I have had psoriasis since I was 5 years old. It started as a small patch on my left ankle – I remember thinking, what is this flaky thing? – and it remained that way for years. My dad has psoriasis and they recognized it right away. So as soon as I started having symptoms, my parents took me to a pediatrician, who diagnosed my condition. I was told not to touch or lift it and was given a low-dose steroid cream. This was my only form of treatment for the first part of my life.
When I was younger I was more concerned about the hair on my legs than the flaky patches on my ankles. But it started getting worse in middle school, when I was about 12 or 13 years old. Then I started to realize, oh, I have this thing. Maybe it was due to changing hormones or stress, but the spots started spreading. Once or twice on my torso or arms, sometimes even on my scalp, but it still wasn’t terrible. I was using some steroid creams, and I felt lucky that this condition had no effect on my face.
By my mid-20s, when I was training in graduate school to become a therapist, it started getting significantly worse. I’m 30 now, and what started as a small spot on my left ankle has turned into something that sometimes covers 70% of my body. (Although ironically, it never returned to its original location on my foot!)
mental load
I’d be a liar if I said that having psoriasis hasn’t affected my self-confidence. Guttate psoriasis, the type I have, presents as clusters of small, scaly red or pink spots. Right now it’s all over my buttocks, up my back, on my stomach and under my breasts. When it first got really bad, during the pandemic, I was a little nervous. It felt like the world was ending because of COVID, and everything was being impacted at once: I was working, going to school full time, interning, and trying to navigate dating. Around the same time, the strongest steroid cream I could use before considering other treatments like biologics stopped working. I was like, what am I going to do? I just wanted to hide my body.
Mentally it was really tough. I tried finding support on Facebook groups and Reddit, but I felt like they pushed me into even more negative thinking. People share a lot of polarizing opinions about treatments, and it was very easy for me to pay attention to a horror story or fall into the rabbit hole of comparison. I know the purpose of these spaces is to create community, but spending time online made me feel more hopeless about treatment and I became more depressed when I spent time online, so I decided it wasn’t for me.