom. We didn’t speak to each other the entire ride back to his house, but I could feel his eyes on me as I stared out the window, still seething from the experience — from his locking me outside the stall, the terrorized man’s judgmental words toward me in a moment of extreme vulnerability, of having been put on a drug that made me shit state fair blue ribbon-winning cucumber-sized turds in the first place.
I had to take another shit as soon as we got back to my friend’s house. Despite the earlier evacuation, this session still clogged the toilet. There’d been more in my ass than the brown banister left in the urinal for all male Micro Center shoppers to gawk at.
“Did you just poop again?” he asked.
I was too angry to answer. We barely spoke as we played a couple of games of Goldeneye. Then my mom came by to pick me up and take me home.
I live in New York now, but that Micro Center still thrives in the south Denver strip mall where DTC Boulevard becomes Monaco Parkway. I still sometimes have to drive by it on errands when I go home to visit my (still divorced) parents. Every time I do, I feel pity for everyone involved: for my friend, whose middle school antics set off the sequence of events that I’m sure he still remembers; for the man who walked in on the aftermath and the mental scars he undoubtedly sustained; for 12-year-old me navigating middle school while plagued by the side effects of heavy antidepressants; and for the janitor who had to stare the thing down and clean it up without a hazmat suit. It was before the advent of smartphones so he couldn’t even snap a pic and go viral with what is undoubtedly the biggest log ever laid in a urinal.
I’m not putting my name on this shit
May, 2026
submitted by /u/BobbyBacalasVest
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