Episode thirteen of the Some Gender Going On podcast: Showering. You can play it or download it here:

On showering and being clean, and the depth of difficulty.

Notes

Izzy Grosof

Some Gender Going On podcast, episode 13.

This one’s a bit more real, more vulnerable

Showering

When I smell myself, I hate it Momentarily Then ignore it Until I’m sick Then deodorant Then build up so much resentment That I shower In anger at myself In disgust In shame

So showering became a place of anger of disgust of shame

I’ve sat in the bathroom For hours Trying to convince myself to shower. I’ve tried so many different strategies. Different soap More light Less light More transparent curtain Towel drying Air drying Blowdrying Shaving just before showering.

Switching outright to baths.

Many of them have worked - transparent curtain, very gentle soap, shaving, air drying.

But not that much. It’s still very, very, very hard. One of the hardest things I do on a regular basis from an ADHD perspective.

[Ramble about showering strategies:

Lighter curtain, less heat inertia.
Competely transparent curtain (a little bit of rainbow irridescence)
HRT and self-image
Air drying, not towel drying
Heat the room (radiator, used to be space heater)
Towel over radiator
Shave before showering: face and arms.
Don’t have to be emotionally resolved to shower.
Deal with steam whistle via using droplet dispersion to control temperature
Putting my phone in a ziplock to bring it with me.
Having a warm fuzzy bathmat
Call someone when I’m spinning. ]

I’ve always been terrible at showering. I was terrible at showering in elementary school, middle school, high school, undergrad, grad school, my whole life. In elementary school, I had a reputation for being physically gross, in a “don’t touch anything they’ve touched” way. In middle school, I showered once a month, at times. If that much. My elbows turned grey. One time, my classmate (my female classmate) asked if I had a skin condition I said no, I just hadn’t showered. In a month, I didn’t say.

My room smelled bad. I’d notice it when I got back from a trip. Then I’d get used to it. And stop noticing.

My breath smells bad. I rarely notice it. But my mouth feels hot, which means it smells bad And when I’m forced to smell it Like when I wear a mask too many times I hate it.

Morality of smell

Society condemns people who smell bad.

Traditional-conservative morality says cleanliness is next to godliness, and associates a bad smell with uncleanness with dirtiness with sin.

But it’s not just traditional-conservative morality.

In left-progressive-feminist spaces, one often finds condemnation of bad smell. While ridiculing reply-guys and nice guys and unpleasant men of all kinds, to say that someone smells bad, and that someone doesn’t care about the well-being of the people around them, and in a specifically masculine, loser, misogynist condemnation.

A fedora-hat wearing neckbeard living in his mother’s basement, never watching, waves of stink rising of off him.

A perfectly appropriate target.

After all, if he wants to not be gross, all he has to do is shower. It’s right there. But he doesn’t. So he must not care. If he didn’t want to have a disgusting beard growing out of his neck, he could just shave it. So he’s an acceptable target.

I couldn’t shave the beard growing out of my neck often enough, in middle school, high school, undergrad. I couldn’t maintain a consistency. I couldn’t think about my neck and the hairs growing out of it that often. I just couldn’t.

So it would grow back. The little tiny stiff hairs would stab at my neck, make my itchy and hyper-aware and dysphoric all day. Because I shaved and I couldn’t maintain it. It was worse than if I’d never tried. So I’d give up and let it grow out. And again in a cycle.

I couldn’t shower consistently. I couldn’t maintain a habit through the waves of self-anger and disgust and shame. I just couldn’t.

And I saw myself in those acceptable targets. Constantly.

I was so gross.

[Ramble: Insults aimed at men, especially at normatively-protected men, are treated like punching up. Calling a generically bad person an unwashed dudebro.

And I saw myself in these insults, more than I ever saw myself in the people being complimented and held up in these spaces.]

E

Estrogen makes your body odor go away, right? Well, it’s complicated. I remember it decreasing in intensity. I think it’s re-intensified since then. Maybe it takes longer to come back than it used to? I don’t know. I don’t have enough of an objective sense of self, sense of persistent perception, to have a clear opinion on what’s changed, come and gone and intensified. I just don’t know.

But a lot of trans people on E describe their body odor going away essentially completely, becoming unnoticeable.

I hoped for that, longed for it intensely.

But I don’t think the people describing their body odor going away completely were showering just once a week, if that. I think they were showering daily or every other day and before E they’d still have smell problems. And now it’s better for them.

That sounds nice. I hope I reach that storied realm one day.

Current

For now, no.

My armpits smell horrible. Bitter, thick, noxious. Sometimes I get migraines from catching a smell of them, have to apply deodorant so I can recover and eventually sleep, or soap if I’ve run out of deodorant, or that one time I accidentally got flavored deodorant and the coconut was nauseating.

