Shower Power

How one writer improved her mental health by connecting with her body

- Zoe Weiner

There are many details about my past that are fuzzy now, but certain memories are clear as day.

I remember the girl who called me fat in the first grade. I remember the time my mom put me on a soup-only diet after I'd gained weight at summer camp. (I was 11.) And I remember the time a guy I'd been dating broke up with me during the darkest moments of my eating disorder because he "wasn't attracted to me anymore." To this day, a picture I'd seen in a magazine of Jessica Simpson in her Daisy Dukes still haunts me. None of these memories were good for my body image.

For nearly two decades, no matter what I put my body through-which could best be described as a cycle of starving, overexercising, recovering, and repeating-I struggled to love what I saw in the mirror. At some point, I began to just accept that my body and I would never get along. Like a bad roommate, she was someone I was going to have to learn to live with.

But then the 2020 lockdown happened. I was sharing a small space with a partner, and the only me-time I got was the 10 minutes I spent in the shower. I began to cherish those moments of silence, and pretty soon, a quick latherand-rinse transformed into a multistep process with two types of exfoliation and layers of lotion.

And what began as a way for me to get some much-needed space transformed into something else.

All that time slathering and scrubbing forced me to connect to my body in a way that felt foreign to me. Exfoliating my legs gave me a chance to feel the muscles I'd built up from years as a runner. Moisturizing my stomach connected me to a part of my body I'd always done my best to avoid touching.