expulsion

a list of things regarding the void, anxiety, a weird ass coffee date, the flu, expulsion, etc

1. Analog

I’m seeing lots of journal prompts that are encouraging end of the year expulsion. I love a good, honest, manual excision. I love to watch it all be ripped open: the unstitching, wild metamorphosis, hungry viscera, shapeshifting, rearranging atomic particles that go into the art of unbecoming. It’s so interesting to choose what we leave behind, to stare something in the face and say: motherfucker, I can no longer carry you, for I am too burdened by this weight. Your peculiar and unrelenting heaviness is not an appendage of mine but I have been living like it is, molded to the habitual despair. Fuck my iphone and chatGPT and calorie tracker apps and dating apps, the digital prison hellscape, intangible conniving nullified black hole. I swear that I am on the run from the void and yet - that is the void, turning hot and mechanical in my hand. Instead of writing long, winding, stupid poems or eating juicy red grapes or walking through sculpture gardens, I am sitting there waiting for the dopamine hit that you cannot even reach out and grab. If I am ruled by my senses, so much so that I want life to be beautiful, loud, felt fully and deeply, then I mustn’t be devout to a soul sucking, eye burning rectangular box. I want it analog. I want tall candles, to keep writing down important events in my planner, a gold watch.

2. The Purge -

Happy 2026. 12:29 am. Gnocchi. Raspberry desert in a tiny cup to go. Watching silver fox gay guys get drunk on live television, listening to my angel of a sponsor speak about the lengths to which she would go to remove herself from discomfort. Sleep, candy, booze. Escape artist, yes, me too. It’s so beautiful to watch the most brilliant and radiant people in the world openly admit that they struggled with the same things that I did. I wasn’t the black sheep at all. I was on the wrong farm, bitch.

I got food poisoning the day before NYE, twenty-four hours long and violent, expulsion like an exorcism, dry heaving, pouring out of myself and out of myself until I was curled up into a ball, shallow breathing.

“No offense, but you’ve been sick for like, a month,” says my sister, shooing my fork away from the table plate of risotto at our NYE dinner. “Don’t double dip,” and I smile because it’s true, I have been sick for a month. Victorian level immobility. I got the flu, then this stomach thing, and it became apparent to me that this was some sort of expulsion, ridding my body of toxins and stress and negative energy. Sounds woo-woo, but I don’t give a fuck. I am woo-woo. I’ve always had a very intimate relationship with the word expulsion. As a writer, I’ve had affairs with certain words, very specific ones, that I feel called to, that I play tag with, that I chase in circles, turning the words over in my mouth, pushing them around with my tongue, squeezing them until I’ve wrung them dry for all that they are worth. When I was twenty and pregnant in Brooklyn, very in love, but feeling very alone all the same, I made a Twitter account and called it @ Violet Expulsion – meant to be a play on words, like, purple expulsion, rather than violent expulsion, even though everything that I was feeling at the time was completely torrential and vicious. I made it specifically to document my experience, the medical complications that I was having, and the void that I felt from my partner’s lack of support. I suppose the thought process was like, maybe I can get all of this off of my chest and it will hurt but it will still be beautiful because I will survive. And it was a scary thing to be twenty years old in Brooklyn, let alone twenty years old and pregnant in Brooklyn, but the thing is, I did survive. I survived that and worse. And no matter how scary it gets, I will survive again and again and again, red-cheeked and present now, hanging tight to the carousel.

I can’t believe that they’re just letting Andy Cohen be wasted on tequila and call Steven Colbert a “sassy bottom.” I mean. I think it’s fucking incredible, honestly, but I’m just shocked it is permissed. I think that I am from the tail end of a generation that watched live television be censored and have to adhere to certain Boomer-esque standards of dignity and social politeness, so it’s like seeing a dog on its’ hind legs to watch the twinks get to get hammered at work and make sex jokes. Again, I’m not complaining. I think that’s how it should be and twinks would have control over a lot in this world if I were in a position of political power. It’s just funny. I guess Anderson Cooper isn’t really a twink. My sister says A Cooper is a top.