They smell the way they always have.

Sometimes I touch my armpit and my hand stinks too and I have to go wash it off.

I sweat more in sleeveless shirts or dresses. I love my dresses, but my armpits don’t. My body doesn’t.

To my body, I say fuck you. I never liked you anyways. I’ll reshape you to my design. I’ll wade through the putrid cloud you emit, and I’ll come out the other side one day. One day.

To everyone whose life was a bit worse because of my smell, you deserved a better environment to be around. I’m sorry.

Your preference, to have a nice smelling environment, is entirely reasonable. I wish I could have upheld that. I hope that I’ll be able to in the future.

To everyone who equated smelling bad to moral failing, I tried my best. I’m not very good at it. You made it harder.

But I can’t feel any real resentment towards the people who condemned me. People mostly just didn’t tell me. Was that any better than a verbal condemnation? When I’m making people’s lives a bit worse, one day at a time, when thousands or millions of people are doing the same, when the mass of people exerting the harm are doing so from a point of masculine privilege by and large, preventing any pushback, I don’t have any right to police how people express their frustration with the situation.

So there’s nothing wrong with society on this, not really.

The challenge is how I feel about it.

Supposed to feel

The challenge, really, is how I’m supposed to feel, and how society wants me to feel.

There’s the things that society says are supposed to be hard, like math, and the things that are supposed to be easy, like showering.

Then there’s changing a sense of hard and easy based on what I can do or can’t do - but that feels too much like giving up, saying that my current abilities are all I’ll ever been, that they’re inherently written into the fabric of my eternal being.

There needs to be a distinction between what’s easy or hard for me in an absolute, state-of-my-being sense, and what I’m currently good at, what I’ve built up skill in.

I’ve built up skill in showering. It’s very, very hard, and I’ve built up a lot of skill.

And that’s something I want to take pride in, to think of myself as someone who’s good at something hard.

I can’t really do that, not yet.

Mostly, I just think of myself who’s bad at something easy after putting lots of work in.

I catch glimpses of thinking highly of myself, from time to time.

Maybe it would help to imagine a world where everyone struggled with showering.

And different people had taken different approaches - heavy sprays, perfumes and colognes, or hiring someone to help, or giving up, or surgically removing the sweat glands and lasering off the armpit hair.

And I’d taken my own path. [Ramble about this world]

How I feel

I know the way out.

It’s unconditional self-love.

I love myself even when I smell bad.

I love myself even when I sit in the bathroom and I just can’t shower and it’s 2 in the morning. It’s Ok. You’re just you. This is hard for me. It’s Ok. It’s Ok to not have that skill yet. You can go to sleep.

I’ve built some skill, some tactics, some strategies.

And it’s hard. The path to less smell stretches out long and winding before me. I can both appreciate where I am, love myself where I am, and commit to that road ahead.

The mindset that I wish I had was something like the following, in a very abstract sense, from Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.

An appreciation of where I am, and acknowledgement of the challenge up ahead. A weariness, a joy.

When I saw weariness, I mean not just the literal difficulty of sleep if I desire to shower and reject showering too intensely, to the point where I can’t think about anything else, can’t allow myself to do anything else, can’t sleep. Caught on the knife’s edge.

I also mean the soul weariness that comes from a lifetimes of running up against the same struggle, the same failing, the same anguish. Of learning and becoming more the person I want to be in so many ways. But not this way. Not this skill. Not yet.

I can love myself unconditionally. I do. It doesn’t make cleaning myself easier. But it doesn’t make it harder. And not harder is the baseline I need to start from.

I can appreciate the skill I’ve developed. The multitude of little adaptations and strategies that have made it so much smoother over the years. No matter how hard it still is, I have built real skill that I can be proud of.

And I can look with careful resolve at the path ahead.

I want to set a new lifetime record for most days showered in a row. My record is 3, as best I can remember.

I’m at 1, as I write this. I’m at 2 as I return to writing this, the next day. I’m at 9 now, writing again. We’ll see where I get to.

The second day was better. I like how I smell today, actually. My skin smells nice.

I don’t like how my armpits smell. Not as intensely bad as some days, but not good. But there’s no shame, no guilt. I know I’ve done what I can. There’s no “you should have” and really that’s all I want. Less shame. So I just put on some deodorant and go on in joy.

When I was out walking, there was a bad smell, and I was able to say with confidence “the trees and fallen leaves smell bad. Not me.”

In the shower, there was less of my skin to slough off. The shower didn’t scream this time. Body doubling went well.

It wasn’t perfect, the emotional peace strategy I tried didn’t really work how I wanted it to, but that’s ok. I’m still learning.

