I hate showering

I come with a purpose and a dying hope to get clean, but I step out feeling dirtier, ashamed, full of quiet confrontations and loud debates between me, my body, and my mind.

I walk into this four-walled bathroom every day to scrub away the dirt, the dead skin, to smell like vanilla, but I end up feeling like trash, like pavement-stained, stomped-on, and been put on display for the world to judge and recoil from.

I step in and slowly peel off my clothes, piece by piece, layer by layer. Untangling strands of thin, medium hair that somehow survived years of hair loss, damage, and my hair-pulling disorder. Washing the face I’ve spent years resenting. The pores are visible from miles away. The leftover marks from a three-day pimple that shows up like clockwork with my period. Replaying the mental checklist of things to fix, cover, hide, as if it’s my fault I was born with this face, as if something made from love by two people who chose each other was some kind of accident. Like it’s criminal. Illegal. Forbidden. I turn the shower knob. Hot and cold, back and forth. The crystal clear water reflects me as much as it cleans me. It trickles from my hair, down my chest, across my thighs, and into the drain. I just stand there, waiting to be soaked enough for the shampoo and body wash to cling to my skin. I wash every inch. The delicate parts. The places I avoid thinking about. The breasts someone I knew once touched when I was too young to know what “wrong” meant, too scared to tell anyone, too innocent to fully understand what was taken from me. I scrub my underarms, the ones I’m embarrassed about. The body hair I was told to hide. The thighs and legs I’m still learning to see without disgust. The stomach that folds in ways people equate with failure. The birthmarks that give me identity, though sometimes I wish I could trade them for invisibility. The body acne, the little red flags of silent wars I’ve fought alone.

Countless scrubs, head massages, and shaving. Only to still feel like dirt after spending thirty minutes inside with nothing but thousands of thoughts and confrontation. I look in the mirror and barely recognize the girl staring back. No mascara. No eyebrow gel to tame the chaos. No contour to slim my cheeks. No lip tint to hide my pale, shapeless mouth. Just me. Raw. Washed. Bare. Spending another ten minutes, questioning if you’re really alive, or just floating, just flowing by. Am I living, or just floating? Some days, clean doesn’t feel like comfort. It feels like a confrontation, some way of proving that I really do look the way they said, that I really do carry every insult like a bruise that never quite fades, that I’m everything they labeled me, ugly, broad, and too much.

I never thought I’d reach a point where I hate showering, not because it’s a chore, not because I’m lazy, but because it reveals everything I’ve been taught to fear about myself, because it forces me to see and touch every part of me the world taught me to hate. It’s the one place I can’t lie, can’t pretend, can’t filter. I see it. I touch it. Every piece the world told me to erase. My body is built from love, from the DNA of two people who gave me life, but why does the world insist it’s something to be hated? My body keeps changing, and so do the opinions I never asked for. I never imagined that a woman, created from connection, shaped by kindness, could become so unfamiliar to herself. So full of quiet grief, slow-burning shame, and self-rejection stitched into every thought.

But still, I step into the water. Every single day. Even if I don’t always love myself, there’s a strange kind of bravery in facing the very thing that breaks me. In undressing, not just my body, but the lies I believed about it. I hate showering, not because of the soap or the scrubbing, but because it’s the only place I can’t escape myself. The only place I have no choice but to witness every scar, every curve, every memory. It is where I am most naked, not just in skin, but in truth. I don’t hate the water. I don’t hate routine. I hate that this ritual, meant to cleanse, feels more like a reckoning, a ritual that reminds me of everything I’ve been told to wash away. But I still keep doing it. Maybe out of hope. Maybe out of habit. Maybe because some part of me still believes I’m worth the effort, even when it hurts. Maybe, one day, I won’t hate showering.
I’ll just hate what the world made me believe about myself.

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