Hey there! So, as it turns out, my little break from posting lasted approximately nineteen months, which is obviously a completely normal and reasonable amount of time to disappear for, haha. I’m sure older readers are starting to look at their calendars like, yep, it’s about time Serah showed up again. Listen, I kept meaning to come back sooner, but then enough time passed that coming back started to feel like A Whole Thing, and apparently my solution to that was to keep not posting because surely making the gap even longer would help with the awkwardness eventually. Outstanding strategy, honestly.
I’ve had quite a few people ask me how I’m doing, whether I’m still wearing diapers, whether I’m still using cloth, and whether I ever planned on posting again, so I figured I might as well do what I’ve done after previous little (big) disappearances and put everything into one large life update! That way I can answer the most common questions, catch everyone up, and pretend this was all definitely planned from the beginning.
So firstly, life-wise, quite a lot has changed!
I’ve actually moved to Thailand now, which has obviously been a very large change, and I’ve also gone back to teaching after my office-job era! I know, the complete lack of surprise from anyone who knew me before I announced that I was taking a break from teaching, haha.
I did genuinely enjoy trying something different, and I think stepping away for a while was good for me, but apparently teaching and I were only ever on a temporary separation. I’m back into it now, I’m enjoying it, and I have once again accepted that my natural environment involves being surrounded by small people asking me too many questions at the exact same time.
Moving countries, building a new life, returning to teaching, and generally working out how everything functions over here has kept me very busy, as you can imagine, but honestly, things are good! Really good, actually. Thailand is lovely, the food is amazing, my partners moved with me, I’m very happy here, and the weather is wonderful right up until I have to be outside for more than about eight minutes while wearing a thick cloth diaper, haha.
So yes, as far as the part most of you are actually here for goes, I am still wearing diapers full time, and cloth diapers are still my main setup (and have been for almost two years at this point!). I know, the disposable diaper industry is in shambles about it. Tragically, I was right, and continue to be right, and cloth diapers are still an extremely good choice for me.
When I last properly wrote about them, cloth was still somewhat new for me right. I had gone from using cloth boosters inside disposables, to trying full cloth diapers, to suddenly realising that I liked them enough to make them my main protection.
At the time, I talked a lot about the practical side of that change, like the comfort, absorbency, laundry, bulk, upfront costs, clothing, liners, and everything else you need to think about when completely changing how you manage your incontinence. Now though I’ve had much longer to actually live with them, and honestly, I think switching to cloth full time has probably been one of the most mentally important changes I’ve ever made in managing my incontinence.
That sounds very dramatic, haha, but let me break it down a little!
I don’t think I fully understood how much the cost of disposable diapers affected my relationship with my incontinence in the past until that pressure disappeared. Disposables are expensive right, like legitimately expensive, especially when you need reliable protection every day, wet heavily, and aren’t going to just accept dealing with wearing thin medical diapers and simply hoping for the best.
When I was still wearing disposables, every change reduced my stock. Every heavier day cost more money. Every time I ordered another case, it was a reminder that yes, I was spending a lot on premium diapers every month. Sometimes I would then put on a fresh diaper, be comfortable and ready for the rest of the day, and then end up inevitably messy not long afterward, which meant that barely used premium diaper had to get changed again.
Obviously, it had still done exactly what I needed it to do. It had protected my clothes, contained everything, and made the whole situation much easier to manage, so logically it was not wasted at all, right, but emotionally it could still feel like, fantastic, there goes another expensive diaper because my body chose truly impeccable timing. That resentment definitely added up more than I realised.
There have been a couple of points in the past that I’ve talked about on this blog where I definitely got into a bad headspace about my incontinence and decided I should try to stop wearing diapers (recorded here, somewhere, listen it's a long blog). I did not successfully stop being incontinent, obviously, as anyone who has followed me since then may have noticed, because my bladder and bowels were not particularly interested in accepting that suggestion despite my occasional insistence that they really ought to, haha, but since switching to cloth full time, I genuinely don’t think I’ve had one of those bad headspace moments again.
Cloth removed the feeling that every accident came with a receipt attached. If I need to change, I change. If my body decides to make a freshly changed diaper messy, that is still inconvenient, obviously, but the diaper has not been permanently used up. I wash it and use it again. There is laundry involved, yes, and cloth has its own inconveniences, but I no longer feel like my body is forcing me to throw money away every time it decides to be annoying about timing.
Anyway, cloth fundamentally changed my relationship with diapers way more than I had initially realised, and not just because they are comfortable or absorbent or because I can get cute covers for them, though listen, those are all very good reasons too, haha, but because it took away any last sense of financial guilt I had left with my diapers. The bigger question that leads into though, of course, is how am I actually doing with it?
These days, I’m doing really well.
I still like waking up wet in the morning. I still like putting on thick, comfortable protection and knowing I am secure for the day. I like that my bladder can leak or bowels can empty whenever they want and I do not have to stop what I’m doing or give it much thought at all. I love my cloth diapers particularly. They are soft, incredibly absorbent, reassuringly thick, reusable, and they feel very right for me.
