Accepting the Skin I'm In

Self-love is something I have struggled with my entire life, not too long ago, my hatred towards myself started to escalate. It got so bad that I started canceling almost every plan I made, and even ignoring people I used to talk to. I felt like everyone else hated me as much as I hated myself. I knew that it was all in my head, but I’m a perfectionist and can’t help but judge and criticize every single part of myself, especially my appearance. It took a long time, but now I finally feel okay in my skin.

In 6th grade, I would wake up with bloody scabs around my eyes and bumps that I couldn’t explain. My doctor and parents thought they were warts at first, and I had to go through painful attempts at freezing them off with liquid nitrogen and using various medicines, but nothing seemed to work. Somehow, the bumps eventually disappeared. But it wasn’t long before they appeared again, two years later, on my scalp, arms, chest, back, armpits, legs – everywhere. They didn’t come back right away. It started off as a couple of bumps, multiplying and multiplying until they were everywhere. That summer, the summer of 2016, I was diagnosed with plaque psoriasis: a chronic autoimmune disease that creates bumpy rashes of dry, scaly skin.

My condition was easy to ignore at first. It was pretty mild and was something I could just keep in the back of my mind, away from more important things I had to worry about. I spent my summer on the East Coast in the sun, and the UV rays helped keep it calm. When I started high school was when things started to go downhill. I attend a private, academically rigorous high school. I had attended public school before then, and for the first time I was worrying about things such as my socioeconomic status, and whether I was smart enough or not. There was a lot of competition, something I wasn’t used to. I became very stressed and anxious, triggering my psoriasis to appear everywhere. I started to feel a kind of self-consciousness I never felt before, a whole new level of self-hatred.

People started to notice. This time, the psoriasis started appearing on places like my forehead and under my chin, places I couldn’t cover with clothing. They asked if I was having an allergic reaction, and why I had such huge hives everywhere. I didn’t know how to respond. I was too embarrassed to tell them what was really going on, so I would just shrug and smile.

I didn’t want to tell anyone because at the time I thought of psoriasis as disgusting disease that only old people and weird people got. That’s the way I’d seen it portrayed in the media. In the show Glee, the football coach, Ken, had psoriasis. Nobody liked him and his psoriasis was used as a reason for people to justify why they thought he was gross. I didn’t want people to think of me in that way. I had nobody that I could relate to in real life. I didn’t know anyone else with psoriasis and I felt so alone. I didn’t want to out myself by telling people that I had it.

I saw a dermatologist and she prescribed me to a topical steroid cream for my body, an ointment for my face, and a liquid for my scalp. She also recommended a shampoo that was supposed to help with the flaking. I began to treat myself every night, my mom helped me apply the cream on my back, which I couldn’t really reach or see. For a while it seemed to work, but never completely. Every week my skin would be good until one morning when the psoriasis would decide to come back. However, it was manageable for the most part, and a part of me still believed that it would go away like the bumps on my eyes did in 6th grade.

This past year, sophomore year of high school, was a horrible year for my skin. I was under even more stress that the year before, more than I thought possible. My skin became the worst it’s ever been. My psoriasis became harder and harder to treat, making me want to crawl into a hole and disappear forever. I felt so ugly, so disgusting. I hated myself for having psoriasis, I thought I had done something wrong to deserve it. I didn’t feel comfortable in my own skin anymore. Almost every night I would cry myself to sleep about it. It didn’t feel fair that I had to deal with it when no one else I knew did. People at school and even family members started asking about my skin even more, but I still felt uncomfortable telling anyone.

I was talking to one of my best friends about an acne medicine that was working miracles on her skin. “You should try it,” she said. I was always complaining about how much I hated my skin I told her that acne wasn’t really my concern– that I had something else wrong with my skin that needed stronger stuff. I realized at that moment that I couldn’t admit what was “wrong” with me to anyone because I couldn’t fully admit it to myself. I didn’t want to believe that I had psoriasis, because in my head psoriasis=ugly gross people, and I didn’t want to be that. But I also didn’t like feeling like I was keeping a secret from everyone. I knew that once I got it off my chest I would feel a lot better. But before I could tell anyone else, I had to accept it myself.

It took me lots of research, and even secretly joining a support group online to finally feel comfortable with my condition. I learned that there were so many other people in the world with psoriasis, just like me. Beautiful, amazing, smart, talented people. I realized that there was nothing for me to be ashamed of, that it’s not my fault I have it. There is no cure, and I will most likely have it for the rest of my life. I now treat it as part of me, no longer an evil monster that makes me want to die. Each time new plaques appear on my skin, I think of them as flowers blooming. I love going to the field to see the daisies. You never know when or where they are going to appear on the field, just like the psoriasis on my skin. I have flowers scattered across my body, new ones blooming all of the time. I think flowers are the most beautiful things in the world, and thinking of my psoriasis like that makes me feel beautiful too.