Immersion therapy

Learning to be naked

Let’s pretend to tell this story. Once, body began.
Then body fattened, deformed. Now body is expiring.

                  (From Historiography by Samantha Zighelboim)

Before I went to the spa, no one had seen me naked in years. In the weeks leading up to it I layered cream after cream on my skin – for tone, for texture, for softness, for scars. I stood in front of the mirror trying to acclimatise my eyes to my body, a body even I tended to hide from. In the days before I waxed and plucked, tried to turn myself into as frictionless a surface as possible. I wasn’t so much frightened of being perceived by others – though that was part of it – I felt frightened of experiencing my body in a brand-new way. A desexualised nakedness, a test of whether I could allow myself to be free in the open air when I found it hard to be free in private.

I went with close friends who I credited – perhaps mistakenly – with being more attuned to or at least less scared of their bodies. We left the changing room in our plush robes and sliders and walked through rooms and out into the pool areas and gardens. Hundreds of naked bodies: soft invertebrate cocks, slack buttocks and peachy ones, high tight breasts, chests thick with hair, tan lines imprinting bikinis onto skin, curved bellies, the gentle bounce of tits on a strolling body. I wasn’t quite looking but I took it all in. I was tentatively reaching for recognition. I wanted to know if my body fit in.

We found an area towards the back of the gardens and arranged our sun loungers, gently inclined towards each other. One friend went to get us all drinks and returned with glasses of prosecco and water on a tray. It was warm. We passed around sunscreen and one by one my friends removed their robes. I looked at my friends’ bodies. How lovely they were, how unalike! Pale and freckled and athletic and juicy and golden and taut and lax. How quickly they became un-naked to me. But still I felt unsure about my own nakedness. Would my friends notice how my breasts flattened as I lay down, my nipples lolling towards their respective sides? How my inner thighs stuck together as I walked. How the softest parts of my body were dimpled, the skin frail and stretched? And if they noticed, would they find these things hard to look at? Would they feel glad they were not like me?

These thoughts would slide across my brain despite my what my gut knew: my friends didn’t look at me that way. They’re not conducting a grim, prolonged surveillance on my fat body’s progression into mid-age. With the greatest respect, they don't care about it; the litany I keep holds no interest for them other than the fact that I keep it and that makes them sad because they don’t see me the way I see myself. I drank my prosecco and let the sun warm my body – my robe half on, half off – and hoped my mind would resolve my conflicting feelings without my active participation. In my stillness a red dragonfly settled on my toes, and this felt like a sign I was welcome, and I could let go.

Once we’d finished our drinks we decided to swim in the main outdoor pool – and this meant being naked for the first time. I went in last, not quite by design, still, I remember feeling relieved I wasn’t going to be observed lowering myself into the water. But the immersion in the pool almost instantaneously conquered my self-consciousness. I felt intense pleasure. In the water, my body became everything, but it also became utterly irrelevant. I lost all boundaries – the water was me. I felt all my boundaries – the water formed my body anew. Our voices floated up into the air above the pool and the sound was delight. After the pool we tried all other varieties of water the spa had to offer. We smeared lavender masks on ourselves and sat in a steam room. We chatted in a gently bubbling hot tub. We plunged ourselves, one after another, into a vertical coffin of ice water. We swam lengths in an unheated interior pool. We walked on pebbles through channels of hot and cold water. We goofed about, it was play! And we sat in a small amphitheatre of a sauna and experienced an infusion ritual, which was a near-erotic experience of sitting in an obscuring fog while being fanned with hot herbal-scented air by an attractive man wearing a sarong. I forgot the labour of having a body, I felt so light, so free, that I was also vapour.

(Anne Sexton’s poem ‘The Nude Swim’)

I’ve spent most of my life understanding my body only in relation to another person’s body. A finger touch that confirms my edges, desire for my body confirming my body’s acceptability. As I’ve aged I’ve found that intimacy and sometimes acceptance through my body being in water. But even in water I’m most often clothed in some way. The liberating potential of nudity hasn’t felt accessible to me because I attached it to sex so profoundly. And I felt that because I wasn’t having sex it was only right to be detached from my naked body. My body was something to quickly cover up because I thought no one wanted to look at it. Actually – not only that no one wanted to look at it but the experience of looking at it would be abject. And if I spent time looking at it, if I risked paying proper attention to it, I’d come to understand all the reasons why.

I realised that before going to the spa, I had placed an expectation on myself not to be ashamed of my body, or at least not to let my shame get the better of me in case it killed the collective vibe, curtailed the freedom we’d come there to experience. I thought I had to achieve body acceptance before I could be naked, but it was the experience of being naked that led me not just to acceptance, but joy.