The Sign I Could Not Hide

It began beside my mouth.

A rough patch near my lower lip. Another along my cheek. Small enough to explain. Winter air. A new product. Something I had eaten.

For years, my body had given me signs I could manage privately. This one followed me into meetings. It appeared in photographs. It waited in the mirror when I leaned closer.

Then it spread. My arms. My legs. My inner thighs. A little on my stomach. And a patch on my breast.

I felt embarrassed by my own skin.

At the time, I thought the embarrassment came from appearance. Years later, I understood another layer. My body had begun speaking in public. It was showing something I had worked very hard to carry quietly.

That patch finally sent me to a doctor.

She examined my face, my arms, my legs, and my breast. She asked what else had been happening. I told her about my joints.

She guessed lupus, and asked for a full autoimmune workup.

I did not know what lupus was. I knew enough to feel frightened. She told me there was no cure. It would only worsen.

Even with insurance, I paid hundreds of dollars out of pocket.

I carried it home with me. On the drive, my mind built a future around a single word. Appointments. Medications. A life organized around a disease I had never considered before that afternoon.

What frightened me most was simpler than any of it. Whether I would still be able to become a mother.

I told my husband what the doctor had said, and that she had examined the patch on my breast. I was frightened. I needed someone to understand the weight of the word I had carried through the door.

He smirked.

“She examined your breasts?” he asked. “Was she a lesbian?”

I stood there with my eyes wide open. I was quiet.

I had learned by then that bringing pain to him created another pain. A fear became an argument. A need became evidence that I was difficult, demanding, sick again.

The results came back. No autoimmune explanation. Lupus ruled out.

For a moment, I could breathe again. I could still be a mother. It could still be something else.

Then the relief turned into another question. If it was not lupus, what was it?

My Body Was Always Showing Signs

The adjusting had been going on for years by then.

The first sign came within six months of the marriage. More than forty pounds.

The Forty Pounds: What Sudden Weight Gain Told Me About My Marriage

The second came within a year, and it came for my stomach.

First, at Chipotle. Severe gastrointestinal cramping, sudden and shocking.

It happened again at a Tex-Mex place, then at a sushi place. A few months in, I finally traced it back. Avocado. Something so ordinary, so harmless to nearly everyone around me, that I had never once thought to suspect it.

Then it kept going. Soup. Penicillin. Birth control, during failed IVF. Cream. Season after season of allergies I had never had before.

I read labels, avoided ingredients, steered around restaurants. To everyone around me, I was just a woman with allergies, a body that had lots of problems. I became efficient at being unwell.

Inside, I went quiet. I stopped asking why and started accepting. This was who I was. I was destined to fall sick, unfortunate this way, because of my genes.

I had yet to understand how deeply my environment was shaping my experience inside my body.

My brother was in medical school then. He asked the right questions, with concern. My husband dismissed them. Concern from someone who loved me threatened the control he held over my life.

The Symptoms Outlived the Marriage

My body carried those patterns past the divorce.

My brother again asked me to see a rheumatologist. Hundreds of dollars out of pocket, again. The second autoimmune evaluation reached the same conclusion.

Leaving the person did not switch off the alarm. My body had been in fight or flight for so long that it stayed there on its own, no longer waiting for a reason. A toxic stretch of working life in those years gave it something real to answer to. And on the days when nothing at all was coming for me, it answered anyway.

The Benadryl stayed in my bag for years.

A few years after the divorce, I went to see if I could still be a single mother. While running the tests, the doctor put me on a heavy dose of vitamins.

The eczema came back.

The marriage was years behind me. The man was gone.

I had left the life.

My body was still living inside it.

Awareness, and the Healing That Followed

That was when I began asking a wider question.

What had my body been trying to communicate?

What had it been responding to?

I was living in a marriage that kept me braced. The pressure was daily, low, and unrelenting, the kind of strain a woman can normalize while her nervous system records every hour of it.

Years later, research gave me language for part of what I had lived. Psychological stress can affect the skin’s ability to recover after disruption and can contribute to the conditions in which eczema flares.

In my life, chronic stress sat at the center of the pattern.

The turning point came through acupuncture.

My acupuncturist looked at my body holistically. She asked about food, digestion, lifestyle, stress, my everyday routine, what I was thinking, what I was feeling. She learned my history of trauma.

She helped create the conditions my body needed to heal.

She taught me how to listen.

It spoke through my stomach, my liver meridian, my skin, my joints, my weight.

[Link “my liver meridian” to the Scene 29 blog when published]

The sign I could not hide was never the beginning.

It was the moment my body brought the story into view.

Where This Work Continues

Second Spring Health is a personalized wellness platform for midlife women in perimenopause, rooted in the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine and designed to support this stage of life the way it deserves to be. So many women arrive at midlife exactly where I stood, carrying decades of stored stress and symptoms that one test cannot explain. We built it for them, as a companion to good medical care.

[Link to secondspringhealth.ai]

Sources

[1] Garg A, Chren MM, Sands LP, et al. Psychological Stress Perturbs Epidermal Permeability Barrier Homeostasis. Archives of Dermatology. 2001;137(1):53-59.

[2] Altemus M, Rao B, Dhabhar FS, Ding W, Granstein RD. Stress-Induced Changes in Skin Barrier Function in Healthy Women. Journal of Investigative Dermatology. 2001;117(2):309-317.

[3] Robles TF. Stress, Social Support, and Delayed Skin Barrier Recovery. Psychosomatic Medicine. 2007;69(8):807-815.

Traditional Chinese Medicine terminology appears here as part of my lived experience and as a traditional interpretive framework with its own language, history, and scope.