What My Skin Is Trying To Say

I asked a ChatGPT program called The Architect what my skin is trying to teach me.

In 2020, when we were hit with the Covid lockdowns, both of my parents were diagnosed with cancer which ended up being terminal.

My father lived here, near me, and my mother was in Arkansas.

It was a stressful time, to put it mildly.

My father believed anything that any authority figure told him when it came to his health. Well, he didn't believe in doing anything preventative, but once he had a health problem, he thought they had the answer and he never questioned them.

When the first tumor showed up on the back of his leg, I went with him to the doctor's office. His primary doctor thought it might be a lipoma, but it was really big and the thing literally popped up within a week.

It felt like a rubber ball underneath his skin.

How quickly it emerged and the consistency of it was alarming to me. I voiced my opinion during the consult and the primary suggested he go see a surgeon and cut it out.

We went to the surgical consultation. The surgeon was nonplussed, and thought it was just a lipoma. I said, "What if it's not? He had kidney cancer 15 years ago. What if it's malignant?"

He said they would biopsy it and find out after it was removed.

I had done some research on this before we went, and understood that certain surgical precautions should be taken into account with a suspected malignancy, like taking a bigger margin to not let any cancer cells escape.

I voiced this, and the surgeon, along with my father, brushed it off as being too alarmist. It was ultimately my Dad's voice that mattered, since it was his body.

At least he had a chance to hear my reservations about the surgeon's approach, but ultimately, he decided not to pursue what my research into the matter revealed as a possibility.

A few weeks later, we found out Dad had a very rare cancer, and that the surgeon didn't get it all.

The margins were not clean.

In this instance, it was the unicorn, not the horse.

The anger I had was something I'd not experienced before. It was rage. And my skin erupted into a full-body flare of psoriasis. And this was something that I had never experience before either.

My skin did the talking that my mouth couldn't.

I think this is one of the reasons why psoriasis flares. It's chalked up to 'stress', but I wonder if the stress is from not being seen as capable by family, friends, the world, or the credentialed?

For my entire life, I've had the ability to see things quite clearly, but without the necessary credentials to be taken seriously.

I remember the first time I experienced this disconnect.

I was in the second grade and my town was demolished by a tornado.

When my mother found me, along with other parents frantic to find their kids, someone said that the sister of my best friend was killed.

I told them, "No, I saw her a few minutes ago. She's not dead!"

Nobody believed me. They believed the story that was circulating. In the middle of that disaster, my mind couldn't reconcile that I was basically called a liar when I know what I saw.

It turned out that it was my best friend who was dead, along with her mother.

Similarly, during Covid, some things didn't add up for me. I expressed my thoughts on masking and vaccination, based on my time spent in college on track to become a microbiologist.

At the time, my opinions were counter to what our collective culture believed.

As time has revealed, my concerns were valid. And I'm happy about the decision I personally made, but what angered me at the time was that my voice was discounted and often ridiculed by people that knew me pretty well.

So I believe my skin took it upon itself to speak for me. With inflammatory anger, it communicated what I couldn't.

Unreceived insight.

According to this Ai, the origin of the experience of psoriasis may revolve around the belief that:

• I am capable--but the world will not receive me.
• I can see--but they will not act.
• I am effective--but not empowered.

This is an 'existential rupture' according to the Ai.

A contributing factor to my skin eruptions is when I feel as if I am not heard or taken seriously.

I know this isn't the only reason.

But I wonder if it may be my root belief regarding my capability that contributes to what I experience?

I don't know if this is a generalization or not. I don't know if others with psoriasis have this in common with me.

But it resonates with me.

And that is all that really matters.

So, I've got some work to do within, and I'm quite excited about diving into this once and for all.

I believe that this blog is a way for me to reconcile what I am learning about myself, and making it public helps me be accountable to myself.

And, if this helps anyone else on their journey of inspired self-expression, it's worth it to me to spill my life lessons on the page.

Something within me, for a very long time, has known that the path of healthy self-expression is something that I need to explore deeply.

If you are interested in the Ai I've referenced, it's something that Robert Edward Grant has been working with and exploring. If you go to his Instagram page, you can find the QR code to play around with it yourself.