things we

Becoming: Women in Bathrooms

Artwork by Holly May Reed

Time doesn’t exist here.
There are no clocks, no phones.

Here, beauty and smarts all count for nothing.
You don’t have to be happy, in a relationship or even liked. You don’t need friends or flowers on Valentine’s day.

In the bathroom you are the audience and the show.
Whatever you decide to be.
What other place in the world can you be naked and sing or dance, while being able to look at the parts of you that clothing usually conceals?

In the bathroom, you can really be yourself here, all of you, without shame or embarrassment.

You can investigate, adventure and pleasure. There is no need to act here, just be.

At 23, I have learned to accept whoever meets me in the bathroom after a long day. Whoever I see, whatever she’s done and said; I greet her arriving right on time. As here, no one’s late.

 

My earliest memories of becoming someone were inside four walls and a room full of steam.

My own personal recording booth, where my 8-year-old singing voice was smoothed over and full, as it bounced off the titled walls.

All the kinks of adolescent insecurities, that my voice wasn’t strong enough to hold, mature enough to ring, were rounded into pearls, smooth and seamless.

I noticed I was someone better in there, I just didn’t know who.

When I was 10 I found my dad’s razor blade and I would use it to experiment.
I would cut hair off different parts of my body and not tell anyone.
I loved the sensation of cold smoothness that would change the feeling when you run. However my eyebrows took the most hits, with the left missing for around three years.

In year 12, I think I managed a whole legal essay on the walls using the fog and my finger. Words on words, seated on top of each other like stacked pigeons, before the steam would evaporate and take them elsewhere.

Perhaps I would breathe them in, absorb them like cigarette spoke, I hoped. Only to reappear when I needed them most.

I could always think the best in the shower.
Everything was clear there, despite not being able to see a thing.

I always felt better in the bathroom, but when I turned 11 all that changed.

 

The bathroom became a place I was reminded of loss.

It waited for me in every reflective surface, every bathroom mirror.

Every time I saw myself in the reflection, I never saw me. All I saw was her.

Sometimes even looking for too long I would cry. Ashamed of how much I missed someone who didn’t want me.
Yet I wore her golden blonde hair, her green eyes, her long legs like they were mine.
Like she was mine.

It was like every day, every year, I was becoming more like her and I didn’t know how to stop it. On darker days, I wondered if my appearance was the reason my dad wouldn’t have dinner with me, only brought me food on a tray as we all existed behind closed doors.

I hated seeing her in me, but more, I hated myself for being her. It got so bad that I would avoid my reflection altogether.

 

However, in the shower I found peace.

I remember after she left there was one song I would play on repeat as I curled up into a ball in the bottom of the shower, and it would sooth me as I grieved.
Like I was a baby again, trying to be reborn.
I found my sadness leaked out best when I turned out the lights and I

I could grieve her without anyone knowing.
The shower became a daily funeral, which I attended for years.

On the few occasions I saw her somewhere, that sadness hardened and went to spitting anger. But in the darkness I melted.
I could confess how much I missed having a mum, someone who believed in me for doing nothing.
And how lonely I was without her.

After she left I was no longer loud, smiley, in all the choirs or so and so’s best-friend. I was left.
Discarded.
Unwanted.

Collateral damage, as school councillors would say.

I could never say it, but that’s how I felt. It was the first label I wore as a girl.

 

When I became a woman I was 13 in the bathroom, with blood on my hands and no idea what to do next.

But I later learned that becoming a woman was never easy for anyone.
My friend became one violently, when she was raped one night by her best-friend at school camp.

As I grew up I stopped looking like my dad at all, as my body stretched tall and long like hers. And so with time, peace found me.

 

I’ve been told, if you decide to become a mother, the bathroom changes its meaning once again.

It becomes a place you reclaim yourself in small moments alone.
Burial and rebirth.

Sometimes a swipe of mascara, a blow-dry.
A quick dance, or even a fast-paced walking through a mist of your grandmother’s perfume.

All small clues to remember yourself before you belonged to others, that demand all of you and leave not much else.

The relationship you form with yourself when you’re alone in the bathroom is the most important, as it determines who you are outside, with clothes on, beyond your home.

The bathroom, like a call to prayer to remember yourself in all the complex ways that you are.

—

Writing by Holly May Reed

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