I hated baths long before I watched The Shining.
Hygiene isn’t the problem; I shower sometimes twice a day. My issue is with bathing, that languid self-care ritual every therapist, female-targeted website and concerned friend thinks will change my life. Scented candles have also been suggested to me. My sister says they light her way through the Wisconsin winter. The first day I lit one and sat down to work, I kept jumping and flinching thinking some stranger who smelled like honeyed-peacock-milk-flower-cardamom-Snowpiercer lurked just beyond my view.
My startle reflex is part of why everyone thinks I need self-care.
“I’m a good man and I live here,” my husband says when I scream and drop the butter dish because he’s walked past the kitchen door. He’s started singing “Under the Sea” from The Little Mermaid to alert me whenever he changes rooms.
I startle easily in part because I’m rarely grounded in the present moment. I’ve climbed high into the crow’s nest of my brain and left my body to fend for itself. Up there, I’m reliving past rejections or girding myself for future ones. I’m playing both roles in thorny conversations and thinking through the ramifications for anything I might do or say.
Ramifications are one reason I find baths stressful. Sure, the heat might feel soothing for the moment, but the water will cool and when I stand, air will chill my body; toweling off will take forever, and my finger pads will feel sensitive from being wet for so long. What I mean is, why begin a process that will end?
You might ask why do anything then. Good question. From the moment of my birth, I’ve dreaded the moment I’ll die. I’m not great at concerts either. I spend the whole time stressed about my parking garage exit strategy. I don’t remember the last time I saw an encore.
*
When my therapist recommended baths for self-care, she sank in my estimation.
“I take care of myself,” I told her. “I run three miles each day and I drink water every two hours and even if I don’t want to, I go to bed at eight-thirty p.m.”
“That’s rigidity.”
“I’m always attending to my emotional health. I think through household dynamics and analyze interactions with my husband and stepson to figure out what I could do better.”
“That’s rumination.”
I’m summarizing her responses. Therapists are never that unambiguous. They want you to gather the clues they lay for you, follow them back to their source. It’s like Stanley Kubrick says: “If you really want to communicate something…the least effective way is directly. It only goes in about an inch. But if you can get people to the point where they have to think a moment what it is you’re getting at, and then discover it, the thrill of discovery goes right through the heart.”
“You want me to do fluffy self-care,” I said finally. “Would you recommend baths to a man?”
According to popular culture, men don’t take baths. They take masculine showers, tipping back their heads to display their square jaws. Baths are the purview of sad or solipsistic women, self-conscious about their self-care. Baths are Instagram before there was Instagram. Baths are the solution to problems of the lovelorn. When I’m lovelorn I ruminate rigidly and run; I don’t steep in my sadness. Baths are steeped sadness. Baths are performative calm.
But in my therapist’s defense, she wasn’t rummaging through a Spiritual Gangster tote, sorting through gel face rollers and Kendal Jenner sound baths, to arbitrarily pluck baths. She understood baths as a legitimate solution to physical issues that inhibit my daily life.
*
My acupuncturist once told me my soul was noncommittal. It arrived here and thought better of it. It’s lodged somewhere in my upper body, struggling to escape through my head. That might sound ridiculous to some people, but as the assholes say, when you know you know. For me, her statement was instantly the most accurate description of something I’d never known I needed to describe. It captured my base-level physical and emotional experience, that crow’s nest sensation of looking down, down, down, uncertain about whose feet I see. But you can’t flee to your head without repercussions. My pelvic floor is tight and elevated. My shoulders are perennially lifted; my diaphragm cages my lungs. Worse than all that, my facia (the thin casing of connective tissue that surrounds every organ, muscle, blood vessel, bone and nerve fiber) is constricted; I have to contort myself to take a shit.
This is not something most doctors recognize. Over the decades, I have been diagnosed with and medicated for Crohn’s disease (despite having literally none of the symptoms), and IBS (which is essentially a catch-all for any bowel complaints). After twenty-five years of suffering, I googled my way into an understanding that my muscles not my bowels were to blame. Since then, I’ve found some relief via physical therapy, pelvic floor manipulation, and acupuncture. Isn’t acupuncture self-care, you might ask? Yes, but it hurts, so it’s real.
While my acupuncturist uses metaphysical terms to describe my issues, my therapist understands my muscle tension as one facet of a post-traumatic response to a challenging family of origin. My body meant to protect me, but like many defense mechanisms originating in childhood, that protection causes the adult me pain.
