Brianna Parkins: At my lowest, I wouldn’t leave the house if I wasn’t ‘presentable’ because ‘what if someone saw?’

“You either grew up in a fart proud home or a fart shame home and that determines the outcome of your entire life,” was the wisdom imparted on me this week via a stranger on TikTok. And I have not stopped pondering it with the same passion and gravity as I did reading all the dead Greek philosophers at university.

Never mind Freud, Foucault, Marx, Butler, Žižek and Bourdieu when trying to work out why humans think and behave the way they do – a man on TikTok might have come up with the overriding axiom. Other great minds on the app stitched the video, or commented that members from these two opposing groups tend to marry each other. The outcome is usually the creation of a “fart proud home” leaving other intellectuals to conclude, “so fart shame homes are recessive?”

After much analysis and introspection, I deduced that I grew up in a “fart neutral” setting. The dogmatic belief was that while farts were inherently gross, they were also almost always funny. This meant, for the most part, that an accidental bottom emission would be greeted with a pretend frown, a scoff and usually a little giggle. If it was a case of someone purposely playing a loud solo on the arse clarinet without regard to others sharing the same sitting room, they would be met with a much more aggressive “You alright in there, you bloody animal?”

But there would still be laughter. There were some exceptions of course. For example, I think celebrating the advent of electric windows in cars by rolling them all up, locking them and letting one rip while your family scramble for air probably constitutes some form of child abuse. But dads consider that comedy gold.

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A friend of mine grew up in a fart shame home. As kids, she wasn’t even allowed to say the word “fart”. Or “toilet”. In her house, she didn’t “vomit” or even “menstruate” – women simply “fell ill” or “weren’t at their best”. Like most people, she internalised the settings she grew up with as personal rules about how life works. When she started dating her now-husband and they moved in together, she was so convinced that girlfriends never have body functions that she refused to use the loo when he was in the house. I was never quite sure how she managed it, but she did admit to “taking the dog for a walk” and visiting the bathroom of a nearby McDonalds when she was desperate.

Eventually, because life is full of cruel irony and all-you-eat buffets, my friend and her partner had a violent bout of food poisoning. At the same time, in a small flat with one bathroom. There was no room for dignity or mystery. It broke her personal rule – the love of her life had not only seen her vomit, but held her hair back while she did it. He had passed toilet paper and even a glass of Dioralyte through the open bathroom door when she could not leave the porcelain throne. But he wasn’t repulsed, he didn’t leave. He didn’t care. The experience just brought them closer together and they told the story laughing at their engagement party about how he knew she was the one when he realised there was no one else he would rather be lying on the ground puking into a bucket with.

She had caused herself so much stress, both on her bladder and her brain, for nothing in the end, over a “rule” about “what you should/shouldn’t do” that actually didn’t exist, at least not the person who really loved her. We all have unconscious rules that we go out of our way to uphold because “that’s what ladies do” or “only lazy people do that”.

Some are important like saying please, holding the door open for others and taking your rubbish tray to the bin at a fast food restaurant. But others just got lodged into our heads at some point and only serve to make our lives harder than they need to be.

A lovely older woman I know spent years nearly falling down of hunger because a teacher at school once told her that “ladies don’t eat on the street”. She deprived herself of ice-creams on the promenade for years, until she realised no one was coming to arrest her for having a 99 and also, that no one cared.

Personally, I had many stupid rules that were ultimately counterproductive. I wouldn’t buy pre-prepared veggies because that was “lazy” but then I wouldn’t be bothered to make anything when I came home exhausted from work and all the unused produce with dirt still on would rot in the fridge. At my lowest, I wouldn’t leave the house if I wasn’t “presentable” because “what if someone saw” and because finding a matching outfit, doing my hair and putting my face required more capacity than I had, I would just stay inside. Making things much worse.

As we come into the run up to Christmas – the time when weird rules run riot (“good hostesses make their own mince pies while having an anxiety cry in the kitchen”), now might be a good time to ask yourself, what “shoulds” can you let go of so you can enjoy your life more?

Except farts in the car with your unexpecting family. Maybe hold onto those.