I’ve had psoriasis since I was 5 years old. It started as a little patch on my left ankle—I remember thinking, What’s this flaky thing?—and it stayed that way for years. My dad has psoriasis and recognized it right away. So as soon as I started having symptoms, my parents took me to a pediatric dermatologist, who diagnosed me with the condition. I was told not to touch or pick at it and was prescribed a low-dosage steroid cream. That was the only course of treatment for the first half of my life.
When I was younger I was more concerned about the hair on my legs than the flaky patch on my ankle. But it started getting worse in middle school, when I was about 12 or 13. That’s when I began to realize, Oh, I have this thing. Maybe it was changing hormones or stress, but the spots started to spread. I’d get a one or two on my torso or arms, sometimes my scalp, but it still wasn’t terrible. I was using some steroid creams, and I felt lucky that the condition didn’t impact my face.
It wasn’t until my mid-20s, when I was in grad school training to be a therapist, that it started getting significantly worse. I’m 30 now, and what started as a small spot on my left ankle has become something that sometimes covers 70% of my body. (Although ironically, it has never returned to the original location on my leg!)
The mental load
I’d be a liar if I said having psoriasis hasn’t impacted my confidence. Guttate psoriasis, the type I have, presents as small, scaly red or pink clusters of spots. Right now it’s all on my buttocks, up my back, on my stomach, and under my breasts. When it first got really bad, during the pandemic, I was freaking out a little. The world felt like it was ending because of COVID, and everything was hitting at once: I was working, going to school full-time, doing an internship, and trying to navigate dating. Around the same time, the strongest steroid cream I could use before having to consider 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 hard. I tried to find support in Facebook groups and on Reddit, but I felt like they put me in an even more negative headspace. People share lots of polarizing opinions about treatments, and it was too easy for me to latch on to some horror story or fall into a rabbit hole of comparison. I know these spaces are intended to create community, but spending time online left me feeling more pessimistic about treatment and more depressed when I spent time online, so I decided it wasn’t for me.
