Gut Feelings is an attempt to be more candid about personal emotions and trust my gut, despite my sometimes hypochondriac tendencies. The term “hypochondria” was born of a medieval term for an area of the abdomen, and has evolved to be more widely accepted as an anxiety disorder today.

In China there is a saying that those who can tolerate spice wears the pants, so from a young age my mother would feed me lots of chili. This inevitably gave me a stomach ulcer and chronic stomach ache, and almost twenty years later, I would learn that spiciness is not a taste but a form of pain. Unsurprisingly it facilitates the expectation that women are supposed to digest their feelings and suffering alone, especially since the capacity to endure hardship is considered a virtue in Chinese culture. And when women do speak up about those experiences, their accounts are usually dismissed.

In the 1600s, Robert Burton, the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, essentially saw hypochondria as “windy melancholy”, and gave an extensive list of gassy symptoms. Centuries later, modern scientific studies would demonstrate that gut health does indeed affect mental health. Thus Gut Feelings employs scatological humour to ease the tension of the messy, chaotic moments of existence, while also addressing the not-so-funny gendered connotations historically associated with hypochondria.