So fine, baths. Specifically Epsom salt baths, which I’d believed represented self-care at its most cartoonishly feminine and capitalist. They were bath bombs that smelled like bubble gum. They were syrupy bubbles that left your bathtub slick and then you’d slip and die alone on your tile floor because your husband sometimes doesn’t hear you when you’re two feet away from him and talking. The wet crack of your head against porcelain won’t penetrate his consciousness from down the hall. He also forgets to lock the backdoor, so another thing that might happen is that a home invader might rape you unless he slips on the Epsom salts too.
Come to find Epsom salts are more medicinal than fluffy. They’re older than social media but younger than patriarchy. Still, I was right about capitalism’s reach. At Whole Foods you can choose between rose printed bags that read mineral soak and others stamped with a first aid symbol; Soaking aid for minor sprains and bruises, those packages say. The ingredients seem identical, leaving it up to the consumer to decide which sort of woman she wants to be. I chose the bag that looked like it belonged in a field hospital. If I’m going to relax, it’s going to be intense.
In order for an Epsom salt bath to be effective, you must submerge for fifteen to thirty minutes. Of your life. (Which ticks past so swiftly, death waiting crouched behind the backdoor your husband forgot to lock again.)
The initial four minutes of my first bath passed easily. I was focused on acclimating to the heat; I had something to overcome. For the next three minutes, I really did zone out and get languid. But then I started sweating. In the bathtub. How? After I’d held out as long as I could, I snuck a look at my cellphone. Eleven minutes had passed. I read three pages of a novel. After another two minutes, I texted my sister.
Me:
I need to know what the secret to baths is.
My Sister:
God I love baths so much. I have no idea how to help here!!! Candles?? Music?? Weed??
Me:
I don’t like music
I’m afraid of weed
You know my issues with candles.
I might be broken.
My Sister:
Lol @ I don’t like music
For the last minute and a half, I tried to make peace with the fact that my stepson likely urinates in the shower.
This was not an experience I cared to repeat. Still, the results were incontrovertible. After years of struggle and experimentation I’m sensitive to small shifts in my muscles. Breath came more easily. Normally, I can feel the taut distance linking C7 on my cervical spine to my shoulder blade to my psoas major. Post-bath, places which usually felt snagged, restricting my descending colon, offered noticeable give. I developed a daily habit. Habit is maybe not the right word. I enforced on myself a new regiment.
By then it was October, the month when I have to decide whom I love more, my husband or myself.
Matt adores scary movies. He says they put him in touch with a feeling he’s tried to recapture since childhood, a sense of being awed and small, fighting to catch glimpses of some inscrutable whole. I on the other hand, need no assistance from the merry band of players behind The Saw franchise; awed, small and confused is how I feel each morning when I open my eyes.
Through careful separation of my intellect from my emotions, strategic disassociation, and eye-covering, I can tolerate the actual viewing of select horror movies. Like childhood trauma, it’s only when the danger has passed that the rumination and anxiety rush in. Post viewing, the washer and dryer are a no-go, situated as they are in our labyrinthine basement. I limit my liquid intake; no way am I walking to the bathroom at night to pee. Even my husband’s trick of singing his way into rooms skews sinister. The sound of his voice approaching (Caribbean crab impersonation notwithstanding) reminds me of the old woman in the garden in The Happening and how she rocks and murmurs the Lord’s Prayer which reminds me of Britney Murphy pressed up against a tile wall crooning “I’ll never tell.” (Imagine Emma Thompson playing Robert De Niro’s role cast opposite Timothée Chalamet to understand how much of Don’t Say a Word’s cachet comes from America’s sexualization of broken teenage dolls.) which in turn, reminds me of all the other movies where someone, likely a woman, sings in an unsettling way. That’s the perniciousness of horror movies: one image unlocks a lifetime of absorbed imagery. I saw US five years ago and I still panic whenever anyone has laryngitis or tilts her head.
To be fair, Matt is more of a John Carpenter fan than a Saw guy. And I don’t watch scary movies just to make him happy; sometimes I get tired of coddling my sensitive soul. Have I mentioned that if my stepson fries bacon after midnight (which for some reason he is always doing) the smell wakes me? Smells wake me. Why? I already wear earplugs and sleep beneath the drone of a sound machine. Am I supposed to stuff cotton up my nose as well? Sometimes I just want to be able to eat a donut for breakfast without getting a migraine. To skip a run without anxiety prickling its way up my legs. From my crow’s nest, my needs are small children tugging at my skirts. How can one person be so sensitive? She’s exhausting. She’s more trouble than she’s worth.
