Discomfort

I remember reading once, in a novel, a description of a character that he was “comfortable in his own skin.” It’s a figure of speech that indicates self-acceptance and confidence. Now, not as a metaphor, but as a physical fact, I am uncomfortable in my own skin. My skin is dry and itchy. I scratch the itches and my skin becomes raw and painful. And ugly. Sometimes I see it as so ugly that I tear at it with my fingernails, making it more raw, more painful, and more ugly.

When I go to bed at night, after I’ve been lying there a while, my skin starts to feel hot, tight, itchy, and painful. It is almost impossible for me not to scratch it. After a while, I feel so upset about the ugliness and unpleasantness and pain that I become stressed, unable to relax—almost twitchy. I keep lotions nearby to rub on to try to do that instead of scratch. Sometimes, after I’ve been asleep for a while, I wake up with these feelings and scratch in a half-sleepy state until I wake up enough to get up and go to the bathroom to clean my skin with cool water and a washcloth.

Sometimes I've taken Benadryl at bedtime with the idea that it may alleviate the itching and in any case it will make me drowsy. But eventually I felt like Benadryl was starting to trigger restless leg syndrome instead of putting me to sleep. I also tend to develop allergic reactions to any skin product that I use for a while.

During the day, while I’m sitting at my desk, or in my car, or—excuse me for mentioning it—on the toilet, I explore my skin with my fingers, finding rough spots that I want to scrape smooth. This leads to increasingly raw, painful, and ugly skin.

Sometimes after I’ve scratched the skin on my wrists and hands until I am bleeding, I apply an antibiotic balm and wrap my wrists and hands in cotton bandages. For a while, this is soothing, often even for the better part of a day. Eventually, the bandages become annoying and I cut them off.

Scratching until I bleed makes blood accumulate under my fingernails, so I spend time cleaning my nails. Because my skin may bleed at any given time, I wear dark clothes that won’t show blood spots. I wear a lot of black, navy blue, and brown. I wear shirts with long sleeves and full length pants. I can only wear cotton clothes, smooth cotton. Anything else feels painful when it touches my skin.

Sometimes I plan a skin-care session where I take a shower and then apply my latest remedy to my damp skin—over the counter lotion made for dry skin or a prescription thing (lotion isn’t quite the correct word as its consistency reminds me of Crisco). I do this when I have time to slather it on, then sit wrapped in a cotton robe or sheet until it absorbs and I feel less greasy and sticky. Another complication is that my dogs think lotion is tasty, and they try to lick any exposed part of me that has lotion on it. So I have to be able to spend time in my room with the door shut to keep the dogs away.

I’ve had a bit of a struggle with dry skin since childhood, but it has been at its absolute worst the past few years. When I was in about elementary school, I would scratch the lower part of my legs. My sister once laughed at an old photo of me at about 10 years old wearing shorts with knee socks. I definitely looked like a dork, but I needed knee socks to cover my scabs. As I moved into my teen years, I got better at putting lotion on every day and stopped having such itchy skin.

My skin was clear and acceptable looking (always pale and blotchy but at least not with open wounds) from about junior high until my 40s. It started up again with my lower legs and then my lower arms. I would always have one or two sores on an arm or leg, and I would try to keep them covered. My dad told me that he and his father had had the same thing.

My dad also suffered from psoriasis. All of my siblings and a significant proportion of my nephews and nieces have some form of skin issue—dry skin, psoriasis, eczema—some more severely than others.

So after my issues started to resurface in my 40s, I was at that relatively mild level for the next two decades. When it really became bad, with all the severe symptoms I’ve described, was during covid. I had some mental and emotional issues going into covid, mostly related to the decline and death of my parents, but I’ve had recurring bouts of depression since about age 10, so my mental health can range from getting along quite well to really feeling shitty.

I’m an extreme introvert and I would see memes about how introverts were loving covid isolation, but it didn’t work that way for me. My main feeling about the pandemic situation was that everything felt unnervingly weird. The situation was bizarre, and that stressed me out. Also, a few months into the isolation my dog, who’d been my dear companion for close to 15 years, died. More specifically, I made the decision to have him put down. Even now, tears come to my eyes as I remember that.

Sitting alone at my desk at home doing my office work—by the way, I was extremely thankful that I did not lose my job because of covid but had that steady income and benefits—but constant solitude gave me the opportunity to scratch and tear at my skin as often as the urge took me. No one could see me and be grossed out, so scratch and tear I did. I became more and more depressed and anxious until I really could not do anything my job required, nor could I care for myself or my house. I went days without showering, weeks where the only time I opened my door and left my house was to go to a grocery store to have my online order loaded into my car. I had gotten new puppies and their love was comforting, but I couldn’t train them or clean up after them. I finally had to take a medical leave of absence while I got medicated back up to functionality. Not to a high level of effectiveness, just functional.

I never caught the covid virus, but the pandemic still caused a severe (mental) health crisis that is still affecting me. Since getting effective meds, I no longer sit indoors with the shades down for days on end. I take showers, and I clean up dog poop. I was able to limp along, so to speak, with my job until I was eligible for Social Security and could retire. But the one thing that has not improved has been my skin.

I keep trying different approaches. Starting just the other night, I put a damp towel across my lower legs at bedtime, because that’s where the problem is the worst, and that cool, damp feeling did help soothe the pain and itch. I had a smaller damp cloth to wrap around whichever wrist felt worse. I hope that this tactic helps my condition to improve.

For several years, the way I am able to calm down and get to sleep is that I listen to and silently participate with the night prayer liturgy of the Divine Office, which I play on my phone from the Divine Office website. Night prayer is usually between 15 to 20 minutes long. Sometimes I fall asleep by the time it’s over. Otherwise, I move on to the Hallow app and listen to and silently pray along with the rosary, which lasts 20-25 minutes. I often fall asleep before that’s complete, but, if I don’t, I still feel more peaceful.

(I'm silent in my devotions so that my dogs don't think I'm talking to them and get excited.)

During the day, I try to spend some time using my hands to do needlepoint or write in a journal to give them something else to do besides check on how rough my skin feels. I only do brief journal entries; that’s all I’m up for. Since retiring, after I wake up and take my dogs outside, I come back to my bedroom with a cup of coffee and listen to and silently participate with the invitatory and morning prayer liturgies of the Divine Office.

But still my skin and I are in conflict. I am not comfortable in my own skin. I can only hope and pray and do my best to improve.