That does not mean total incontinence is always a delightful walk in the park, haha. Sometimes diapers are hot. Sometimes my skin gets irritated. Sometimes laundry is annoying. Sometimes protection leaks for no obvious reason despite behaving perfectly the previous fifty times because alas, betrayal is always possible, and sometimes my body picks the least convenient moment imaginable to do something dramatic, but those things do not cancel out the positives for me.
I think people sometimes assume that if you admit incontinence can be frustrating, that means you must secretly hate wearing diapers, or if you say that you love your diapers and enjoy aspects of being incontinent, that means you are pretending there are no inconveniences, but no, we are going to do this scary thing called nuance again (my favorite word on this blog), haha.
I can love bedwetting and still be annoyed when protection leaks onto my sheets. I can enjoy the freedom of not having to worry about toilets and still dislike skin irritation. I can be comfortable with my bowel incontinence as part of my life and still think my body has the worst timing imaginable on occasion. None of that is contradictory. It is just real life. Most of the time, my diapers just work, and I really appreciate them for that.
I leak much more than I consciously notice now. Occasionally I’ll feel a vague little drip while I’m out, but most of the time my diaper is already wet and warm, so slightly more wet and warm is not exactly breaking news, haha. I generally notice the accumulated result later rather than every individual wetting or leak, and even when I do notice, it is usually just a quiet little, oh, my body is wetting again, okay, and then I continue with whatever I was doing.
Honestly, I really like that. I like that my body can do its thing in the background and it does not have to become an interruption. I like that wetting usually feels ordinary and reassuring rather than urgent or important. I like that I can wake up in a very wet cloth diaper and think, yep, everything worked exactly as intended, instead of having to get out of bed in the middle of the night because my bladder demanded immediate attention.
There is a lot about incontinence that can make life harder, but there is also a lot in my current reality that I actively enjoy, and I do not think I need to pretend otherwise just to make my experience sound sufficiently serious, haha. That is a huge part of why I feel so settled now, I think. Incontinence does not constantly interrupt me emotionally. I don’t need to remember exactly when it happened, how much it was, whether I could have stopped it, or what it supposedly means about me. Most of the time, it blends into the background, and my diapers turn it into something comfortable and manageable enough that I can simply continue living my life with incontinence and not constantly think about it.
I also recently realised that I’ve been wetting the bed for more than a decade now, which wow, that was a slightly alarming thing to calculate, haha. From what I can work out from my old posts, it began around late 2015, so bedwetting has been part of my life for roughly a third of it and basically my entire adult life. Time really does fly when you are waking up wet every morning, apparently. No wonder memories of being continent have become so fuzzy.
I can remember the hard facts about my prior continence. I know there was a time when I woke up to use the bathroom, noticed my bladder filling, held on during inconvenient moments, and planned around toilet access like everyone else, but trying to remember what any of that actually felt like is a bit like trying to recall a dream. The information exists somewhere, but it does not feel instinctively connected to the person I am now.
I wrote an entire big rambling draft post about this phenomenon before I disappeared, because past me was a bit unsettled by how much those memories of continence and control were fading. They feel like they should be important right. These days though, I think I just mostly find the whole thing interesting, because continence does not feel like something I am actively missing. It is not a treasured former ability I keep looking back toward. It is simply not part of how my current life works. My life works with diapers, and honestly, I really like that it does. So I suppose that is where I am now.
I’m still very incontinent. I still wear thick diapers full time. I still prefer comfort, absorbency, and reliability over pretending nobody could possibly notice what I’m wearing. I still like cute covers, probably to a degree that has become financially dangerous in its own separate way, because apparently saving money by switching away from disposables just creates more opportunities to think, well, this cover has bunnies and the other one only has kittens, obviously these are completely different and necessary products and I need to buy every single one that gets advertised in my inbox because variety of cuteness is essential, haha.
I still become extremely opinionated about diaper design, laundry, hydration, or why a product marketed for severe incontinence seems to have been designed for someone who wets approximately three tablespoons per calendar year, but I’m also more settled, confident, and genuinely happy with my diapered life than I think I’ve ever been. Cloth did not solve every inconvenience, it just removed one of the biggest sources of resentment I had toward managing my incontinence, and that gave me much more space to appreciate my diapers for what they actually do and what they actually mean to me, which is a lot, who could have guessed.
As for the blog, I’m not going to make any dramatic promises about posting every week or returning with a perfectly organised schedule, because we now have approximately nineteen months of evidence demonstrating how reliable those promises would be, haha.
Digging through my old posts though has reminded me how much I still care about talking about this stuff, and how much I genuinely enjoy doing it when I am not placing some enormous imaginary expectation on myself to produce the perfect post that answers everything for everyone forever, despite my hopes and dreams for such.
Sometimes incontinence is frustrating, and yet more often than not I am deeply grateful for it, because I feel that this is how I'm supposed to be. Sometimes I am standing in the Thailand heat wearing an extremely thick cloth diaper and wondering whether absorbency is worth the fact that I am slowly baking, even though the answer is, and will always be, yes. Both of those things can be true at once.
Anyway, I’m still here! Still teaching, still incontinent, still wetting the bed, still wearing extremely thick cloth diapers, still choosing cute covers with the seriousness of meeting an imaginary dress code, and still occasionally discovering that my body has made a decision without inviting me to the meeting.
Honestly, things are pretty great.
It’s really nice to be back <3
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