Thinking out loud about my relationship to others, myself, and my eczema. Snippets of this previously appeared on FB & IG.

Wordcount: ~3,000.
Content Note: Humiliation (?) and NSFW due to sex.

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I don’t like the horror genre, because I don’t like being scared. But every now and then I press through it, like Annihilation for Gina Rodriguez and Tessa Thompson, or Get Out to be culturally competent. I watched both with the lights on, in broad daylight, after reading the summary on Wikipedia.

I have a particular aversion to body horror though. I don’t fuck with that. I’d list some examples here, but you’ll just have to go to the Wikipedia article instead, because even thinking of listing them makes the back of my skull tingle in bad ways.

My body is already a horror, after all.

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A selected list of monstrosities:

• thickened skin, darkened skin, combine the two and you get dragon scales
• a body full of open wounds, ready to ooze and weep and bleed at any moment
• skin dappled with scabs in various states of repair
• my hands, smelling of raw meat after I’ve scratched them raw
• my fingers, stiff and brittle leaving me two options: 1) delicately applying lotion to my joints to bring movement back to them 2) clenching my hands into fists, snapping the skin open like a glow stick lit bright with my blood
• my lips, my nipples, splitting open like overripe fruit

Does that satisfy your criteria? Do you know why my body is marked off with yellow caution tape? It’s not because of any of these, it’s because of the way you treat me.

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