The Bath

It’s 3am.

I don’t know how I got home. I’m not sure I care.

Vodka. Something else ecstasy maybe. My body isn’t fully mine tonight. If I’m honest it hasn’t been fully mine for a long time. Maybe ever.

I’m 17 years old and I am sitting on the edge of my bed in the dark and there is a sadness in me that I cannot name and cannot shift. It lives somewhere beneath my ribs like something permanent. Like it arrived before I did. Like it was written into me before I had any say in the matter.

I feel dirty.

From the men. From what has happened in rooms I don’t talk about. From things that were done to me before I even had language for what was being taken. From choices I’ve made with a body I was taught to believe was not really mine to protect.

I am 17 and I don’t have words for any of it yet. Trauma isn’t a word in my vocabulary. Abuse isn’t something I’ve applied to my own story. I just know the feeling. The one that never leaves. The one that follows me into every room, every relationship, every moment of almost-okay before it pulls me back under.

Tonight it is louder than usual.

So I do what feels logical at 3am when you are 17 and drunk and have spent your whole life believing you are fundamentally, irreparably dirty.

I run a bath.

I pour bleach into the water.

I light a cigarette.

And I get in.

The smell is sharp and chemical and wrong. The water is cold before it’s even warm. I sit in it anyway because some part of me believes this is what I deserve. That if I just scrub hard enough at the outside of myself maybe I can reach whatever it is inside that feels so contaminated.

I sit in that bath and I cry.

Not the kind of crying that releases something and leaves you emptied and clean. The kind that confirms what you already know about yourself. The kind that proves it. The kind that feels like evidence.

You are dirty. You have always been dirty. This is all there is for you.

I don’t know how long I sit there. Long enough for the cigarette to burn down. Long enough for the bleach to start burning my skin. Long enough for the sadness to do what it always does — exhaust itself into a kind of numb silence that passes for peace at that age.

I get out eventually.

I don’t tell anyone.

I go to sleep.

And I wake up the next day and I keep going. The way you do when you don’t yet know there is another way. When survival is the only mode you’ve ever been taught.

A woman who has built a life around holding space for other people’s healing. Who sits in ceremony. Who works with the body, the breath, the places in people where the pain has gone underground and grown roots.

I am writing this for the woman who is in her own version of that bath right now.

Maybe it isn’t bleach. Maybe it’s something else entirely. But she knows the feeling I’m describing. The 3am. The dirty. The sadness that feels like it was written into her bones before she had any say.

I want to tell her what nobody told me.

The dirtiness was never yours.

It was put there. By people who should have known better. By experiences no child and no young woman should ever have to survive. By a world that failed to protect her and then somehow made her feel responsible for that failure.

The body you have been punishing is not the problem.

It is the most loyal thing you own. It carried you through every single thing that should have broken you. It is still here. You are still here.

I spent years trying to clean something that was never dirty.

I spent years not understanding why the sadness wouldn’t shift because I didn’t yet know where it came from or what it was carrying.

I know now.

And the knowing didn’t come from one moment of revelation. It came slowly. Through work I could not have imagined that night in the bath. Through sitting in my own darkness long enough to stop running from it. Through finding people and practices and moments of grace that showed me a different way to inhabit my own skin.

It is possible.

Not easy. Not linear. Not once and done.

But possible.

But I know now that the stories we are most afraid to tell are almost always the ones that set someone else free.

If you are reading this at 3am believing you are beyond saving

You are not dirty.

You never were.

And this is not all there is.