The best self-defense: your own shit.

Hi and welcome to Not Normal! I’m currently on holiday in Australia and New Zealand with my family. In honor of taking time off, I’m posting the story that made me fall in love with writing humor—which also happens to be a story about when I first fell in love with travel.

I told this story live on stage in February 2024. Below is a lightly edited version, or you can watch the video here. Hope you enjoy!

It was two AM and I was sitting on the edge of my bed, shaking in fear. I was holding a can of hairspray in one hand and in the other hand, a bag of my own shit.

There was a man right outside, rattling the door, trying to break in. I was in Thailand, by myself, in a tiny bamboo hut. The bag and the hairspray were the only things I had to defend myself. I figured that I would spray the intruder in the eyes and then hit him with my sack of poop.

I had no idea at the time, but this moment in the hut, with the hairspray and the poop bag, was the moment my life changed forever. Much like a newborn baby, holding a bag of my own biohazards in my arms transformed me.

It started two months earlier, in China, where I was living for the summer. I was grad school for nutrition, so I thought, what better way to immerse myself than to try the local cuisine?

And I did. I ate something called stinky tofu, a type of fermented tofu sold on the street that sort of smells like stinky feet and sort of tastes amazing. I ate things that still had eyes, and things that had been squirming just a few minutes before.

And I ate a lot of spicy, oily noodles- the kind that are so hot that afterwards you’re drenched in sweat.

So when my stomach hurt, I thought I was just paying the price for my culinary adventures.

Initially I just ignored it.

I was so busy. I was setting up a research study in a dozen local kindergartens, and I had to run around all over the city asking school principals for permission to enter the classrooms. No one tells you this when you go to grad school, visions of Nobel prizes dancing in your head, but as it turns out, research is mostly signing forms, paying invoices, and begging people to let you do it.

At night, I was hanging out with my new roommates, who were from all over the world and seemed so much more sophisticated than me, a small town girl from Ohio. They were always doing fancy things like watching film with subtitles and hand-rolling cigarettes—you know, the kinds of things you think are peak glamour at age 25.

I had my own glimpses of glamour too: in 2010, in Western China, there weren’t many tall pale blondes around. People would come up to me on the street, requesting photographs. Some of the kindergartener would even come up to me, giggle, and run away. I heard some of them singing, “la la ra ra ra” to the tune of Bad Romance. This happened a few times before I realized: they thought I was Lady Gaga.

So, everything was going great. I was doing science and masquerading as a fake celebrity.

Except for that stinky, spicy tofu, reaping its revenge.

After a few days, I was running to the bathroom every hour. Absolutely, totally NOT glamorous.

To make matters worse, most bathrooms had something called squat toilets: holes or troughs in the ground where people would line up, side by side, and do their business.

Of course, in China, this is totally normal. For me, it was mortifying. Especially because I because rural Ohio is a place where bodies are never mentioned, let alone bodily fluids. My sister and used to joke that we would rather disembowel ourselves than be overheard flushing my grandmother’s toilet, because that would be admitting that you’d used it. Ideally, you didn’t ever poop, but if you did, you did it in secret.

I was deep in the shame of my newfound status as a public pooper when something else happened. I learned I was going to have to shut down my research study, after just two weeks. Instead of a busy summer full of collecting data, surrounded by little kids who thought I was Lady Gaga, l had nothing to do and no one to talk to. My roommates were great, but they were all busy working or in class.

I was terrified.

You see, back in grad school, I avoided being alone at all costs.

On one hand, this made me a super fun friend. Margaritas the size of your head? Count me in. A day trip out of state just to try some lobster rolls? I’ll drive. All-night karaoke? Already signed up.

And I also did some really dumb stuff.

Like, this one time, I was out posting flyers around the corner from my apartment, which is no big deal, but I lived in neighborhood full of crime.

Like, the very first week I moved in, there was a murder, a drug bust, AND there was a bike-by shooting, which is like a drive-by shooting, but for people who are environmentally friendly. It wasn’t a nice place. I was posting these flyers and a cop came and told me to go home, it was after dark and it was too dangerous. Instead of listening, I just went to the street where the bike-by had happened and started flyering there. It wasn’t that I was so obsessed with getting these flyers up, it was that the idea of going back to my empty apartment felt worse than the prospect of getting hurt.

