Ego Death Becomes Her
Having a body, at the spa
I had been searching for a way out of myself, or a way into myself. I guess we all are, especially nowadays. I never expected to find it in Palisades Park, drunk on champagne from the party van.
Step one to sublimation of the self – the reminder that people have divergent viewpoints. There are many ways to be in the world. You are different, just like everyone else. One of the women at my friend’s birthday-outing to the spa remarks that she makes a point to wear “all her diamonds” to school pickup, in order to avoid being mistaken for the nanny. Aha, I think. We are different.
Step two – the recognition that actually, we are the same. Nipples, belly buttons, and ass cracks. Now swathed in standard-issue cotton uniforms like a minimum security prison. This is the traditional Asian spa experience, with compulsory nudity in its gender segregated spaces, and a universally unflattering, uniformed sameness in the communal areas. I have a body. I see you do, as well.
***
Meditation has not connected me more meaningfully with my physical form. “I’m not doing it right,” I often think, as I shift my weight to my other thigh. “Stop having thoughts”, I think. Stop thinking about having thoughts, I silently stage-whisper inside my brain. Ultimately I am able to gain a simulacrum of serenity, for a few minutes.
Therapy has not earned me transcendence. Having returned to the self-improvement fray a few months ago, I struggle with the fact that my therapist is roughly fifteen years my junior. What could she possibly understand about being single, 39 years old, with an unrecognition bordering on dissociation of my 2-year-postpartum body, wondering how anyone new will ever touch me again? What could she understand of the windswept desolation of the dating app landscape for the nearly-forty, non-white woman? You can describe Siberia in words, but you have to physically be there to feel the windchill. The fact that she is excellent at her job hasn’t prevented me from referring to her as “my child therapist” in conversation with others. More than one person has asked me whether the subject of her youth is something I have raised with her: “therapists love talking about stuff like this.” You people must have an awfully droll relationship with your psychologists – I treat mine as a weekly professional meeting, apologetic when I lack an agenda of prepared talking points.
Now, I am naked. No one acknowledges my comfort, or discomfort, which is immaterial to the proceedings. The body scrubs take place in a communal wet room, with drains in the floor, 4 or 5 tables lined up in a row. The array of older women conducting the scrubbing are inexplicably clad in black lingerie, which they wear with the world-weary air of a butcher’s apron.
I’m dimly aware of lying in a pile of my own dead skin, like wet pencil shavings. I'm being roughly descaled like a fish. Buckets of hot water are dumped over me, business-like, to rinse away my sloughed-off leavings. My limbs are manipulated into the positions that are required of this treatment, after demonstrating (to my embarrassment) that I am unable to understand this woman’s heavily-accented commands over the hubbub of the wet room. I do understand when I am told to flip over on the unimaginably slippery pink vinyl table, moving gingerly as I picture myself whooshing off the edge and clattering to the stone floor tiles.
Stand up. Rinse off. Get into that steam. Come out now. Stand here. Lie down again. Not that way. In an effort to comply with the rapid fire demands, I have lost track of how I move or look. I am ungainly in this body I do not recognize, but that is all there is. I am just a body. I am only my body.
Some of the apps ask me to list my kinks – there isn’t much to say here, certainly not lately. I don’t know what I want, or even what I could tolerate. As a reasonably online person, of course I know the lingo, and as I lie there, experiencing full ego death on a pink, plastic slab, I wonder if this is anything akin to “sub space;” a supposedly trancelike, otherworldly glaze experienced by some people in submissive sexual scenarios. I’ve been dommed into a detente with the soft flab of my transformed body – this body that made another body nearly two years ago, and has been a stranger to me ever since. Dommed by a bored old lady with a scrub brush and a shower cap, who might as well have had a cigarette dangling from her lips the whole time.
Later, my Korean-speaking friend tells me that the women have spent the hour discussing their lunch order in minute, excruciating detail: Why is Shirley always trying to “treat us” to lunch? Who does she think she is? Has there been enough sauce ordered for the quantity of noodles? Who decided we only needed 4 sauces for 6 orders of noodles? There is great disagreement until one woman thunders with annoyance, “there WILL BE enough sauce, OKAY???”
Somehow it’s essential that this is all in a day’s work for them. They could be stamping forms and filing them. Next body, please! When’s lunch? Meantime, it’s all I can do to totter up to the cafeteria, where I purchase myself a packaged ice cream from the cooler and curl up with a book, unwilling to think too much and disturb this delicate peace.
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I loved this essay, Amrita ❤️
You touch on a LOT here, Amrita, and it is very VERY well written!