Another thing that has been bugging me as well is a raised area above both of my eyebrows that is causing wrinkles to appear on my forehead.

Given where my skin has been, this 5% really consists of trivial discomforts but it includes things like eyebrow hair that has not completely grown back, thinner hair on areas of my scalp that I used to scratch quite viciously and the occasional itch (especially when the weather turns hots). However there is still that 5% as mentioned above which is centred around my facial skin. In other words, I can freely plan events ahead of time without having to fret about the possibility of a flare. I now don’t give a second thought to arranging activities with friends. Or even if I were to arrange a coffee, I would try to align it with the good phase of my skin. I used to avoid catching up with friends because I hated the thought of them seeing myself in that state. Showers are now a normal activity and I don’t have to think twice about the aftereffects. I remember that when it first started, showers were an absolute nightmare and I very much dreaded having one because of the way my skin would split open once finished. This is to be expected given that it has now been 3 years and 1 month since I embarked on TSW. This slowly (and if the bold font isn’t clear enough, I do mean slowly haha) dropped to around the 5% mark as of today. Right at the start of this journey, I would say that my skin and its condition dictated around 80-90% of my daily activity.

For clarity, I am only talking about my facial skin and my scalp now because other areas have not provided me with any issues at all over the last year. There are various ways that others use to gauge how good their skin is: the length of time since the last flare, the intensity of the flare, level of discomfort etc. For me, one of the ways I like to use to measure how good my skin has been is the amount of time I have dedicated to thinking about my skin and how much my skin has affected my daily life. Yet here I am not having provided the same form of comfort I once so eagerly craved. When I was deep in the throes of TSW, I remember clearly how reliant I was on the blog posts of others as a means of reassuring myself that I wasn’t alone. Firstly apologies for the lack of updates! I just realised that I have not posted anything for the past 1.5 years.

The end of something tsw