It is sort of revitalizing to view sickness as a period of metamorphosis - it is uninterrupted healing, because you are forced into survival mode, complete corporeal awareness and determined electrolyte consumption. You have no choice but to lay there and be a bag of bones, praying to the God that you believe in that you’ll make it through this, you’ll be so good if you never have to exist in such a hell ever again. Being sick is hard after a break up. In a relationship, there is a sense of security in that when you feel like dog shit, you get to lay on their chest and make them deal with you. Which sounds pathetic, but it’s actually really tender and intimate if you’re ever comfortable enough with a person to experience that. During my food poisoning, I felt so sad that my ex wasn’t there to be practical and patient with me, to watch movies in bed for hours and do the WaWa run. When you’re in bed for twenty-four hours at once, it’s hard when someone isn’t coming home from work and joining you for some of them. You’re just banished and sort of dead to the world if you happen to get debilitatingly ill while single. That might be a very dramatic way for me to have phrased it. I’ll be honest, though, while I’m actively interested in nervous system healing and emotional regulation, I’m not all that worried about being less dramatic in 2026. I have a flair for it, and so what. Someone in the world has to be sexy and a diva and a genius. Dramatics are how people wind up with good literature and good outfits.

When I got the flu, however, I wasn’t thinking about my break-up, I was too busy watching my life flash before my eyes. I went from hosting finals on Zoom with my camera off, knowing that I felt tired and achy, to shooting off of the couch with a palpitating heart at eleven PM and sprinting upstairs to the bathroom because I was freezing. I was sweating bullets and shaking simultaneously, the chills leading to what can only be described as borderline convulsions. That’s it, I thought, a bitch has to save her own life. I simply couldn’t take it anymore. So I called 911.

“What’s your emergency?”
I told the operator.

“Oh, okay. Yeah, emergency is that a 26-year old female feels like she’s.. About to pass out? That’s what you said?”
“Yes!”

“Okay, well, just… do some breaths. Do you have anxiety?”
“Yep.”

The sassy EMT who arrived was low-key irritated that I was wasting his time. He rolled his eyes and informed me that the local hospitals were backed up with people who had the flu, which is likely what I also had and I was better off recovering at home. His partner rubbed my back gently and handed me a lilac hospital puke bag.

“My heart rate,” I told them, gasping, staring at the pulse oximeter on my finger “is 150.”

“Well, yeah, that’s just ‘cause’ you’re excited.”

It’s already annoying enough to be a woman because you have to constantly try to prove that you’re not crazy when you have feelings. Being a woman with hypochondria and panic disorder is like a double-whammy crash course in how to spend a life insisting upon your own sanity. These hoes honestly could never.

I spent the next days in and out of consciousness in painful flashes, thinking - if I’m sweating this much, I better be sweating out all the bad shit: all the tobacco tar and relentless human need. Fever dream/purge.

3. The Coffee Date

When I recovered from the flu, I went antique shopping with my friend, who had to attack my face with powder in the CVS parking lot before we could go anywhere because I had made myself look like TRUMP with a semi-perm self-tanner while I was delusional and ill.

“It’s really bad, actually, have you seen yourself in a mirror?” my friend SK asked. I waved her off. “Fix my face, if you must, but I just went through a life-threatening experience. I cannot be bothered with the trivialities of my botched tan job.”
“Well, bro, it’s bothering me,” she said.

She was right. It looked absolutely insane. Mentally ill levels of “I applied this in the dark.” It looked like I smeared bronzer all over my forehead in random splotches. Like I let a little kid paint in brown wherever they wanted to on my skin.

A week later, I was ready to face the world again. I sought SK’s help in picking an outfit for what would be my last Hinge Date of 2025, and probably my last Hinge Date ever. You should dress like Miley Cyrus in 2011, she told me. You know. The grunge era?

That’s hot, yeah. I agreed.

Hinge is a bad place. I’m a hardcore lover. And so.. It’s a bad fucking neighborhood, dude. It is a hellish palace of millennial humor and an assortment of group photos that make people feel corny, inauthentic, performative and disposable. It is the antithesis of true connection, something that I put myself through post-breakup fueled by a masochistic urge to prove that I could still conquer hard things, like suffering through a first date. I recently found out that dates aren’t supposed to make you suffer - you’re supposed to chill out and have fun and be yourself. But in sobriety, it’s really hard for me to digest meeting someone who is like, a character from an app, and you don’t have any real grounds for why they deserve to go on a date with you, but you’re just doing it because cyber-space threw you together. And not even in a sexy, mysterious Craiglist missed connections way. In a MetaData algorithmic, “you’re both kinda artsy” way. Mechanical and inhuman way to meet someone aaaaaaand —- I felt alone and I was all out of vices, which made me feel shit out of luck. So - the Coffee Date was arranged.

