One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Emetophobia and the Pandemic
If, like me, you have ever been forced to participate in a range of embarrassing team-building exercises in your lifetime, you will undoubtedly be familiar with the exceedingly popular and excruciatingly awkward game ‘two truths and a lie’. Universally beloved by overly enthusiastic seminar tutors and group leaders the world over, the aim of said game is to sneak a lie past your fellow players without being caught.
However, whilst the lie is supposed to be the focal point of the game, in my experience it is the outrageous truths that actually prompt the most animated game discussion – particularly if, as in my case, one of the outrageous truth happens to be that you haven’t thrown up for nigh on thirteen years.
When I tell people this fun fact, I am usually met with puzzled faces and at least one person uttering a sceptical ‘no way!’. It is fairly unbelievable, I must admit; thirteen years with no food poisoning, bad flu or sickly hangovers is, for many, the stuff of legends. However, this rabbit-like inability to be sick is sadly not evidence of a super-human immune system, nor is it an indication that I possess what my friend Eve would describe as the hardy ‘stomach of a goat’. Instead, it’s the result of a life-long and exhausting struggle with severe emetophobia – one that, up until the recent pandemic, I believed I was finally overcoming.
Meaning ‘the fear of being sick’, emetophobia is a fairly prevalent anxiety disorder that affects 1.7 – 3.1% of men and 6 – 7% of women. Like it says on the tin, emetophobes typically experience an intense and excessive worry about being sick or seeing others be sick. Naturally, nobody enjoys being sick, but for emetophobes this fear is so acute that it often results in the development of serious avoidance behaviours, such as feeling unable to leave home if stomach bugs are going around or tendencies towards anorexia to avoid food poisoning. At this point, it can begin to run (and ruin) your life, which is precisely what it had been doing to me up until my final year at university.
As far back as I can remember, the thought of being sick was always accompanied by a palpable sense of dread and a set of obsessive avoidance behaviours. Following one of the few and far between evenings I actually was sick as a child, I resolutely decided that I would never again eat a brownie as I was certain that this is what had made me ill – a resolution I kept until I was well into my teenage years. However, following a period of intense stress in which my dad was severely ill when I was thirteen, this anxiety began to spiral completely out of control. I began to spend every minute of the school day agonising about what would happen if I was sick in class (despite the fact that I never, ever was) and started skipping lunches, convinced that if I had nothing in my stomach then I physically couldn’t be sick. Every single moment was consumed with calculating how quickly I could run to the toilet if I had to, which subsequently developed into a compulsive need to always sit near the back of assemblies and classrooms so that I could do so without being seen. I also began to designate ‘safe’ people – i.e., people who I could throw up in front of and feel the least amount of embarrassment – and stick close to them as a method of managing my anxiety which, naturally, increased tenfold when surrounded by strangers or – god forbid! – people I fancied. It was exhausting.
Eventually, as outside pressures began to mount alongside the personal pressure cooker inside my own head, I began to let my emetophobia take over my life completely. I would routinely find myself incapable of going to school and began committing to invitations to go out with friends only to never turn up because it was too difficult which inevitably led to drifting away from the people I loved most.
After suffering through the intensely anxiety-inducing experience of the GCSE exam hall, I also switched to doing exams separately in a smaller room in order to minimise the amount of people I could potentially be embarrassed in front of – something I was too afraid to explain the real reasons for, citing general ‘anxiety’ when asked about the move. After a series of what you might call ‘small’ (if you’re being kind) breakdowns in front of my parents, we eventually decided it was probably time for therapy and medication. However, since I was unwilling to be honest with my therapist about what the real problem was (I was still too embarrassed to tell people that what was causing all my anguish was a fear of a routine bodily function), this didn’t help me much, and as I transitioned out of secondary school and into sixth form my emetophobia transitioned with me.
Fortunately, during those two years I begin to feel the hold my fears had on me ease. I would regularly say yes to going out and getting drunk despite the fact that these were two things that routinely ended in at least one of my friends being sick – usually spectacularly, usually in front of everyone else – which would have been unthinkable in secondary school. However, I still spent hours of the day obsessively worrying about being sick, never fully relaxed unless I was in the comfort of my own home. The first and second years of university were much the same – in some ways, I made extreme progress and yet in others, I felt myself lagging behind, still compulsively sitting at the back left in lectures theatres and panicking about being sick in front of strangers in my seminars.
Everything began to change in my final year, however. Now living with just four of my best friends in a house we loved as if it was our own home, with two years of experience handling university and living away from home, I slowly began to let go of all my hang-ups and fears and managed to acquire a number of personal victories. I even started working in a job that actually entailed me being responsible for cleaning up other people’s sick – shout out to the O2 Bristol! – and whilst I still wasn’t ever sick myself and panicked if I did feel nauseous, it was no longer the only thing I thought about all day every day.
That is – until the pandemic came along. This time, however, the obsessive fixation was slightly different. At its core, my fear of being sick was never actually about the act of being sick itself; it was more a crippling fear of the embarrassment that might cause, and following the pandemic what was formerly emetophobia began to transform into a fear of having to pee. Ridiculous, I know.
Following the closure of pubs and restaurants in the summer, a lot of us began to drink outside in parks whilst we soaked up the sun. However, as we all know, drinking inevitably leads to breaking the seal and at the beginning of the pandemic, nearly all public bathrooms were closed to prevent the spread of the virus. This, in turn, led to me becoming excessively worried about being caught short and then paralyzed with fear about how embarrassing that would be.
Once again, I was terrified of my own bodily processes, and this anxiety was, in some ways, even worse than the emetophobia. Although it’s far less embarrassing to pee in public (we have ALL done scampered off to a bush when nature calls at the wrong time), this fear of being caught short is even more exhausting than worrying about being sick as my obsessive overthinking initiates a fight-or-flight instinct that makes me need to pee even more often than I would normally. Again, this problem is always exacerbated by what other people might consider mundane situations: travelling, standing in line for a covid test (topical), doing anything in a place that might not have quick access to toilets if necessary. This, in itself, is also agonizingly anxiety-inducing – why do I find it so difficult to do routine, regular things that everybody else can do without any problems? Why am I so embarrassed and afraid of my own body?
To see myself slide backwards so significantly after a year of incredible personal growth has been extremely difficult. Although I remind myself that we are living in ‘exceptional times’, this sudden reappearance of another exhausting and trivial fixation makes me worry that each time I push past anxiety, it’s never really gone – instead, it lurks perpetually under the surface, always waiting to assume some unorthodox new form.
That said, following an exceptional year, I know that I am fundamentally not the same girl that I used to be, and whilst I’m still struggling to keep a lid on the ever-seething panic inside me, it does seem to be getting easier every time I try. Thus, perhaps what has felt like two massive steps forward and one massive step back is actually just a series of complicated lateral movements towards mental peace. In 2021, here’s hoping!
Written by Ellie Rowe
Ellie Rowe is a recent English Literature graduate from the University of Bristol. Although she hopes to pursue a career doing something vaguely related to her degree, she is currently working as a salon assistant in her local hairdressers in Hackney. In her spare time, she likes to drink with friends and fantasize about living in a small Italian village with a dog and some lemon trees.