I never knew I had an issue with nudity, until I was surrounded by it.
I’d never set foot on a topless beach, never skinny-dipped, never frequented a sauna or been to a life drawing class. I was still faintly haunted by memories of the communal changing rooms in Miss Selfridge circa 1999. I was practically born in a cardigan. And yet each morning, in the changing room at my local lido, I was confronted with the flip-reverse of the classic anxiety dream. Everyone else naked; me clothed, and dying of embarrassment.
I would marvel at them – the naked women, like a host of pre-Raphaelite nymphs with White Company toiletry sets. Most in their sixties and seventies and seemingly all called Mary, they had body confidence and bonhomie that seemed to coexist as part of a package. They weren’t just naked; they were naked together. Cheerfully, briskly, matter-of-factly naked. Sometimes naked at leisure. I once witnessed two of the Marys chatting while getting dressed after their swim, and during their conversation one Mary put on a bra, then a T-shirt, then a jumper, all before she put her knickers on. The full Donald Duck. Imagine! Caring so little.
I’m too young to have experienced forcible nudity in a cold Victorian-era school shower block, thank God, but too old to have known the warm embrace of the body neutrality movement while all my insecurities were still blooming. At my all-girls school, nobody showered after PE. To have attempted it would have been tantamount to social suicide. Instead we would wrestle our uniforms back on, blast ourselves with Impulse body spray and race across campus before the next bell to sit, sweat rising off us like a hormonal swamp fog, through an hour of French or geography.
Years later, I realised this was probably the reason I strenuously avoided exercise for the first decade of my adult life. Physical exertion, I had decided, wasn’t worth it for the gross discomfort afterwards.
But things change. You get older, parts of you start to ache, the doctor offers not cures but “management plans”. I tried different forms of fitness in punishing bursts, self-flagellation disguised as self-care. Running, tennis, yoga, zumba. Each time I’d go hard and then give up, ego bruised, the promised endorphin rush clouded by the stronger force of self-loathing. Exercise felt like a performance – look at me! DON’T LOOK AT ME – that was pointless unless you got rave reviews. Really, the same often felt true of life in general. Until I started swimming.
It’s not a very original story: “millennial woman finds peace at the lido”. But I liked that, knowing I was part of a long lineage of people to discover – and subsequently blether on about – how good it feels to start the day suspended in cool water, limbs moving in soothing repetition. Dawning sky overhead, phone stowed away in a locker. I could make big claims about the invigorating catharsis of the icy depths but the truth is it wasn’t even very cold, since the lido is (allegedly) heated. And athletically, I was impressively unimpressive. Months passed, seasons changed; I never got any faster or swum any farther. My only goal was to keep on going.
No, the real progress took place afterwards, in the changing room.
At first I kept my swimsuit on, even in the shower. You never know, I reasoned, when there might be a fire drill. Afterwards, I would bundle all my clothes up and scuttle to a changing cubicle, burning with the imaginary glances of pity (poor prude!) from the freely naked people. “Next time,” I’d say to myself. Next time came and went, came and went, until finally the poor prude challenged herself to start with baby steps – literally one step, from the shower to my towel, hanging on the hook outside the door.
The first time I did it was a rush bigger than any I’d experienced in the cold-but-not-that-cold water. I had been momentarily naked in not-quite-public, and lived.
A month or two later, I felt confident enough to quit the cubicle and begin changing alongside everyone else in the time-honoured Brits abroad manner: awkwardly, within a towel. In time, I perfected the art of the one-handed pants hoik. I could manoeuvre a bra into place beneath a dress, like that scene from Flashdance on rewind. But the whole process still felt like a performance, one that I desperately hoped nobody was watching. Nudey nonchalance still evaded me.
This was happening, by the way, in the run-up to my 30th birthday. Run-up being the operative phrase, as the birthday had started to loom in my mind like a fence to be vaulted over, crashing down to who-knew-what on the other side. But instead of the catastrophic thud I’d imagined, it was a surprise soft landing. I turned 30 and – not original either, this – I started to care less. Some of the cliches about ageing are true. I felt myself take a step closer to the cheerful, naked Marys and a step farther away from the teenage me who longed to unzip her body and flee.
And eventually, a few weeks into my fresh new decade, I got naked. The other shoe dropped and so did my towel.
I don’t know what I expected. Gasps, applause, a confetti cannon? But nobody even glanced in my direction – and why would they? It wasn’t a performance at all. To me, it felt like a milestone – my first moment of public nudity – but to them it was just another body, entirely unremarkable among the veritable variety-pack of bodies in the changing room. Another pillar of flesh and bone, readying itself for the world, and neglecting to dry properly between its toes because, honestly, who has the time?
I still don’t swim any faster or farther than I did those first few weeks. But afterwards, I am cheerfully, briskly, matter-of-factly naked. Sometimes at leisure. I still reach for my knickers before my jumper, but perhaps in another decade that will change too.
More importantly, I’m hopeful, for the sake of younger me, that my cubicle shame days are over.
Imagine! Caring so much.
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