Treehouse: Switching to fresh underwear every day sent my body into total shock

Fresh Start

So, I started college last fall. Thought I was ready, you know? Had my dorm assignment, my class schedule, the whole nine yards. But about three weeks in, I realized I wasn’t ready at all. Not for the workload, not for being away from home, not for any of it.

So I made the call—took a gap year. Best decision I could’ve made, honestly. Gave me time to actually figure some things out.

And one of those things? Man, this is embarrassing to even say out loud, but… my hygiene was terrible. Like, really terrible. I’d wear the same pair of underwear for three, sometimes four days straight. Showering? Maybe twice a week if I remembered. I just… I don’t know, I never really thought about it. It wasn’t on my radar. Nobody ever sat me down and said, “Hey, this is how you take care of yourself.” It just wasn’t talked about.

I finally opened up to someone in my friend group I really trust, and they were cool about it. Didn’t make me feel like a complete disaster, just… listened. And we talked it through. They were like, “Okay, let’s start small. Daily underwear. Daily showers. You got this.” And I thought, yeah, I can do that. I should do that.

So I went all in. New underwear every single day. Showering twice a day—morning and night. I was gonna be the cleanest version of myself, right? Except… my body didn’t know what hit it. I started getting these jitters, like my skin was crawling, my heart racing. I felt dizzy, anxious, like I couldn’t catch my breath. I thought I was losing it. Ended up in the hospital because I genuinely didn’t know what was happening to me.

Turns out, when you go from one extreme to another that fast, your body freaks out a little. The doctors said I’d stripped all the natural oils from my skin, messed with my body’s balance. But honestly? I think it was more than that. I think it was psychological too. I’d spent so long ignoring my body, treating it like it didn’t matter, and suddenly I was hyper-focused on it. It was overwhelming.

And here’s the thing I’ve been thinking about a lot: I grew up in a Christian household. Good family, good people. But there was this… silence around the body. Like, we talked about purity and modesty and keeping yourself “clean” in a spiritual sense, but nobody ever taught me how to actually care for my body. It felt almost wrong to pay too much attention to it, you know? Like being too aware of your own body was somehow vain or sinful.

I don’t think it was intentional. I don’t think anyone was trying to mess me up. It’s not about grooming or neglect in the way people usually mean. It’s just… a gap. A blind spot. When you grow up hearing that your body is a temple but also that you shouldn’t think about it too much, you end up in this weird place where you just… don’t. You don’t think about it at all.

So now I’m here, trying to find the middle ground. Learning that taking care of myself isn’t selfish or sinful—it’s just basic human maintenance. And yeah, I’m still figuring it out. Still a little insecure about the whole hospital thing. But I’m getting there. One day, one shower, one clean pair of underwear at a time.

-Working on the basics and that's okay