skin issue 10 # is there such a thing as caring too much?
Am I too self-involved when it comes to skin problems? Can some people really brush it off? Do I listen to myself too much? Can I let it go?
Hello, I’m Angèle – a writer and trainee counsellor based in London. I have a few (annoying) skin conditions, and I like to connect the dots between my mind and body through writing. Join me. 🏄🏼♀️
You’re too sensitive. You need to toughen up.
I don’t remember who told me that. Perhaps no one. Perhaps I just made it up and it was just the general gist I got growing up. I certainly saw how my crying, loving, needing was too much.
It took me a long time to accept that I have big feelings — I might still be coming to terms with it, but I try not to sit around feeling guilty about them anymore. They bloom, they don’t impose on anyone, but they exist, still and raw. They remind me of peeling the kind of peaches you could choose to eat with the skin on. Soft outsides that make you shudder as they reach your teeth, so you grab a knife to uncover what’s underneath, and it’s a mess really. Sticky hands, quick bites to catch juicy bits.
My skin, and all of its flaws make me not only full of feelings, but vulnerable at times. In ways that I sometimes struggle to identify. Last year, when it was pretty much at its peak, the urge to visit my older brother suddenly appeared. With the inflamed and weepy patches I bore on my hands, sometimes not wanting to look down, he seemed like the answer. A safe place on Bastille Day weekend.
My brother and I are very close, but not in ways that you can immediately identify. We don’t call each other very often or text a lot. I don’t know about his life, but we’re made of cutting Barbie’s hair and dropping Action men from bedroom windows, riding bikes alongside the same strip of road for hours on end, playing tennis with fluorescent plastic rackets, sharing Cornettos in our grandmother’s kitchen, buying waffles dusted in icing sugar with pocket money and retrieving lost balls from the neighbour’s garden without ringing the doorbell.
That’s what pushed me to fly to Bordeaux, where he lives. South of France. Far away from the Normandy land where where we were both born on complete opposites. I’m an August child, and he’s a December one. Regardless, we saw more rain through our lives than scorching summers, and before he moved, I didn’t take him for someone who would love that kind of lifestyle — where you live with the shutters down until four o’clock, only resurfacing for pastis, the sickening smell of anise, boules and long walks on the beach sometimes peaked by dips in a sea that never leaves.
Normandy is not that. The sea comes in waves of looking up the calendar and the tides, when you’ll be able to swim in a water that never reaches more than 18° degrees. Local food is made of apple cider, apple tarts, apple compote, apple everything until you get sick of it, and surrounded by cows with different colours as soon as you get out of the city. The grass is almost never dry, wetting your trousers if you happen to sit on it too early in the morning. Il pleut comme vache qui pisse, like my grandpa would have said.
Arriving at Bordeaux airport, I got off the plane, late, in an evening where the light had not yet set. I waited for ages in line at the passport control, careful to hide my hands in the pocket of my shorts. French people are tactless, and I always thought someone was going to comment on them.
I hadn’t seen my brother in about six months. And even that last time only lasted a few hours. We probably had one phone call since, where his voice had resonated over the walls of his newly empty apartment, as he’d not had time to buy new furniture. Had we ever talked about anything but the way we felt about the rest of the family and his recent divorce? Did we mention his kids? Maybe we had the therapy we didn’t need, so why did I want to visit him? I didn’t know, but it seemed like my weepy hands had done the talking.
It didn’t take me long to spot him in the shitty part of the airport where the Ryanair flight often departed from. It wasn’t even made of any concrete material, but iron sheets trapping the heat, and making me long for Cabernet d’Anjou drowned in ice cubes (a speciality of the South). He was smoking a cigarette, nervously tapping his tattooed fingers on his beige shorts. And I looked at him from afar. Just looked at him before he got the composure of being watched. Just wanting to know him almost, to see what he looked like, a nervous man who wasn’t able to stay still and who sported a dry cough in-between puffs. It only lasted a moment, and soon we advanced towards each other, corner of my lips growing big. We hugged whilst keeping our bodies away from each other. Perhaps it’s the way all opposite sex siblings touch. That acknowledgment when you’ve reached a certain age that you need to put some distance. In this embrace made of cold tobacco, Paco Rabanne aftershave and end-of-day sweat, I realised how much I’d missed him.
But my anxiety never flew far away from my body, and it came back to the skin. I saw the worries flowing through my mouth, mentioning my psoriasis and eczema in the first minutes of our meet, wondering about the mosquito bites, I had no product, were they bad, what to expect, should I get something more? My mind had been on the mosquitoes throughout the flight. I glanced up to him in panic. Don’t worry we’ll go to the shop. And we did, and he bought the product to slather my skin in chemicals, as well as the plug for the night. Refused for me to pay. I trotted behind him like a child. When was the last time I’d felt like the little sister? Ha, that was that feeling of helplessness coming back, but relief that someone was there to hold it for me.
