Alright, so, this is going to sound crazy, but I don’t like showering. It has nothing to do with the feeling of being clean (I love cleanliness and order), but just simply because I find it uncomfortable to shower. I have a whole bunch of fancy shampoos, nice-smelling body washes, etc to help encourage me to shower, but it still just feels freaking uncomfortable and annoying. And it’s so embarrassing to talk about it because of the stereotypes about people and showering. I end up showering on about an every-other-day or every-two-days basis, and I’d really like reducing that down to every day. I don’t like smelling, or desperately trying to avoid people because I’m insecure I stink. I just want to be motivated to shower without having to constantly force myself to do it for the sake of everyone else or picking up the pieces.
By the way, my psychiatrist strongly suspects I’m autistic. I’m being formally evaluated w/ the psychologists and stuff in late July. So that might be a reason why I have such an odd dilemma like this.
My first and best move, I believe, was to make my bathroom a lot less stimulating. I added an indirect light, an adjustable pressure shower head, and a space heater.
That helps an absolute ton.
I also accepted that doing less but doing it still, is a lot better than not doing it at all. Someday I just shower, some other day I shave and shower, some other day I just wash my hair. Breaking it up and not seeing “hygiene” as a big single task massively helps too (and that’s applicable to many other things as well).
Oooh. Thank you! (i’m going broke)
If you’re actually autistic, I hope you get diagnosed, it’s definitely life changing (for the best and sometimes the worst ahah)!
I don’t know how to feel about the autism thing T_T I don’t feel like I have enough of the criteria to be autistic, but damn it could explain some things. I don’t know. We’ll see I guess!
When I questioned whether or not I was autistic (at 31) with my therapist, it made me realise how contextualised and nuanced it was, how ingrained it was and what couldn’t be explained by autism was actually ADHD. It turns out I have both (as many do).
Now everything just makes sense, but it took me almost 3 years of introspection, reflection and work to see it all (or most of it, I’m pretty sure there are things that I haven’t entirely noticed or understood yet).
I thought the same thing, that I could have autism and ADHD combined, and that it simply masked symptoms from both sides. But this was during a manic episode, so I don’t know how much of that was actually credible.