The Creature Under My Skin

In praise of a short story that unexpectedly captures the experience of living with eczema

I’ve been at war with my skin for as long as I can remember. It’s hard to describe how eczema feels to someone whose never had it, but you’ll recognize it as a scaly or bumpy rash on most people.

The way it looks is just one part of the experience. Sometimes it oozes and you get the unpleasant experience of having to peel your clothes away from your sick, sticky skin. Sometimes it becomes unbelievably itchy, but the immediate relief of scratching gives way to burning pain and bleeding. Because eczema is an autoimmune condition, there’s inflammation underneath the rash — which often means swelling and irritation to boot.

My eczema seems to have a mind of its own. Every winter, it chooses a new place to spawn, usually on my hands or the backs of my legs. This past winter, it chose the tip of my right thumb. The rash spread until it started to eat away at soft skin under my nail. My thumb became swollen and puffy, later rendering the skin into a dry, hard, shell-like casing. At one point I couldn’t feel anything that brushed against my thumb. I also worried I might lose my nail entirely, but thankfully the rash spared me from that experience.

I often feel like I’m at the mercy of whatever my eczema decides to do. And before you come at me about treatments, yes, I’ve tried plenty. I’ve been dealing with this long enough that I know my triggers, and thankfully, most of the time, my eczema is manageable. But it’s an autoimmune disease that’s prone to flare ups and will (probably) never go away. That means I’ll be living with this creature under my skin for the rest of my life.

I think of my skin as an animal. It has a mind of its own, and as much as I’d like to tame it, it will always find ways to assert its autonomy. I can imagine most people with chronic conditions can relate to this — just when you think you’ve got things under control, your disease reminds you that it’s more in charge than you’d like.

Most books that I read describe skin in delicate, expressive ways. Like, “her skin was sticky with sweat” or “goosebumps spread across his arms as he approached the voice in the dark.” The skin is always in service of the skin-haver. The assumption is that it’s blemish-free, or at least functional. It’s merely an accessory, or a mirror to whatever feelings the skin-haver feels.

That’s not how my skin works. Which is why I was surprised when I picked up a book recently that did describe skin in a way I could relate to.

I was browsing at my local bookstore looking for something to buy on Indie Bookstore Day when I came across the short story collection Salt Slow by Julia Armfield. I’d never heard of it, but the cover looked interesting and it was in the sci-fi section, so that piqued my interest.

The book in question.

The first story, Mantis, immediately sucked me in. It opens on a young protagonist grappling with a hereditary skin condition, described as “not quite eczema but not quite acne, either. Psoriasis or vitiligo or something.” And yet, the way she deals with her stormy skin feels incredibly similar to my struggles with eczema.

A neighbor comes over and rubs the protagonist with different creams to see what might help. I reckon most eczema-havers have had a similar experience flying blind in the drugstore, trying different remedies until we can find something that gives us an ounce of relief: colloidal oatmeal baths, cortisone cream, various Aveeno lotions, etc. Plus the multitude of remedies recommended to us by well-meaning friends and family members.

“Our bathroom shelves are a graveyard of bottles — discarded jars and lotion pumps left to clog at their necks and nozzles, ointments used for two weeks and then abandoned,” the protagonist observes. Me too, girl.

But it’s really the description of the main character’s skin that fascinated me. Her skin is flaky, scaly, itchy, and repulsive. It’s bad enough to get her out of PE class, thanks to a doctor’s note. When all the protagonist’s friends, also tween girls, ruthlessly critique their own physical features, she handily puts and end to every conversation once the topic of her skin comes up. It’s just that terrible, and no one can compete.

There’s a lot of description of her skin flaking and rubbing off. “My skin peels into the bristles of her makeup brushes,” the main character notes as her mother does her makeup. In an attempt to give her some relief, her mother binds her hands at night to prevent scratching and wraps her bed in rubber sheeting in an effort to curb bedsores and infections.

It sounds like an extreme sleep regimen to follow, but it reminded me of times in my life when I’ve worn eczema gloves to bed or patched up my itchy skin with bandages to prevent me from scratching at night. Sometimes I’ll wake up, still half asleep, involuntarily scratching a dry patch that I was using all my willpower to avoid so it would actually heal. And yet I’d ruin my progress in an act of involuntary sabotage.

There’s one skin description in Mantis that I particularly love above all the others:

“I warm my bandaged hands inside my armpits as, beneath my blazer, I sense a slight but certain splitting in the fabric of my back.”

The fabric of my back. Agh, I can feel that. The way my skin splits when it becomes too dry or inflamed is like taking a seam ripper to the fabric of a delicately sewn garment. And the bandaged hands remind me of my own. I carry around piles of band-aids in my pockets during the winter in case my hands spontaneously start bleeding or oozing. On bad days, most fingers are already covered up.

Aside from a few bumps and a stubborn patch on my thumb, my eczema isn’t too bad right now.

Mantis is about a lot more than just skin, and I won’t spoil it for you because I think you should have the joy of reading it yourself if you can. But I was so moved by the realistic description of a chronic, eczema-like condition that I wanted to highlight it specifically.

In this story, the protagonist’s skin isn’t an accessory; it’s a character of its own. It has such a presence that it feels like its controlling the narrative more than the protagonist herself. And as she tries to tame her stubborn skin, it only becomes more problematic until her condition consumes her entirely.

While Mantis ends in a surreal and fantastical way, I adored the author’s attention to detail about a skin condition that, for the most part, felt extremely real. Bravo, Julia Armfield — you made me feel seen even if you didn’t intend to.

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P.S. If the topic of eczema interests you, I’ve written a few other articles about it that incorporate my personal experience. They’re a little old but still some of my favorite published pieces I’ve written because they gave me a chance to talk about a condition I don’t feel is well understood by the public.

Anxiety Inflamed My Mind — and My Skin. Here’s How I Calmed Them Both | Greatist | 2021

The Cure for Eczema is Likely More than Skin Deep | Discover Magazine | 2020

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