When Matt suggested The Shining for our Halloween viewing, I remembered watching it on a first date in my twenties. This was before I stopped riding roller coasters and braving haunted houses to please whichever happy-go-lucky human devoid of startle reflex had chosen to date me to balance themselves out. Post viewing, I’d experienced some anxiety about drowning in blood while boarding an elevator, as well as shortness of breath when confronted with busy carpeting, but no other lingering effects.
Alternating eye and ear covering got me through the first two thirds of my second viewing of The Shining. Then Jack pushed open the door to room 237.
What follows will not be a faithful shot by shot analysis. Breaking down a scene requires a sort of dilation; you widen yourself to take in myriad images, expand further to explore what they mean. I’m getting jumpy just thinking about that process. I can’t allow the feelings to nest inside of me, not when I have three loads of laundry to do.
On screen, a woman emerges from a bathtub. She’s lithe. She may even be languid. Lithe people usually are. She approaches Jack, drawn as if deeply attracted to him (which should be indication enough that she’s paranormal). Her aspect is vacant as their lips meet. When Jack pulls back from their kiss, her placid expression has turned gleeful. Her body is bruised and rotting. Her once taut flesh has loosened; she’s no longer young. Jack looks her up and down, disgusted. God forbid he should be aroused by an older woman with thicker hips and sagging breasts. And yes, obviously her flesh is decomposing. But that’s the crux: Decay is gruesome enough. Kubrick didn’t have to age the specter’s body; that trick was performed vis-à-vis the male gaze.
It’s the ultimate patriarchal nightmare: one moment you’re kissing a thin, young guileless woman, then you blink open your eyes to find a hefty, grinning crone. And don’t tell me the woman’s transformation from young to old is incidental at the same time you tell me Jack’s son’s Apollo 13 sweater is Kubrick’s acknowledgment that he helped fake the moon landing. Kubrick worshippers don’t get to have it both ways.
That said, I believe your average reddit user fundamentally misunderstands Kubrick’s artistic ethos. His fans want desperately to believe his every image has literal meaning. They theorize for example that Jack’s German typewriter is yellow in one scene and blue in another to represent the shifting identity of Germany during World War Two. But Kubrick himself has said “the artistic process you go through in making a film is as much a matter of discovery as it is the execution of a plan.” Most artists first engage with their unconscious minds, then apply their conscious minds to analyze what they have dredged from that bog. But Kubrick doesn’t tether every image; sometimes, they are kites with no tails. With his knack for the uncanny, he might toggle from yellow to blue typewriter to imbue the Overlook hotel with a sense of instability; to create in the viewer confusion and unease. His prowess is in his willingness to keep his creations soggy with bog water, rather than sterilize each one through conscious thought.
In this way, an image can be not incidental without being intentional. Artists are not Big Daddy Gods dominating the figurative. They are people with unexamined beliefs; with fears soaking in their unconscious; they are products of family systems, of socioeconomic and racial backgrounds, of capitalism and hierarchical norms. Kubrick knows how to use all that murk to create in the viewer an emotional truth that supersedes the literal, but he’s no more in control of what he absorbs than any of us. We are all made awed and small by the unspoken. Pinned beneath culture’s mass, we don’t sense its weight.
*
“Do you think that woman will be in the bathtub waiting for me?” I asked Matt after the movie had ended.
“Of course not,” Matt assured me. (Same way he assures me he’s locked the backdoor.)
He’s right and he’s wrong. Kubrick’s bathtub woman is what the self-care industry implicitly guards against. Here are the things you must buy and apply to stave off your future. Soothe your body under warm white lighting. Gaze dreamily from the grid to promote your anti-aging product. Abrade your skin with this hundred dollar brush. Whatever you do, don’t masturbate using the shower head. Especially if you’re over twenty years old. Don’t enjoy your body; make it enjoyable. Don’t smile with your crone’s mouth. Don’t cackle with lust.
In my Thornberry-açaí-glazed-donut-teenage-boy-urine- scented bathroom, I’m tasked with contrary duties. I must toughen my skin against culture’s pernicious expectations, at the same time, let the Epsom salts seep through to soften my slide down from the crow’s nest and into the cradle of my pelvic floor. In the bathtub, I must care for my bodily spirit; use the master’s sheet masks to dismantle the master’s house, all the while knowing the woman is figurative yes, but she’s also literal. One day I’ll cross the threshold to find her there, languid or gleeful, thicker and looser.
Culture tells me she’s trouble. I must find her worth.
Brilliant.
Did this piece hit extra hard being read in a pelvic floor PT waiting room? Probably. What a sharp, beautifully written essay.