I Want To Be Free

I’m writing this as someone who’s hidden a problem from pretty much everybody for about 30 years. I dealt with it on my own because I was ashamed of it. I didn’t want the judgment that was inevitably going to come with revealing it to the people around me. For a man, it’s particularly emasculating. That’s what I have the most trouble dealing with. That this makes me less of a man. That’s why I hid it.

So here it is. I have paruresis. Shy bladder. I can’t piss in front of other people.

The few people I have told, I didn’t really tell them the true extent. I brushed it off like, “Yeah I sort of have a hard time going to the bathroom in public.” What I didn’t say was how much it runs my day-to-day life. How it’s always there. How I’m always calculating.

When I go to a restaurant and I don’t know what kind of bathroom they have, there’s this calculation that starts before I even get up from the table. A lot of sit-down places have single-person bathrooms, which is nice. But fast food joints and cheaper spots, you get the worst of both worlds. A small bathroom, but no lock on the door and no real privacy if anybody else happens to walk in. Two toilets, a urinal, a sink. That’s it.

So I walk in. And if I’m feeling confident, if I’m in one of those moods where I’m telling myself I’m going to get over this, maybe I go to the urinal. I unzip. I’m standing there. And then this thought starts to creep in that somebody could walk in at any time. It worms its way inside my brain and just sits there. I’m standing at the urinal because I want to not be bothered by this. I want to just take a piss and be done. But now I’m just standing there holding my dick and nothing is happening.

Eventually I swallow my pride and zip back up. I walk into one of the stalls and sit down like I was here to take a shit. And now it’s worse than if I had just sat down in the first place, because now I’m really thinking about it. So I put my earbuds in. I play white noise or a podcast. I scroll on my phone. I’m trying to distract my brain long enough for my body to let go. After a few minutes, something clicks over. And it finally happens.

Nobody even came into the bathroom. There was no problem except the one inside my own head.

I get up. I wash my hands. I walk back out into the rest of the world. And nobody knows that I’m ashamed I can’t do this thing the way other people do it. I don’t really understand why. I don’t really understand where it came from. But I feel it and I deal with it.

When my partner is in the bathroom and we’re getting ready for bed, she just goes. Right there. Doesn’t think twice. I couldn’t do that if you paid me a million dollars. Not because I don’t want to, but because I can’t.

Whenever I start a new job, one of my first thoughts was always about the bathroom situation. What’s it going to be like? When is it least occupied? I map out the timing, try to find the dead windows, and never do it perfectly. It always leads to awkward moments. Going to the bars when I was younger was a fucking nightmare. Alcohol helps. I’ve gotten over it with alcohol before. But that’s not a solution.

This shit has infected my mind for so long, man.

I wonder how much time I’ve spent being consumed by this problem while simultaneously telling myself it’s not that big of a deal. That it’s avoidable enough if you use strategies to cope. That it’s manageable. That’s the trap, right? It’s not bad enough to face, so you just keep engineering your life around it. Year after year. Decade after decade.

Well it is a big deal. And I’m fucking sick of it.

I’m fucking sick of not being willing to just take this on. To fix it. To make it better. I know it’s possible. I know people have done it. I know I can do it. I just haven’t put myself to doing it. It’s on me. It’s my responsibility. No one else is going to do this for me.

I want to be free again. When I was a little kid I didn’t have this problem. I didn’t fucking care. I want that freedom back. I want to get a job and not immediately worry about the bathroom. I want to be a normal fucking person, because most people don’t have a problem with this. And yeah, it feels pretty isolating. Everybody else in my life just doesn’t deal with this. I know there are people out there who do, plenty of them, but none of them I know.

So I’m going to share my journey. As embarrassing as it is, I need the accountability. I know myself. Without it, I’m going to avoid this again. The internet is pretty nice in the way it lets you be anonymous but public at the same time, so I’m going to use that.

I’ve done a good amount of research. I’ve put together a plan. Graduated exposure, building a toolkit, working my edge step by step. My timeline is 8 to 12 weeks. And I’m not aiming for “a little bit better.” I’m not aiming for “I can pretty much handle it.” I want to master this. People don’t think about pissing as a skill, but I’m going to take it on as one.

I’ll report back at least every week. Maybe more. Because I am so fucking tired of this shit. There’s just no reason, man.

I want to be free.