I think a lot of girls will agree with me when I say that one of the hardest things about college is having to poop in public bathrooms.

It's not something you think about until you have to do it for the first time. You've just stepped into your newly furnished dorm room, it's two in the afternoon, and you're looking forward to a relaxing hour before you're off to your next orientation activity when suddenly your body reminds you it's That Time of Day. The time you've forgotten about in the whirl of chaos that is the first few days of college, the time that you've maybe been putting off for too long -- the time to rid yourself of the solid parts of your last few meals that your body doesn't want.

It's time to take a dump.

You push open your door, step across the hallway, and realize something: you're going to have to do this in a bathroom where anyone else could walk in at any time.

In high school, this was a little easier to avoid. You could always wait until you went home in the afternoon before you took care of this unpleasant business or, if worse came to absolute worst, you could have your best friend stand guard in the school bathroom. But now you're alone and miles from home and friends, and the call of your body is getting stronger and stronger. Eventually you're going to have to suck it up and go.

The unfortunate truth about public bathrooms is that everybody knows what's going on. The entire room is aware that you had too much fruit for breakfast. That huge cup of coffee you drank an hour ago is suddenly everyone's business. And it's mortifying! It doesn't matter whether the person in the stall next door is in the exact same situation -- you still don't want anyone to know what you're doing. What strikes me as truly amusing is that we girls are so devoted to hiding the fact that our bodies practice healthy waste disposal that we will literally sit silently in adjacent stalls, waiting for the other person to leave before we finish whatever it was we sat down to do. This gets really awkward really quickly when both of you have to poop. One of you is obviously going to have to swallow your pride and go for it, but dropping a load while someone sits next door and listens is one of the most embarrassing experiences a girl can suffer through. I have rarely been more uncomfortable than when I'm sitting in a public bathroom stall waiting for the person in the stall next to me to realize that I'm waiting for them to leave before I poop and then realizing that they are also waiting for me to leave before they poop, and then realizing that we both know that we both know, and then contemplating the fact that we are sitting about four feet apart, completely silent, each refusing to poop while the other is there.

So why do we insist on concealing the fact that we poop when we all know it happens? That's a question I'm not qualified to answer. Should pooping be a humiliating, clandestine experience? No. Will I continue to only poop when I am alone? Yes. And to that girl who refused to leave the bathroom: I was late to class because of you.