Day 8: My First Onsen

I thought this post would be about the hills.

About hiking through Nikkō, which I’ve discovered is essentially a sleepy onsen town in winter. Everything shuts by 4pm. Or 5. Or 6 if you’re lucky. Food places vanish. The streets empty. The temperature drops the second the sun slips behind the mountains. It is forecast snow tomorrow.

/

I thought I would write about the temples and shrines. A UNESCO site, some dating back to 868.

You can hear water everywhere. Running beside you. Beneath you. Through you. I can see why they built them there. The cedar trees rise like quiet witnesses. In certain pockets, if you stop and breathe deeply, you can actually smell them.

The light hits the forest in a way that feels almost staged. Like theatre. Like someone somewhere understands illumination better than the rest of us.

I took a thousand photos. Bought fortunes. Said blessings. Entered shrines. Collected goshuin to map my temple experiences like proof that I was here. That I walked. That I prayed. That I noticed.

/

I am staying in a traditional tatami room with a balcony that hangs over the river. I can hear it rushing as I write this. Constant. Cold. Alive.

/

When I arrived, the woman checking me in encouraged me twice to use the onsen.

When I returned later, she encouraged me again.

And here is the thing. I was terrified.

Not of the heat. Not of the ritual.

Of being naked.

Publicly naked.

In front of trim, neat, composed Japanese women. Women whose bodies seem untouched by steroid bloat, by surgical scars, by hormone chaos.

I carry a lot of shame about my body.

/

It is complicated. Because this body has quite literally kept me alive. Steroids make my face rounder, puffier. The “moon face” they warn you about. They slow the dying down. They hold inflammation at bay. They allow me to travel. To hike. To be here.

I should love this face. It is doing its absolute best.

And yet.

I hate that it looks different. I hate the weight gain from treatment. I hate the scars. I hate the weird, dark hair that grows in places it never used to because my hormones are constantly negotiating survival. I hate that I sometimes feel like a medical experiment rather than a person.

And the irony is that I am probably the last person who would judge someone else for their body.

But I judge mine.

Quietly. Constantly. Without mercy.

/

I almost did not go.

But something in me knew that if I did not, I would be letting shame win again.

So I bit the bullet.

And when I say I was anxious, I mean the kind of anxious where your shoulders are up by your ears and you suddenly forget how to move your limbs naturally.

/

I kept thinking about D telling me about his hotel hot tub. How he closed his eyes. Focused on his breathing. Tuned into the sounds around him. He told me this just before my biopsies this summer, when anxiety was thick in the air between us. He was trying to give me tools. Something steady. Something to hold onto.

At the time I thought, how on earth can anyone relax like that. Especially naked. Especially in public.

But tonight.

I got it.

/

At first, I was hyper aware. Of my stomach. Of The pale scars. The faint bruising from injections that last for ages because of my blood issues. The roundness of my cheeks. Etc.

And then something shifted.

Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was the steam softening the edges of everything. Maybe it was the fact I had the entire space to myself, which helped massively. Maybe it was the river outside, still running, not caring about any of it.

After a few minutes, my body language changed.

My shoulders dropped. My jaw unclenched. My breathing slowed.

I tried to follow Ds previous instructions .

/

I closed my eyes.

I listened.

Water pouring into water. The faint hum of the building. My breath.

And suddenly, I was not a body to be evaluated.

I was just a body.

Warm. Held. Floating.

This body with its scars. This body with its treatment scars and weight. This body with its strange hormonal negotiations. This body that has been cut open and pumped full of chemicals and put through biopsies and scans and fear. This body that runs 4 miles on a good day and collapses on a bad one. This body that refuses to quit.

/

The shame did not disappear in a dramatic, cinematic way.

It just drifted.

Like steam.

And for a moment, I felt something else instead.

Gratitude. Relief. A kind of quiet awe.

Not at how I looked. But at the fact that I am still here to sit in hot water in a winter town in Japan, listening to a river rush past ancient cedar trees.

/

I spend so much time fighting my body. Trying to get it back to a version it used to be. Smizz 1.0. Before surgery. Before steroids. Before fatigue. Before trauma. Before the timeline split into many different versions

But what if this is just the current version of survival?

In a culture where nakedness is ordinary, unremarkable, almost boring, I realised something.

The shame I carry is mostly self-manufactured. It is stitched from comparison and memory and an old longing to be untouched by illness.

But I have been touched by illness. Deeply.

And I am still here.

Tonight, in that onsen, I was not the round face. Or the scars. Or the blood & hormone imbalances. Or the girl about to go for biopsies again.

I was breath. Heat. Water. Alive.

The river is still rushing beneath my balcony.

It does not care what shape it takes as it moves around rocks. It does not apologise for swelling after rain. It does not shame itself for changing course.

It just keeps going.

Maybe I can learn from that.

Snow tomorrow.

But tonight, steam.