In a faded photograph of myself as a toddler, my long hair is twisted into braids and I am perched on the edge of Mr Turtle, the green, plastic pool my grandparents set up in the backyard of their Queens home. I am wearing a bikini. Red, white and blue, it’s adorned with lace and has an adult-like halter neck.
This 1980s snapshot is memorable because it captures a moment of rare, alfresco-induced youthful bliss. It is also one of the few times I’ve ever been seen in a bathing suit.
At eight years old, wearing a garish yellow and black-striped suit that only an impulsive second-grader could find alluring, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I saw puckering dimples of premature cellulite, rounded tummy courtesy of devouring too many chipwiches from the ice cream man. It was the first time I deemed myself fat. And it wouldn’t be the last.
Wearing a swimsuit, I thought, was a privilege reserved for skinny, softball-loving girls, the Robins and Jills who took dance lessons and effortlessly laughed with the Dannys and Keiths who ignored me. I was the girl whose thighs rubbed together in stirrup pants and needed an A cup by age 12. Appearing in a swimsuit would be an intimate, self-propelled form of public shaming.
So while they all splashed around, I retreated to my room, reading and fantasizing about an adolescence of bonfires with boys who wouldn’t be able to keep their eyes off the tanned limbs and rippled stomach I would somehow acquire over the next few years. Along with these reclusive habits, I developed a malformed body image that was nearly impossible to shake.
As a kid, I often threw out my brown-bagged lunch. As a teenager, there were days I subsisted solely on V-8. After gaining 20lbs my first semester in college, I returned to campus and, for the next four months, shunned the cakes and cookies I loved, conscientiously sticking to undressed turkey sandwiches on wheat. Even in the midst of heated make-out sessions, I’d demand the lights go off as soon as he reached for my skirt.
Despite a young adulthood of professional success, I remained convinced, whenever a man rejected me, it was because I couldn’t slither into a size two. Surely, I told myself, they wanted the fit girls who set their alarms to 5am for pre-work runs through Central Park, not the food and drink writer who woke up overjoyed that only an hour separated her from a stack of pancakes. They wanted women who deserved to wear bathing suits.
At the mere mention of a water-related activity, I immediately crafted a flimsy excuse. Halfway to the beach, for example, when it was too late to turn the car around, I’d slap my hand to my forehead and say, “Oops, I forgot my bathing suit” and feel content sitting on the sand in a sundress. When my friends headed to a mammoth Korean spa, I lied about having a migraine.
Then, after years of living in New York, I moved to Hungary last summer to immerse myself in a completely new life, to start over at age 36 and let things unfold for me differently – more positively, and magically – than they had back home. Nothing, I promised myself, would hold me back from joy.
But it turned out that my struggles followed me across the globe. Though I loved it here, what gave me pause was how gorgeous the women in Budapest are. And how unworthy I thought my stretch marks looked in comparison.
This immediately ruled out public bathing, a beloved ritual there. There are beautiful pools that date from the 16th-century and are set under marvelous Turkish domes. But when new friends asked if I spent much time in the city’s storied thermal baths, I changed the topic. After all, there were other ways to dive into Hungarian culture, from taking in traditional folk dances to sipping shots of the native fruit brandy, pálinka. I survived decades without pools; I surely didn’t need one now.
Then one day, seven months after my move, I was in a clothing store, and my eyes wandered to a mannequin in a black-and-white, retro polka-dot swimsuit. Captivated, I kept walking past it until I finally picked one up, nonchalantly throwing it into the pile of dresses slung over my arm.
In the fitting room, I tried it on, expecting to see the same shortcomings I always saw when I looked at my body. But this time I didn’t cringe. I realized that very second, as the suit clung to my short, voluptuous frame, that maybe I even looked... good. I hung up the rest of the clothes; I bought the bathing suit.
Before going to the doctor, I will agonize over mythical diagnoses, but my fears recede once I’m there. The night before heading to an airport, I angst over a likely missed connection. But if the flight has issues, I just sit quietly and catch up on Netflix, nonplussed. My inaugural dip in the pool was the same. Once I made myself appear in front of fellow bathers, I almost believed I had loved the water all my life. Acting as though that’s true helps me make up for lost time.
Open contributions: When have you faced your fear?
