For the last month of Year Four, the patrons of the New Worlds Patreon voted for personal care! We’re starting off with bathing — or rather, the many methods we’ve developed over the ages for getting clean, only some of which involve a bath. Comment over there!
Another barrier to regular showering is physical fatigue and physical pain.
I am chronically ill, and I know many other chronically ill people, and it is INCREDIBLY common in the chronic illness/chronic pain/Disability community to only be able to shower once every seven days or even once every 14 days due to exhaustion/pain.
For many chronically ill people, a shower or bath = all that they can do that day, and for some of us, a shower or bath = nothing else will get done the following day either.
eg shower on Monday, both Monday and Tuesday are a write-off.
Good point — and it’s interesting to consider that a schedule like that would have been completely unremarkable not that long ago! Societal norms are good at making it look like things must be a certain way, when in fact they’re much more negotiable.
