The Puke

I have a phobia of throwing up. Actually, I used to have this phobia; it's lessened in intensity over the years. The more I talked about it the more I noticed that it's not uncommon to be totally freaked out about getting the stomach flu. My good friend Jen calls it "The Puke." If someone so much as walks by her in the mall with a nauseous look on their face, she hits her medicine cabinet and swallows truckfulls of anti-puke medication in anticipation of The Puke. And really? I don't blame her.

There's just something about getting the stomach flu that turns my world upside down. I've thought about it many times and tried to analyze it (my name is Suzy, and I am an analyzoholic) and the best explanation I could come up with is that when we throw up, it's a complete loss of control. As humans we are control freaks, some of us more than others, but at the end of the day we need to know that we have some sort of grip on our decisions and their outcomes. But when we get The Puke, there is no amount of self-control and cheek-biting that will stifle the spaghetti purge.

This is gross.

There's some funky virus going around right now that is giving everyone the worst form of The Puke since Norwalk, 2003 (been there, puked that). Kids at school are dropping like flies. The party people I work with are phoning in sick, and the rest of us are all hanging onto our health by our fingertips. Andrew and I saw a girl in one of the food courts at the mall yesterday wearing a mask and do you think we wanted to eat there? No. So we starved.

Whether we carry it as a phobia or as a mere discomfort, nobody wants to lose control and have our insides come out. It's embarrassing. It hurts. It smells, and it's out of our control. But when we finally let go, isn't it such a huge relief? The fear of letting it out can make us feel sicker than we need to feel but once we let go of that vice grip, we can purge ourselves of our sickness and start over with renewed health. This is why I don't fear The Puke anymore because my life will play out the way it's supposed to play out whether or not I feel in control. A feeling is a feeling, not truth. The sooner we let go, the healthier we will be.