If you’ve ever lived in an area that has its own monthly neighborhood newsletter, you might have seen a picture of a person holding up a past issue of that monthly neighborhood newsletter while floating in a body of water. At first it doesn’t seem out of the ordinary, but then you read the caption—usually something like “Jan Carlson defying gravity at the Dead Sea.” When you think about it, looking at Jan in her one-piece and water booties poking up a few feet from her face, you remember that you can’t normally float in the ocean and read, because the pages get wet. So why everyone is so excited about Jan reading her monthly neighborhood newsletter is because of the Dead Sea’s saltwater holding her up and keeping the pages dry.

To read your own monthly neighborhood newsletter, or other literature of choice, in a body of water, you typically need a pool floatie, or perhaps one of those wooden trays that straddle across a bathtub, if you’re an indoor floater. Which, since my latest foray into weird-consumer-things-people-do-to-try-to-make-themselves-feel-better, I am decidedly. The difference with a float tank, however, is you don’t need anything. No reading material, no clothes, no water booties, no inflatables—and definitely no expectationsflo.

Epsom salts were once something I’d only heard of due to growing up playing the PC game Oregon Trail (both the original black-and-green 1997 version and the full-color 5th edition from 2001). The salts were something you bought at the general store that helped a little when one of your travelmates got sick, something you sometimes lost while fording the river. They’ve re-entered my vocabulary once again, however, through the last five years’ influx of self-care trends, along with bath bombs and mineral water facial spray.

If you google “salt float” or “sensory deprivation tank” and you are within 30 miles of a major metropolitan area (this is true at least in California), you will find a handful of places touting small dark rooms filled with saltwater that supposedly make you feel nothing, which supposedly makes you feel something. They fall in the category of, and are branded as, anything from a futuristic spa to a holistic wellness center. Aside from considering any general medical contraindications, you don’t need to do anything to prepare; it’s just recommended that you don’t shave on the day prior, that you keep caffeine out of your system for a few hours before, and that you sign a waiver saying you know what you’re getting into and you’ll be charged $10,000 on the spot should you urinate or defecate in the tank.

In the location I’ve been frequenting, each float tank holds eleven inches of water filled with 1,000 pounds of epsom salts. It’s worth noting that all that salt doesn’t smell briney or McDonaldsy or beachy or anything—the float process is almost entirely odorless, minus a whiff of coconut if you use the ethically-sourced vegan, paraben-free lotion they have available or a hint of an incense stick someone lit in the common area before or after their float. This particular location has the option of light and/or sound during your float, should total nothingness be too much for you.

To many, it is. The common area houses a self-serve tea and kombucha station, along with a table full of art supplies and sketchbooks where floaters are able to express, in word or image, their experiences and leave them (however anonymously) for others to look through. These notebooks, which I read cover to cover before and after each float, are filled with everything from multi-page trauma confessionals to brief quips and musings to symbolic watercolor interpretations of mid-float dreams and visions. My admitted favorite was a page where someone had, in pink-colored pencil, drawn a picture of a fat cartoon cat and written “Warm and itchy, but nice.” There appears to be little homogeneity amongst these expressors: handwriting slants left and right, curlicued and flat; God and Jesus are mentioned equally amidst Buddha and universe and great spirit; spouses, partners, children, parents, friends, enemies, and abusers are discussed with equal frequency; reflections surround recent birthdays or other milestones from age 17 to 73. I especially liked, when a hurt or wound was shared, the way that readers had dated their witness over the years. “Said a prayer for you, 11/6/17.” “Sent you blessings, 5/21/18.” “Held your pain, 1/11/19.”

What the many entries imply for the float experience is the deep nuance and universality of facing the darkness. There is a darkness in us and a darkness around us, and the float experience makes invisible the line between the two—something not everyone is ready to face.

There are warnings, both on the website and in the waiver, about claustrophobia and anxiety, all couched in soft, encouraging language: you can leave the door to the float tank open, pick a color of light to have on, pump soothing music in. You can take baby steps towards each new sort of stillness. And I’m glad for these. I don’t know what I would have felt in there had I not done several years of PTSD therapy before entering the tank. I do know that I, me who’s clicked on every targeted Instagram and Facebook ad for whale shark leggings and opalescent dog collar monthly subscription boxes and custom scented candles I’ve ever seen, was able to ignore the cool shiny blue float tank ads completely. The subconscious is a slippery beast indeed.

When I do these things, and I think about writing about them (as a writer does while doing things), I try to figure out what the difference is between an exploratory culture essay and a glorified Yelp Review. What is the story of self-care? A lot of it is me or other writers being like, ah, I had this inner problem I never dealt with, and I finally realized it and dealt with it thanks to X, Y, or Z thing! And that’s a story you do see repeated again and again in both the actual Yelp reviews, in my own journal pages, in the post-float sketchbook pages, and in other internetty write-ups of activities like this one that walk the line of indulgent and unsuspectingly completely necessary. I read piece after piece after piece like this, though—and have written my fair share myself—about how we as people needed to do said random thing in order to learn to be a little bit softer, more kind, and more free than we are in our average living state.

