PERSONAL ESSAY | In mid-September, I got a sunburn.

My first. My skin — a majority of my skin, the largest of all my organs — reddened and tightened, and the inside of my clothing rasped against it, bringing agony on what seemed like a timed delay. First, the touch. Then, the pain. I ran a fever that lasted days. More than once, after unthinkingly rolling over in the middle of the night, I had to stifle a scream, lest I wake the child who still sleeps beside me.

Before a week was up, there were blisters across the breadth of my chest — a shiny field of pinheads that rose and burst within hours, dampening my cotton shirt as I drove us toward home.

My bad joke: “I finally know how white people feel!”

I considered a visit to the doctor, but let’s be honest, a medical opinion is rarely wise if you look like me.

Hashtag-Not-All-Doctors, please don’t take offence.

Good, evidence-based care for people like me is sadly the exception rather than the rule. As a rule, the medical establishment is out to obliterate my kind, hoping at best to starve us into nonexistence, and at worst, recommending and undertaking the mutilation of our vital organs, carving us up, leaving us less than whole, and making us thank them and pay for the privilege. This isn’t an exaggeration.

The concentration camp mentality is alive and well when it comes to fat bodies, but what can I say to convince you? There’s nothing. Some ideas just seem to take hold, no matter how egregious. “You don’t have MSG syndrome because there’s no such thing,” I could say. If I was angry, I could add, “You’re probably just racist.” What good would it do? People believe what they believe, no matter who they incinerate along the way.

After the blisters, my skin started peeling.

It sloughed off, rolling under my hands into sticky brown worms that peppered the bath water. The pain had gone and it was impossible not to help this part along. My fingers compulsively sought the edges, grasped them and lifted, bringing up sheets of gossamer membrane.

How is this possible? I wondered, as the skin came away. Is this not the part that holds me together?

“What is it?” my daughter asked, pointing to my scales.

I’m becoming a dragon.

“It’s dead,” I told her. “Just skin that is dead.”

For weeks (again, none of this is exaggeration), every change of clothing came with a rain of flakes that would flutter to the floor around me, require a broom.

Desquamation. A vile word. I apologize. I won’t repeat it.

I’ve always been “too sensitive”.

For years, I thought it a sort of personal flaw that could be overcome. A symptom of anxiety, a weakness. Irrational. Illogical. All of those things.

“I know this is unreasonable,” I told a therapist I saw briefly in my early thirties — a medical doctor, before I knew better. “I’m not a stupid person. I see that these feelings are outsized. So what I want you to do is to tell me how to stop.”

Don’t laugh. I know it doesn’t work that way (though I think it should).

When you are badly burnt, it hurts to move, and it hurts to be still.

You are forced to travel through the world slowly, trying not to touch anything, trying not to be touched. This, I understand. People have been telling me to grow a thicker skin for decades, but I am as soft and uncalloused now as I was as a teenager, when my long-term boyfriend told me about someone he was working with on whom he’d developed a little crush, and I stayed awake for days, panicked about it. It’s been 23 years. Nothing happened. Why do I even remember that?

Want to see me cry? Ask me about a friend who isn’t a friend anymore, but never said why. Again, it’s been years, but I am still burnt. My thin skin is no protection at all.

Is that a bad thing?

It is who I am. I can’t seem to help it. I remember every every slight, every hurt, every feeling, and each one seems to support the next, and the next, and the one after that. And I don’t really know how to explain it except to say that it’s turtles all the way down and that it seems to mean something. Something about me. Something bad, probably.

If you don’t like that metaphor, I can come up with another.

One of the lesser turtles is my over-reliance on metaphor, another shameful quality, you see?

Okay. Okay. Let’s try this. So, every atom is made up of protons and neutrons, right? Surrounded by a nucleus? And surrounding (or maybe only sometimes surrounding, but that doesn’t matter) the nucleus are electrons and the electrons are moving? They’re, like, orbiting the core of the atom, making a shield?

At this point, a therapist will cross their legs. Their eyes will flick to the clock that is undoubtedly located somewhere behind your head.

Wait. I can make it work.

Okay … it may be a stretch. I don’t understand nuclear or atomic physics, but I’m sure it means something. I understand shields, and skin, and strength, and the idea that some things protect us, and keep us together. That’s all I’m saying.

I should have thought this out before. Let me try again.

One pain can eclipse another.

In this metaphor, we are looking up into space, and the moon has moved in front of the sun at exactly the right angle, so it’s casting a shadow. The sun isn’t hot anymore and we’re distracted, because this new thing, this new pain (dangerous in its own way because it’s rimmed in flame bright enough to blind) is right there, so close, and for a time, it’s all we can think about.