Emotional peace

When I need to recharge, what feels like it works will is a floaty state of mind, where I’m simply not worried about plans or considerations, where those things are placed by the side and don’t weigh me down for the moment. Where I set aside the usual sources of distraction and just float.

I got the float for perhaps ten minutes while walking from thing to thing, yesterday. But when I tried it at home I ended up napping which was more disorienting and less pleasant.

When I want to shower and I can’t, often this floating peace is what I need. Emotional recharge.

I’m still learning it. It’s ok to not have it squared away and understood. I’m learning, as I’ve learned before and will learn again.

The brainworm that this is supposed to be easy.

The mantra of normative society goes “if you care, it’s easy, you can just do it. You can just be clean.”

In some spaces, people carve out exceptions for resource scarcity. Access to soap, access to warm running water. That’s not me.

In some spaces, people carve out exceptions for dysphoria. Specifically, when the sight or knowledge of one’s body is repulsive to oneselves, to the point it makes it hard to acknowledge it interact with.

That’s a closer to my experience. I’ve felt reassured, seeing people talk about those experiences

But those narratives center the difficulty in a different place than I experience it. For me, the center of the difficulty is in the preparation. Executing the myriad little steps and tricks I’ve come up with to smooth out the process, to make it manageable, repeatable. Having the emotional energy to look back on all these failed or painful attempts, catalogue, and say “it’s going to be different this time”. Of not getting lost in the details, of not getting caught endlessly on the knife’s edge.

It’s a difficulty specific to the intersection of a particular type of neurodivergence with a particular type of dysphoria. Without the dysphoria I wouldn’t have all these knobs to tweak. Without neurodivergence, I wouldn’t have so much difficulty making then all happen, perhaps.

So with my pretty specific combination of challenges, it’s not too surprising that there’s not many people who experience quite similar challenges to mine. And that’s ok. I’m comfortable being unique and distinctive.

But there’s a worm in the back of my mind. It tells me that this is supposed to be easy. When I have difficulty, I’m falling because I should’ve done it easily already. When I don’t manage to do it, I’m an affect failure. When I succeed despite difficulty, I’m a failure for not completing it quicker, with less disruption, less anguish. Failure.

I come out of every attempt at showering sadder than I went in, regardless of the result.

The worm is pretty mean, and pretty stuck in there. And self fulfilling, of course - when I feel that way towards myself, no wonder it’s desperately difficult.

Responding, redefining

So here we are. To the worm, I say: No. No, it’s not supposed to be easy. Insofar as “supposed to” exists, that’s not it, not at all. I claim control of supposed to, I define that objective level of challenge for myself.

I say it is impressive that I showered [#] days in a row. Regardless of the level of difficulty, of missteps along the way. Because of the level of difficulty, the missteps. I am proud of what I’ve done. And if I don’t feel proud all of the time, that’s fine as well.

I’ll deconstruct, decompress, depressurize, expand. My existence is mine to define and control. I’m free.

The watchword of my transition has always been, “in a world with no one else, how would my gender go? What would my gender be?

What would I do, who would I be, with no one to shape me or compare against?”

I don’t know all the details.

But I’d want to be clean in a world where there was no one else.

And the worm wouldn’t be there. It has no hold on inherent reality.

This watchword isn’t always my favorite mindset. It’s a little too individualistic, too isolated for me. But it helps in this case. It’s what I need, what will help me in this case.

[Ramble: I don’t need the perfect answer, it’s ok to be inefficient, bumpy, messy. Two steps forward and one step back.]

Conclusion

So that’s where I am.

I take control of defining what is hard. I decide that showering and cleaning myself is hard.

I take control of defining skill. I have some significant degree of skill, from all of the little modifications and patterns I’ve built up.

I take control of what is worth being happy about. Every attempt is worth being happy about. Every new skill learned is worth being happy about. Every shower is worth being happy about, no matter the turmoil involved. Every attempt that falls through is worth being happy about, because often, I don’t even attempt.

Beneath those “worth being happy”, there is a foundation of unconditional love. I love myself, no matter what the eventualities bring, no matter how my body is or my patterns emerge.

And regardless of what is worth being happy about, regardless of my foundations, my feelings are valid. When I am disgusted, ashamed, downtrodden, exhausted. It’s valid to feel that way. Valid to talk about and exist in. The narratives that generate those feelings aren’t true, but they do exist. I can see those feelings, see those narratives, encompass them, and proceed. There’s a long path. I can rest where I am, I can float, I can see, I can journey. I can feel. I can love.

The path is shaded and full of glints of drifting snow. Peaceful and quiet and long. Personal. And yet worth walking.

Thank you for listening, thank you for thinking. I’ll see you next time.