It’s official: I cannot use public bathrooms. Before I go on, I must clarify that my definition of “public” includes anything that does not sit within the confines of my home or the home of the ones closest to me. This means bathrooms in eating establishments, work and anywhere else you can think of. If a toilet seat cover needs to be applied, I can’t use it.

Of course, just because I don’t want to use public bathrooms, doesn’t mean that I don’t have to and need to, because well, let’s face it, when you gotta go, you really gotta go.

Remember way back when you were studying for that psychology midterm and no matter how hard you tried to get beyond the words “psychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the scientific study of human mental functions and behavior” you couldn’t. You just kept repeating the same incomprehensible phrase in your head over and over again until it didn’t mean anything.

Yea.

That is exactly my thought process when I’m forced to use a public bathroom except instead of repeating phrases from overpriced textbooks, I try to talk and coach and coerce myself into peeing.

The smells, the sights, the sounds, the knowledge that hundreds or even thousands of bums have graced the toilet seat before me is nauseating enough to make me feel a dizzy spell coming on. Fortunately, I have mastered the art of the mid-air pee.

It’s hard enough to actually make myself go when I’m alone in there. God forbid someone walks in, because my entire endocrine system shuts down and refuses to cooperate. My bladder stops in its tracks and my body finds it indecent to object.

Today I desperately had to go. I held it in as long as possible before I decided that I would combust if I tried to deny it any longer and made my way to the dreaded three stall bathroom at work. It wasn’t until I was situated that I realized someone else was in there with me. Oh dear God, I thought, how am I ever going to do this now?

I suddenly found myself mimicking the conversation a dad might have with his son at a softball game.

“You can do this. You can do it. Just believe in yourself. Try harder. You can do it!”

After a couple rounds of repeating the sentence above, I finally got myself to relax enough to start and end my time in the bathroom of the second floor of an office building somewhere in Santa Monica even though someone else was in the stall next to me without a care in the world.

This “I-can’t-pee-in-public-bathrooms-especially-when-I’m-not-alone” business is really bordering on the brink of an illness. A crippling, nerve wrecking, socially awkward illness.

Luckily, whoever it was had left before I came out of the stall. That’s another thing. I have no interest in seeing who I unwillingly shared my fiercely private moment with. I will stay in a stall as long as I can so help me God, as long as I don’t have to exchange pleasantries with my pee buddy.

I am not sure where this dramatic disdain for public bathrooms stems from. There are times when I am proud of myself for refusing to use them, there are other times when I hate that I can’t just go with the flow (no pun intended) and just pee already, for the love of bladders everywhere.

Do not even get me started on doing anything more than the occasional tinkle.