The first time I floated was a joy. I knew I’d dug through a lot of my demons already, and I wasn’t too worried about anything popping up to terrorize me in the tank. The experience itself is so novel that you can’t help but find yourself in a state of childlike awe about it: the water is so dense with salt that you feel like a sea otter, shimmying and bobbing on the ocean surface, curling around in your own mirth. I bent, I stretched, I continued to barely bump the bottom of the shallow tank no matter how much I wiggled and splashed. I settled down and hit the light switch, letting the astral-esque soundtrack (think Outer Space room at a science museum) carry me into the dark. With the lights off, I was able to focus on the key mechanism of the float tank experience, which is the question of sensation.

I struggle with these things being called, by some folks, sensory deprivation tanks. You don’t deprive a person of their sensory abilities so much as you change the things they are sensing. In the float tank, you feel a certain kind of water, and a certain kind of air, and your skin against all that. Indeed, it’s a unique and pretty awesome sensation, one I can only explain as feeling heavy, sticky, light, silky, cold, and warm at the same exact time. Or somewhere in the liminal space between all those things. Mostly, it feels like the point right before your body gets goosebumps—a moment you are never in very long during your regular days, no matter how fickle the weather. Perhaps the float tank’s strength is this: expanding a part of our lives we usually move through all too quickly.

The second time, I brought my parents along, buying my dad a float for his birthday. I went for the complete no-sound no-lights no-nothing experience this time around, perhaps because even as a nearly 30-year-old woman I still felt safer knowing my parents were nearby. For me, being in the dark sent my mind not racing, but carefully and calmly re-explaining to myself exactly where I was: walking through the door to the building, checking in at the front desk, watching my parents go through their own first-float orientations, showering in the shower area, my car parked outside, the coffee place open next door full of people going about their Saturday like normal. You’re told that when you float all you can hear is your own heartbeat, your own fluids and electricity running up and down your nerves and veins—but if your hearing’s attuned anywhere near the level mine is, you can also hear the various hums and buzzings from the machines keeping the float tanks hygienic and operational just a wall or panel away. Those didn’t bother me so much as keep me in this place of knowing, which might be still a form of refusing to let go.

It’s in all this knowing noise that the dark part of myself lies: a deep cynic, raging like Achilles. The float is billed as an alternative healing experience, but it’s still machines and credit cards, all salt and float and smoke and mirrors. I’m angry about our economy of reaction, of idolizing self-care to make up for our culture’s plunge into busyness and self-neglect, depriving our senses to balance out our daily overstimulation. The entire industry of self is built across our greatest rift: we’re obsessed with self-care precisely because we’re so detached from it. It’s like how youth who are taught abstinence are hornier than ever, how you never crave Ben & Jerry’s like when you’re on a sugar detox. How you hunt for the opposite when you’re in a state of need, how you always seek to fill a lack. The real story of self-care is the same for me and everybody else: someone somewhere didn’t meet our needs and now we have to help ourselves, however naive, however capitalized, however uninformed.

Even the phrase “immersion float” is misleading, my intellectualizing-when-uncomfortable hamster wheel of a brain continues griping in the dark. Aren’t we always immersed in something, it’s just a matter of what that thing is? Maybe it’s TV and podcasts and background noise, or maybe it’s pumps and faucets and sensory deprivation experiences? What’s the difference between immersion and distraction? How is this not another thing, another new sensation, to distract me from myself? This time, when the light comes on to signal that the 60 minutes is up, I find I’m relieved.

I drive around thinking about floating all week, parsing out this type of self-care from others. There’s something to be said for learning to use your senses, whether or not things around you are turned on or off. What am I doing—or not doing—with the information I’m getting? The idea of it all, the responsibility of being human, is so overwhelming that I schedule another float.

On my third go-round weeks later, I opted for an early Monday morning float. I was able to pick my color of light (hot pink) and soundtrack (bouncy classical). This time it felt like coming home. I plopped right in, my muscles thrilled to not have to go about the week just yet; felt my consciousness pulse thicker and thinner with the crescendo and decrescendo of the soundtrack, drifted in and out of sleep. I didn’t think, didn’t analyze, didn’t assess, didn’t worry—just sort of was. This, I thought, is how it should be. This is why we do and write about these things.

Only you make you less stressed. I think the idea behind a float is that by stripping away everything else that usually makes you stressed, you’ll realize this. But they make it seem like the float tank itself does it for you so that you’ll buy the monthly float package, which, fine. Here I am, ending this piece the way that all these pieces end, another $49 on the Visa, looking for another place to hide or seek or maybe this time find.