So one pain can eclipse another, but an eclipse doesn’t last. Whatever it looks like, the reprieve is brief. The sun is still there, as hot as ever. It was never gone. And the moon is there too. It was there all the time.

That one works better.

What do you do when you can’t forget?

For a month, it seemed my skin would never stop peeling. I thought one layer would go, and it might be tender for a day or two, but then new, and strong. It wasn’t like that. The same spots peeled again, and again. Peeling is a sign the body is trying to rid itself of damaged cells.

What if I’m damaged all the way through?

In The Hobbit, the fire drake — the great dragon Smaug — is said to have a tender belly, remedied by centuries spent lounging on a hoard of stolen treasure, so that the hard gemstones and coin embedded into the soft skin, armouring that weakness. Still, there was a bare hollow on the left, just below the beast’s heart. That’s where the arrow went in. No solution is perfect.

It’s okay if you’re not a Tolkien person. Do the things you loved as a child embarrass you now?

For most of my adult life, I’ve thought I had some type of semi-undefinable clinical anxiety.

Maybe a cocktail of GAD plus SAD with a side of Agoraphobia. I don’t know. When my hyperactive thyroid was flooding my body with hormones that kept me awake all night with my heart beating so fast you’d think I’d been running, and half of my hair fell out, no one ever bothered to do a blood test. I did talk therapy instead, plus seven months of anti-anxiety medication that I never needed, and from which it was difficult to wean.

SSRI withdrawal symptoms may include:

Once my Graves Disease was properly diagnosed and managed, it was easy to sleep.

My heart beat slowly. I hadn’t been anxious at all. Or, rather, I was anxious, but only reasonably so. It was anxiety-inducing to see doctor after doctor who didn’t believe me because hyperthyroidism is “supposed to” make you thin.

“It actually makes people larger in 10-20% of cases,” I’d say, quietly, humbly, but still inciting them to chastise me for daring to consult “Doctor Google”. Then they’d test me again.

In my chart, the word “non-compliant” appears multiple times.

As a sidebar, ask me how many times I’ve correctly self-diagnosed.

Answer: Countless times. Shingles, Bladder infection, Influenza, Cracked Rib, I could go on.

Now ask me how many times a doctor has suggested that there might be even the offest of off chances that I was correct.

Answer: Zero times.

One more. Just one. Ask me who wins.

Answer: Doesn’t matter. I win. And I’m the loser as well.

Here, the therapist may scribble something on a yellow legal pad.

In recent years, I’ve come to know more and more people my age who have been diagnosed with ADHD as adults.

Counting off the top of my head, I can think of at least ten people I personally know, in real life, who received this diagnosis in their 30s or 40s. Talk about a win/lose.

Nonetheless, I’d never considered ADHD for myself until I heard about something called RSD.

I know it’s tricky. Not everyone with ADHD has every symptom, and not every symptom is indicative of ADHD, and there’s a lot of crossover, right? But when I heard about RSD, for the first time ever, I thought, that’s it. That’s what I have.

“And what is this ARR-ESS-DEE?” the doctor, the therapist, your parent, your friend, will undoubtedly ask.

Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.

They’ve never heard of it.

There are so many metaphors that can be mined in this situation.

In any situation. In one situation or another.

To flay is to remove the skin, either of a corpse or carcass, or of a living being, as an act of torture. When an animal is flayed for use as human food, or for its hide, or fur, the term “skinning” is more commonly used.

In hog processing, the dead animal is often scalded with hot water to remove “the scruff” which includes dirt, oil and the outer layer of skin, and to loosen the hair.

A scorched-earth policy is a military strategy that aims to destroy that which might be useful to an enemy. 

Infernos in California, Oregon, and Washington state reportedly devoured more than 10 million acres of American forest this year. The smoke drifted all the way up to Vancouver. The skies turned red. Last year, fire took more than 12.5 million acres of Australia, and killed more than 480 million estimated animals. In the first seven months of 2020, more than 13,000 square kilometres of the Brazilian Amazon burned.

But.

Mythological dragons breathe fire. They store the embers in their guts. In humans, peptic ulcers occur when acid in the digestive tract eats away at — or burns — the inner surface of the stomach or small intestine.

In espionage, when a spy is burnt, it means someone has discovered who they really are, or at least, whom they are not.

In The Hobbit — I’m sorry — during the conversation between Smaug and Bilbo, Bilbo calls the dragon several names and epithets, including Tremendous, Mighty, Terrible, and my favourite, Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities.

“I’m concerned you’re not loving yourself enough,” the therapist might say. Or maybe, “we’re out of time.”

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