I also went on a lot of internet dates—pretty much with whoever would agree to go out with me. One time I matched with this dentist. When we went out to dinner, we realized that he worked at the same dental clinic that I went to.

The date was fine, but kind of “meh.” Very forgettable—except that after the date, when I was trying to ghost him, he started sending me pictures.

You know the kind I’m talking about, pics of Ds…that is, dental xrays.

My own dental xrays. He had gone into my files, found my info, and was trying to lure me into a second date by sending me pics of my lower mandible. It was super creepy and probably illegal.

And yet, I was facing a Friday night alone—so I texted him back. And we went out again.

Because I knew that if I stayed home, I would start to hear it.

The voice inside my head.

The voice that would tell me the real truth:

I was single and would always be single.

That I didn’t know what I was doing with my life or my career, and maybe I never would.

That I was a dull person from a dull place, with nothing to offer.

The only time I could drown out this voice was when I was with other people, no matter if they were boring or tedious or weirdly obsessed with my teeth.

Now I was here in China, with nothing to do. There were no flyers to hang, no creepy dentists to go out with, no distractions.

That’s when I decided to go to Thailand by myself. To this day, I’m still not sure why I did it. It was sort of like, as a kid, when you have a bruise and you know you shouldn’t press on it, but you do it anyway, just to see how it feels. And also, it was 2010, the year that the book “Eat, Pray, Love” was turned into a movie. Julie Roberts played the main character, who traveled all over the world and in the process discovered herself.

I thought maybe I could do the same: like maybe if I struck out on my own, the sun would beam down on me, I’d suddenly start wearing flowers behind my ear, I would instantly find love, and all my problems would just vanish.

Except in my case, the book would be called, “Eat, Pray, Poop.”

Because I was still sick, and getting sicker. By the time I checked into my little hut on an island off Thailand’s coast, I felt like I was going to explode, literally.

And later that night, I did. But my tiny hut didn’t have a bathroom and it was hundreds of yards away from the communal one.

A few hours later is when the doors to my hut started shaking. I can see this strange man trying to get in. I grab my hairspray and poop bag. The rattling gets louder and louder. Just when I thought that the door was about to open, someone yelled “Hey moron- our hut’s over here!” and I could see these two drunken dude-bros stumble away.

After they left, I was stunned. I had been ready to fight to the death but instead I was just sitting there, alone.

I got back in bed, but my heart kept pounding and I couldn’t sleep.

At first I thought I was just afraid that these guys might come back. But as the hours passed, instead of feeling better, I felt worse and worse. It was like I was being slowly suffocated with fear.

Then, sometime around sunrise, I realized that it wasn’t intruders I was afraid of: it was me.

My obsessive research jobs, my weird internet dates, the late nights with my glamorous roommates, they had all been a way for me to escape myself.

And now, I was totally completely alone.

And there no bag of shit in the world large enough to use as a weapon.

The voice in my head was shouting - telling me to run away, to pack my bags and get on the next plane out.

But I couldn’t, because I was too sick. My intestines were like a pile of snakes trying to eat each other alive. I couldn’t keep anything down and I could barely even drag myself to a hammock near the beach.

For two days I basically just laid there, held captive by my own body.

By myself.

Alone.

And nothing happened.

Nothing happened. I was more alone than in my worst nightmare, and yet nothing happened. I was still there.

And around day two or three of that nothingness, I started to noticing things.

Things like the thick ropes of the hammock, holding me. The taste of the warm, salty air. The beats of the band at the beach club next door.

As I felt my body more, I heard that voice less.

On day three or four, when I started to feel better, I went to a restaurant on the beach. I ordered a glass of cold white wine. I watched the waves, and I watched the other people at the restaurant. There were groups of friends, couples, and I was pretty sure, the two guys who tried to break into my hut.

Most other people were with someone else, and I was alone.

I raised my glass and took a sip. It was delicious.

I’d love to hear in the comments: what’s your most undignified travel story?