So I go on this date, right? And the details, they aren’t really important, but the awkwardness is palpable. Though I am terrified and vibrating in an extremely bad way on my drive to the coffee shop, I am fine once I’m in there, cause that’s show business, baby. He, however, is debilitatingly nervous, complaining more than once about the Red Eye he drank, making him ‘crash’ and then making him ‘too awake.’ He also has a Zyn in his lip for our entire conversation, and his hands are shaking. The small talk is forced. Tattoos, music, whatever, I don’t know.

“Pretty ballsy to drink a red eye in front of a pretty girl,” says SK’s friend, later, when I give them the run down. The date isn’t terrible, but it’s not great. It’s neutral. Neutral is not a positive adjective when it comes to romantic interests. Like how apathy is the opposite of love. And I’m not trying to be brutal, or flame the guy, or shame him for being anxious. Meeting new people from the Internet is weird and it sucks, and I’ve had random panic attacks over much less, okay? I get it. We definitely settled into ghosting each other after in a very mutual, chill way. However, when 11 PM that evening rolled around, I was puking my guts out, violently, gripping the sides of the toilet for dear life, praying for salvation. AGAIN.

It occurred to me that this, again, expulsion, was a spiritual experience of sorts. Rejecting and resteering. Rejecting Hinge dates and releasing whatever the fuck the last section of 2025 was. The body keeps the score. I was not winning this. I needed to let go and surrender.

4. The Stomach Ache

In her motherhood and addiction memoir, Jowita Bydlowska talks about the size of her want, emphasizing its endlessness as a key factor in her addiction spiral.

I think that something similar applies to the size of my dread - or that maybe my stomach dread got lost in translation and the ache is a desire disguised as dread: a void yearning to be filled. Either way, the tug earned its name because it is always hungry. Always. Hungry. Amorphous corporeal bottomless pit. Ambiguous, heavy. That’s the stomach ache. Sedate me, soothe me, it screams, I’ll ruin your day until you do but I will not clarify how. That’s my interpretation. Obviously, the insatiable other does not communicate in language, but in pangs of terror. Which leaves the language that I have for it feeling.. inadequate. The stomach ache sometimes feels illegible to me and intranslatable to others - which is so deeply lonely.

On anxiety-related Reddit threads, users seem to empathize with a ‘constant and unpredictable feeling of dread’ and even then, it feels cryptic, with there being no way to know if our sensations are identical. I’m not sure why it’s so important to me to know that someone goes through exactly what I do, other than that I’m maybe searching for evidence that I’m not alien in my suffering, and confirmation that it is, in fact, anxiety and not my body’s intuitive signaling of an underlying threat. I have been diagnosed with health anxiety, and I often conjure up different things that might be medically ailing me, most of which turn out to be far-fetched and untrue. However, this is different - it’s a gnawing, sinking feeling that seems to surface out of nowhere and it hurts like impending doom. It hurts like being a kid who’s about to get in really serious trouble. It hurts like guilt.

As I lay on my yoga mat, staring at the ceiling, I push my knees deep into my belly as the instructor asks us to. I’m trying to crush the dread out of me, pressure pressure, and more pressure. When that doesn’t work, I imagine someone reaching in from above and digging it out of me, excising this monster with a scalpel. There’s this guy I watch on Facebook reels who performs maintenance on cow hooves. He takes tiny metal tools and scrapes infection off of the damaged feet, puncturing problematic scabs until puss dribbles out and then he sprays it all away with water. It’s disgusting, but so cathartic. I watch until the end of the video every time, satisfied by the fixing, by the previously poisoned surface of the foot being mended, made new.

“In numerology, 2026 is a year of ending cycles,” says the instructor. I stare at the ceiling and silently pray that the stomach ache will let up. Make me new!!!!!