Welcome to Getting Better! This is where I usually invite you to stop doom-scrolling, and to delight instead in a personal narrative essay. But today, I offer a poem I’ve typed with my thumbs, given my other digits are all wrapped up in bandages from an intense eczema flare-up. If you are also someone living with chronic illness, I’m sending you so much love right now and always ❤️
my husband bathed me this morning — overdue and too soon it had been a few days all of me smelling like my hands — open wounds festering. i'm 31. he says he will always be here i feel this isn't fair. my inflammation shows fierce resilience — he has never left my body. jealous, spiteful determined adversary. but i know this mindset — the most toxic poison in my blood. the resentment i harbor that is so misplaced so misguided it could kill me if i let it. so i will not. i pray for these tears to alchemize hatred into love anger into understanding fear into self-compassion — salt disinfecting all my wounds. i pray for the strength to live always in alignment with Truth. to see these two hands wrapped in bandages itching to write itching to create itching to nurture and love on my baby non-luminous pulsing flames licking at me. and rather than berate them to say to them instead — thank you i am so sorry you're hurting i am so sorry. thank you for telling me — for tending to me all this time. please let me now tend to you. and i will shower them with love hold them with light bless them with grace treat them with reverence with kindness and care hold them in love.
Touching poem! God bless you and your husband ❤️
My worst eczema was in my teenage years, I remember been lathered in cream around my neck. Mittens to stop me scratching. I've tons of empathy for you. The flareups are awful. The weepy wounds. I get it. SO sending you cooling hugs and distracting films or ideas to take your mind off the cycles of itch/pain. Thanks for sharing, typing and being here...even if you're all thumbs ;-) (sorry had to be said!). You're doing amazingly!