I spent a lot of my life ignoring and minimizing the shame I felt about my eczema. Instead, I went about life without dealing with the emotional consequences. It’s surprising how much shame around body image can affect our self-esteem, even when we know it shouldn’t.
Learning a vocabulary for how to talk about my experience of shame has been life-changing. I share this piece of my journey in the hope that, for others, it lessens the power of that which we hide and cover up.