Bare Naked

Honesty.

I have a hard time being honest sometimes.  (Though after my last post, you'd probably never know it.)

It's not that I lie....

It's that I have a hard time telling the whole, naked truth.


When I lived in Japan I got to experience an "onsen" which is a Japanese-style, public bath.  It's not at all like bathing here.  In fact, it hardly resembles bathing as we know it in the USA at all.

When one enters an onsen, the men and the women (usually, but not always) enter separate bathing areas.  There's a locker room where you get undressed and grab what is the equivalent to a hand towel to cover up modestly.  You enter the bathing area where there is a long row of hand-held shower heads, soaps, and tiny little buckets that you turn over and sit down on.  You sit on a bucket, wash yourself thoroughly with the soap, rinse off every bubble, wash your hair, and then enter the pool-sized bathtub that's heated to just below scalding temperatures.  That's an onsen.

Here's my first experience:

Mrs. Ogata, one of the English teachers at my school picks me up to take me to a local onsen in the mountains.  It's my first experience and I'm a little nervous.  We get to the hotel where the onsen is located and proceed to the girls' locker room.  Mrs. Ogata, in all of her 4' 10" 65-year-old frame, whips off her clothes in 10 seconds flat, plops them in a basket and hands me one for my clothes.  I'm still dressed.

Ogata-sensei (that's what you call a teacher in Japan) says she'll meet me in the shower room and leaves me there...still dressed.  The coast is clear, so I quickly disrobe, roll my clothes into balls and throw them in the basket.  I grab the handtowel I was given to cover up with, and soon realize that what was enough to cover up all of Ogata-sensei's bits and pieces is in no way going to cover up mine.  I have to make a choice:  North or South?  I choose Sweden, and try to do my best by bending over and scrunching my North a little closer to the South.

So, somewhat resembling Quasimodo, I enter the shower room where a bunch of elderly ladies are sitting on top of buckets, or simply squatting down, giving themselves the most thorough washing I could have ever conceived of.  Ogata-sensei is also in mid wash, and I realize I have another decision to make.  The 'how close is too close' decision.  Do I sit right by her?  Do I leave a space in between?  Or do I hightail it to the other end of the showers?

If you've never been overweight, then you might not understand the humiliating dilemma of having to squat down naked on top of a little bucket that just barely fits under one butt cheek.  The bucket part is bad enough, but then when you sit down, there's tummy rolls to consider.  It's all very embarrassing.

Ogata-sensei spots me.  I must have stood there too long trying to decide what to do.  She beckons me over and I take the shower next to her and try to take the fastest shower possible and not look at anybody.

I clean and scrub, and nearly run over to the bath, still Quasimodo-esqu, but happy to have the warm water cover and shelter my fragile embarrassed self. 

This particular onsen was located on the edge of the sea, up in the mountains with a beautiful view.  There were several different kinds of bath: a super-hot one, a super-cold bath for after a sauna, a milk bath, a lavender-bath...all sorts.  But they all required that I get up, show my bare nakedness before my coworker and a bunch of strangers, and hobble over there.  I wasn't about to do it.  Even taking a look at the view required getting out of the bath to look out the window, and I didn't do that either.

It wasn't a very enjoyable experience my first time.

But I went back.  And I went back again.  And I went to other onsens with other coworkers and friends.  Before long I was going to onsens with my "gaijin" (foreign American-looking) friends.  I even went by myself a few times.  And before long I loved going to onsens.  Yeah, I still got a little nervous when I got undressed around a bunch of pencil-thin Japanese ladies, but I thought about it a lot less than that first time.  It felt good to be able to be naked without embarrassment.


This blog is like my own personal onsen.

I come here, not knowing who is looking or reading, and I bare it all.  It's a little scary sometimes to write down exactly what is in my heart because I don't know if someone is pointing and laughing at me.  But, I've decided that I just don't care anymore about worrying about what other people think of me.

I don't mean that I'm oblivious about my reputation, or how people view me.  But, I don't want to always be worrying about what others think, and whether they're judging me.  I think this is where I have failed in my weight loss efforts in the past.

I've tried to keep my diet and exercise a secret, so that nobody would judge me.  I never told anyone except my very closest friends how much I weighed, because I was afraid of feeling ashamed about what others might think about me.  But hiding the truth like that never helped me.  In fact, it made me much less accountable for what I was doing.

I could cheat on what I was eating, because no one knew any differently.  If I missed a Weight Watchers meeting or a trip to the gym, no one was there to ask how my weigh-in went, because no one knew anything about it.  Hiding myself hasn't helped me to lose any weight.

I've tried to lose weight so many times in the past.  This time, it feels different.  I'm being honest in cyberspace amongst friends, family, and strangers alike.  Baring it all, and trying not to worry about what other people think about me.

So, welcome to my onsen.  Enjoy the water.  I'll be naked.