It wasn't anxiety.

What 15 years of diarrhea taught me about listening to my body

I woke up at 4 AM on Thursday, convinced I had COVID.

My head pounded. My joints hurt. My husband had been quarantined in our bedroom since Monday, and I was sure it had finally caught up with me.

I shuffled to the kitchen. Grabbed a test.

Waited 15 minutes.

Made the 13-year-old test too.

Negative.

And then it hit me.

Oh shit. It’s the chocolate.

The night before, while making dinner, I’d eaten maybe ten pieces of 60% dark chocolate. Just little bites from a box I’d bought at the grocery store. A cousin-in-law had mentioned weeks earlier that refined sugar was causing inflammation in his body, and I’d thought, Yeah, maybe. But I don’t really want to know that.

Turns out my body did.

This is the end of a very long story. Or maybe the beginning.

For fifteen years, I lived with almost daily diarrhea. It started when I was a graduate student at Columbia. I tried to get help. I told my doctor. I told the campus medical team.

“This doesn’t seem normal,” I said. “This didn’t used to happen.”

They ran through possibilities.

Rocky Mountain spotted fever? (It had been years since I’d been west of the Mississippi.)

And then: “Could it be anxiety?”

My gut clenched. Tears welled up. Well, yes. I am anxious.

So for the next fifteen years, living in New York and Hong Kong, every time it happened, I assumed I just wasn’t managing my anxiety well enough yet. I learned relaxation techniques. Took a class in mindfulness-based stress reduction.

And yet, there were restaurants where I knew the bathroom layout by heart. Certain meals guaranteed I’d be there within twenty minutes, emptying my intestines. I accepted it. This was my life. My anxious body doing anxious things.

The breakthrough came during the pandemic, when my husband cooked every single meal. For the first time, I could track every ingredient. If I reacted, I could see exactly what I’d eaten.

Within weeks, I realized it was soy.

I cut out tofu, bean sprouts, edamame. Big improvement. Then soy sauce. Then the real culprit: soybean oil. (It’s in everything.)

This was more complicated than I expected. My husband is Chinese. Soy isn’t just food for him. It’s cultural. Claiming this sensitivity, especially when he’s the one who cooks, felt loaded. On some level, it landed as rejection. We had to work through the feeling that my body was rejecting his culture. (It helped that he's lactose intolerant. We could both agree that wasn’t a rejection of my culture.)

We adapted. Coconut aminos. Pea-based “soy” sauce. No soybean oil. No tofu. I just have to be careful at restaurants.

My stomach improved. Not perfect, but better. And now I knew: it could be food. So I kept paying attention.

My mom had identified a gluten intolerance that caused joint pain. As I entered perimenopause, my joints started hurting too. I cut out gluten, reluctantly. The joint pain eased. So did my headaches, the ones I’d had since third grade. I started to understand inflammation and how long I’d been living with it.

Then more dots connected.

I’ve always reacted oddly to alcohol. Red face. Tingling feet. I’m ethnically Caucasian, yet somehow I share this with my Chinese husband. We joke that between us, there’s one white person and one Chinese person; it’s just unclear where the lines are drawn. We don’t drink. We feel better.

In the past six months, I realized egg yolks were a problem too. For years I’d picked them out of hard-boiled eggs, telling myself I was picky. I wasn’t. My body was telling me something.

Here’s the maddening part: none of this shows up on allergy tests. I did a comprehensive panel three years ago. Clear. No soy allergy. No egg allergy. No celiac. On paper, this all looks like nothing. Or hysteria.

It’s not.

Food sensitivities are notoriously hard to diagnose. There’s no single test. Just elimination, observation, patience. Time. Money. Attention. All the things many of us don’t feel entitled to spend on ourselves.

For the past 5 years, I’ve decided I am worth it.

I’ve done the appointments. Paid attention. Kept testing and adjusting. Dialed in hormones. Adjusted food. It’s taken all this time to feel well.

And I do feel well. Now.

And I’m pissed.

I’m angry that I didn’t think I was worth it sooner. I sat on toilets for fifteen years, shitting my guts out, and told myself it was fine. I was busy. Parenting. Working. Holding the family together. I thought I could just live with it.

I can’t believe I did.

I’m sharing this to say: you don’t have to.

If your body doesn’t feel right, believe yourself. It might be something small. Something tweakable. Something you haven’t been taught to listen for yet.

It might not be a big deal. But it's likely to take time and effort and perseverance to get the help you need.

I thought about ending this by saying you’re worth it. You deserve to feel well.

But if you’re anything like me, that’s not going to get you to the doctor.

So how about this:

Do it for your kids. Your partner. Your work.

How much better of a Mom could I have been if I wasn’t uncomfortable half the time? How much nicer would date night have been if I hadn’t had to spend half of it in the bathroom? How much more effective would I have been as a problem solver if I hadn’t had to take days off for preventable headaches?

And also, you’re worth it. You deserve to feel well.

Let me know how it goes.

🕊️

SAM

On Thursday, more on learning to perform on the instrument that is you.

My office for 15 years