We get a lot of disbelief from normos who can’t imagine why we don’t spend more time in the shower. This is what you show them, to reduce the explanation time and shorten the period of disbelief. We have really good reasons, a whole variety of them. (Mom, this explains why I always look for a bathtub to use instead, but you can give it a miss.)
I’ve talked over The Shower Issue with many people.
Keep in mind that I remember when showers felt wholesome and refreshing. I know what people mean when they say, “Have a Nice Shower — you’ll feel better.”
I have to make Nice Shower a proper noun to distinguish it from other showers. Nice Shower abandoned me long ago. We hardly ever meet each other now… maybe once a year or so.
They’re still dead wrong. I don’t get Nice Showers, though I sometimes get bearable ones.
Some people find each moment of preparation, ambulation, ablution, and drying off to be exhausting beyond belief. Taking a shower consumes most of the day.
Some people have ferocious blood-pooling and dysautonomia from their reaction to standing upright while being covered in water that’s running down — like their battery. Bloodpooling feels awful, and the stubborn dizziness can be nauseating.
Some people can’t articulate why it’s so awful because the English language is not good at describing unpleasant states or experiences. If it’s not bleeding, breaking, crushing, or falling, our language runs out.
For me, it’s several things, and it varies widely from time to time. Here are some of the options in play for me…
Every drop running down me might as well have a hook in its head and be pulling the life-force from me. That’s a real drag when it happens. Literally, ha ha.
The tactile experience of being jabbed, tapped, and scraped by a thousand little nails or pins (different sized shower sprays just mean different sized nasty objects) is, frankly, appalling. 0/10 do not recommend.
And then there’s the temperature issue. In me, CRPS hot-wires my perception of temperature on my skin far beyond what’s reasonable, including my perception of temperature changes. The micro-changes, on days like today, are no fun at all. Imagine something feeling like a stream of hot coals when it first lands, then like a band of ice next to it, repeating that pattern — until the next droplet. The water in the basin, regardless of its actual temperature, feels freezing, with a runnel of boiling-hot swirling through it. I came up with an image for it, which even shows the nicer temperatures, though not how quickly it all changes again.
It’s a bit oversimplified, scaled for Web-based use, but it gives an idea of what the temp-two-step is like:
Too bad it doesn’t actually show. That’d be awesome!