It was a hot June morning during my sophomore year of high school. I knew I would not survive the day in the clothes I had planned to wear. The temperature was already in the 80s, and we still had not heard the first bell for homeroom.
The time I always dreaded had come again. The time when I would have to wear clothes that exposed the psoriasis covering my legs and arms. When I walked down a high school hallway as a teenage girl, I heard a war in my head. It felt like I was walking with a spotlight on me. I kept thinking, “I just know they are staring at my spots. They are whispering about how gross I look.”
I imagined the conversations the kids at their lockers were having about my skin. As I started down the hallway to homeroom, a cold sweat quickly turned into a hot burning sensation as salty perspiration rolled into my lesions. My face turned as red as the patches on my knees when I saw people’s eyes. They sized up my appearance as they passed.
I was 4 years old when my psoriasis developed. I have very few memories of life before the lesions. We all know that kids can be cruel, and it got to the point that I was forced to stay back in second grade because of too many absences. Psoriasis had negatively disrupted my life at a very early age.
Incident after incident and time after time, my psoriasis would continue to hurt me. As I got older, I slowly and steadily sank deep into depression. I developed coping mechanisms – some good and some not-so-good.
Before confronting a new situation, for example, I would start to get “hyped up.” Sometimes it was meeting someone for the first time. Other times it was the annual unveiling of my skin to people in my life as the weather got warmer. I would come up with answers to questions that might be asked and comebacks to snide comments that I was sure would be made. I credit my sense of humor and comedic timing to growing up with this disease.