It was only back at his flat that I noticed his eye. Beneath it, what I’d first mistaken for bags, like a shadow, drawing a V beneath his lids, a scarlet patch had grown. Swollen, blotched, or like someone had hit him in the face. I could see him scratching it from time to time with the back of his hands, almost like chasing a fly. He lit another cigarette and held it up to his window. I let the smoke come towards me. I knew my clothes would smell back home, but it didn’t matter. We cracked open a pack of mozzarella balls, got broken up crackers out of their sleeve, nibbled massive green pitted olives, and we left Parma ham to soften on an Ikea plate. I got a glass of water from the tap and I asked.
What’s that on your eye?
That? Oh that’s nothing.
It looks like eczema…
I couldn’t help it. The rush of info floated through my brain and I got a few suggestions out. This cream and this cream and you should do this and that, and he nodded along. Had we really been separated for the last six months? I got up close and put my hand beneath his eye to look at it closer. You should really see a doctor. He picked at his skin, and I caught myself from telling him off. I didn’t want to mistake him for me, but it was so uncanny to see his skin affected in similar ways, like it’d gone through a twin trauma outside of our shared daily lives, as if we were still sharing a bottle of milk and fighting over the end of a pack of Frosties.
It turned out that, my brother hadn’t even registered with a doctor yet. I brought it up a few times during the weekend. I stared at his eye and my own hands, making notes. Why did he not care about this? Did it not bother him? He went on about his day, sometimes chasing it away as it tickled his eye, but never even once looking at himself in the mirror. Why did I care so much?
I sought connection in our eczematous rashes, when maybe there was a lesson to be learned from him. I saw both the careleness and the letting go in my brother that weekend. Perhaps both can be inhabited, and we don’t always have to manage a perfect balance. I wanted us to be the same and catastrophise everything, but his technique was another one entirely: he didn’t take good care of himself. But on the other side, did I care too much? Maybe his tactic was the best after all. Why did I care so much about avoiding all the cannelés Bordeaux could offer? Why could I not just let everything go? But I have always been scared of letting it all go, going with the flow, because what’s left when you don’t take care about yourself at all? When you don’t bother brushing off the croissant flakes off your chest, delay the need to go to the toilet, brush your hair and go to the doctor. Of course I’m on the other end of the spectrum, and I release all my anguish onto Reddit in search of an answer, of wanting to fix your body so I can live your life the way I believe it should be, but is that taking really good care of myself, or am I just living a lie?
On the Sunday afternoon, I got back on that plane and watched my brother tearing up, swallowing back some myself. It was only as I waited for the gate to appear, and my hand caught the mosquito spray carefully tucked inside my bag between the rest of my belongings that I could finally let it go.
Today’s mood and skin situation
It’s going well, and I’m starting to think the over-moisturising routine prescribed by the dermatologist I saw privately actually got me some blocked pores (…) and made the issue worse by flaring up the skin on my thighs when I sweat a lot. Let’s hope this it, folks.
A skin product I’m currently using
I react to pretty much everything that goes on my lips unfortunately (bye bye lipsticks who I used to love a long time ago), but I love this lip balm called Nutritic by La Roche Posay. Not usually a La Roche Posay gal, I prefer Avène but this one is great if you want a lighter lip balm for the summer.
Mental health idea for the day
My therapist told me the other day about how the mind will latch onto every little thing you need to achieve if you try to accomplish too much, never really relaxing, but instead going into hyper-awareness mode in the background. This sounds exactly like me. It’s hard for me to relinquish control, so how do I do it? Sometimes I manage to do it over small things. For example, I might not act on everything immediately — like not responding to a text right after it was sent and leaving it for the next day, or not completing the insurance claim for my cat’s vet visit straight after, but waiting a few days instead. This helps me avoid being constantly on alert, looking to solve the next item on my to-do list, and instead dedicate a specific time of the day to admin tasks. It doesn’t always work, but I’ve found it helpful at times. The next step is applying this approach when it comes to checking and answering emails — seriously, I’m addicted.
What I’m reading/watching/scrolling/listening to:
Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors — I had no expectations at all for this book, but I find the sisterhood story really tantalizing. Not having grown up with sisters, and having just one male sibling, the competition and the turning on each other as a group of siblings is something I've not experienced, but I love the complexity of sibling relationships represented in this book and how you can never truly let it go. It’s also about suffering from endometriosis (though not the main topic), and as a sufferer myself, it’s been great to read about the reality of it in a non-survivor way.
I am so pleased that Anna Jones has a newsletter, and can’t believe I’ve not found out about it before. I’m planning on making some of these breakfasts sooner rather than later and would recommend you do the same if you like her.
This Instagram account by Claire is about the living truth of psoriasis sufferers, and what it takes to accept this autoimmune condition. Claire beautifully documents her psoriasis flares throughout different stages of her life.
This really struck a chord with me. I just wrote an enormous comment but I think I'm going to turn it into a post instead - linking to this post as my inspiration, of course. Thank you for your writing, as always.