in the swimming pool locker room

picture this: it is the public swimming pool. maybe you’re here for swimming lessons, you’re five years old. maybe you’re 16 and you’ve come here for the P.E. swimming portion of the school year. this is a physical location that evokes panic, fear, self-awareness, discomfort (am i the only one?). there are naked women all around, you see skin in places you only ever saw on your own mother. there are breasts of every shape and form, and skin that looks nothing like in the movies. bodies that all look so different and yet somehow they are all the same. bodies that sag and bulge, or that are lean and firm. you can find every variance in between.

i never understood how women could stand around in this naked solidarity. showering, changing clothes, walking around: all naked. how did we go from the masked and covered and unfamiliar exchanges of the real world out there, to this space where all of that falls away. we strip away the clothing and the mannerisms and as women, entirely naked, are brought together in the swimming pool locker room.

for me i have always had the opposite reaction: an intense desire to cover up, look away, run. i was afraid of their confidence, not quite, their neutrality and naturalness in how these women carried themselves. i wondered how they walked around in their nakedness so gallantly, or actually, just simply, when i felt i had to hide, turn around, and feel ashamed. (the reasons behind this are no mystery, nor will they be delved into today. thank you society for my eating disorder and the way women feel about their bodies. we will not talk about that right this moment). these were the thoughts in the child version of my mind: why did their bodies look like that? what happened to their breasts?

and this is how i’ve felt for most of my life. terrified of nakedness, in disbelief at the women who were naked and brave. i have always felt awe, it seemed like a world i did not belong to.

and yet yesterday, at 23, i went swimming at the public pool. this is the same swimming pool i’ve been going to since i was five. i haven’t been here in a many a long time. but i’m back, i went back to the same pool.

and when i finished my laps, i went into the locker room, and i took a shower. and in tandem with older women in the same shower, we stripped naked and cleaned our bodies. and i felt peace. i felt elated. i was naked and it was okay.

this. this is what i have always felt like an outsider looking in on. we are women and these are our bodies and this is the shower and we are naked and it does not mean anything. it means we are alive and these are our human forms and this is our singular life on this world and the world keeps turning and it is okay. in this swimming pool locker room we have created a sanctuary. surrounded only by women and seen only by women, we shed the layers of expectations and society and clothing and in our nakedness we are at peace. here we see the beauty in female bodies, whether they are young and strong, old and sun-weathered, sagged with age. in the swimming pool locker room, we are female and human and it is so beautiful.

i realized today that if i had accepted this nakedness so many years ago, i would have found my own body to be a familiar home much earlier in my life. that by observing and joining in this cacophony of female bodies and all their glorious differences, i might have found mine beautiful.

what i’m trying to say is that the women’s swimming pool locker room is a haven. and even if i’m a little late to the race, i know i belong, that i too can shed my layers and join those naked women in the swimming pool locker room. and it will be okay.