In one of my first memories, I’m standing on a beige bathroom scale, my mother watching, a pen in her hand. I was five years old, maybe six. There was a chart taped to the back of the door—lined notebook paper, handwritten columns, my name beside my sister’s for the weekly weigh-in. I didn’t yet know what the numbers meant, only that smaller was better. Praiseworthy.
My parents wanted me to have a specific kind of body, one that was compact and controlled. My actual body, generous and stubborn, had other ideas. And so I perfected the art of camouflage: dark clothes, crossed arms, good posture, deflection. I knew how to duck away from photos, how to hold in my stomach. I was fluent in avoidance, whether it was gym class locker rooms, pool parties, sleepovers. The idea of undressing in front of others didn’t feel like freedom. It felt like a quiet betrayal of the armor I had worked so hard to build.
Years passed. I grew older, smarter, more adventurous. But those early habits—those subtle acts of shrinking—never fully left me.
Where the armor cracks
Then, six months ago, I was in Budapest, a trip I’d planned as a restorative escape before a work conference. I pushed myself to visit the co-ed Gellért Baths—one of Hungary’s famed thermal pools, fed by mineral-rich springs and steeped in centuries of ritual. It felt like a bold, self-loving idea—right up until I stood at the pool’s edge, my swimsuit clinging like cellophane.
The air was thick with moisture, nearly dense enough to taste. Above me, the ceilings arched—domed and ornate, like a cathedral built for water instead of worship. Around me, bodies moved with effortless ease, unselfconscious in a way that seemed unattainable. I didn’t know how to be one of them. But I stepped forward anyway.
The water was warm and faintly effervescent. I let myself float, the tension in my shoulders slowly surrendering to buoyancy. It wasn’t just the heat or the grandeur of the space that made me lightheaded. It was the quiet, collective permission. The unspoken understanding that the body is not a spectacle. It simply is.
From a discovery to a theme
I didn’t expect that to become a theme of my travels — this subtle, persistent confrontation with how I carried my body in the world. But shortly after visiting the baths in Budapest, I ended up in Istanbul, barefoot and damp, stepping into the marbled, steamy hush of a hammam.
I was nervous. A hammam is a traditional Turkish bathhouse, where nudity is part of the ritual and cleansing is both physical and symbolic—an ancient practice that requires you to bare more than just your skin. It’s an act of submission that asks you to shed your defenses and surrender to heat, to water, to the care of another.
The room was warm and echoing, lit by soft light filtering through star-shaped holes in the ceiling. I lay on a hot slab of marble while a woman—confident, quiet—began the ritual. First the buckets of water, then the scrub. Her movements were brisk, practiced and oddly tender. When she poured warm water over my head, my muscles clenched out of habit, then let go. There was no room for shame. Only trust. Trust in the process. Trust in someone else’s hands as she sloughed layers off me.
By the end, my skin felt brand new. But what lingered wasn’t just the physical renewal— it was the quiet, unremarkable act of being cared for. There was no judgment in her touch, no hesitation. She wasn’t repulsed by my body; she was simply kind to it. There was something profoundly healing about being seen without scrutiny. I didn’t need to vanish. I just needed to let go of the belief that I should.
By then, something in me had begun to shift. Budapest cracked the door open. Istanbul nudged it wider. I felt like I was starting to live more inside my body, rather than in constant negotiation with it.
And then I arrived in Japan.
Taking the plunge
At a quiet hotel in the hills of Hakone, I was introduced to the onsen—an indoor communal bath fed by sulfur-rich hot springs. The rules were unambiguous: no bathing suits, no barriers. Just bare skin, clean water and heat.
The water was almost scalding, the kind that made you pause while easing in, inch by inch. The room smelled of sulfur and earth, like boiled eggs and ancient stone. As soon as I submerged myself, my skin prickled, and my heartbeat surged to the surface, drumming against the walls of my body.
Each night I soaked there alone, just me, the rising steam, the tiled walls. No prying eyes. No expectations. No one to hide from.
What began as hesitation became ritual. I started to crave the warmth, the stillness, the small ceremony of slipping into the water. It felt less like bathing and more like returning to myself, to something elemental.
Finally, in Kyoto, I ran out of privacy. The onsen there was larger, more modern, and this time, I wasn’t alone. Several women stepped into the bath next to me without ceremony. They wore no expressions of discomfort. They barely even glanced my way.
In my peripheral vision, I caught sight of the woman closest to me. Her body was lived-in, fully present—creased and soft in places, strong in others, bearing the quiet evidence of years. She didn’t shrink or perform. She dipped her shoulders into the water, closed her eyes, and exhaled like someone who belonged exactly where she was.
I too sank deeper into the bath, into myself.
The transformative nature of travel
Travel breaks us open in places we don’t think to guard. I hadn’t gone in search of transformation. But perhaps that’s why it found me. In cities where I spoke none of the languages, among strangers whose names I’ll never know, I began to inhabit my body not as a project to manage, but as a place to return to. Not to monitor. Not to shrink or disguise. Just to exist—without performance, without pretense.
Each of those rituals—Hungary’s thermal pools, Turkey’s hammams, Japan’s onsens—carries its own cultural story. But threaded through them all is a shared philosophy: The body is not wrong. It does not need to be fixed or hidden. It deserves care. It deserves rest. It deserves to be witnessed without judgment.
Now that I’m home, I think about that often. About how I might carry that same softness into the everyday. How I might move through the world without armor. How I might soak a little longer, linger a little more, and stop treating my body like a problem to be corrected.
In the end, these experiences weren’t about being naked. It was about being seen—even if the only eyes that mattered were my own. In those quiet baths across the world, I met myself again. And for once, I didn’t look away.
Photo by Stefano Ember/Shutterstock.com
