Hi, I’m Nina.

My name is Nina, and this space was born from the story my body carried when words were not enough.

This is my TSW journey – eleven years of survival, trauma, and learning what healing really means.

My TSW Journey and Healing in Layers

For over eleven years I lived through Topical Steroid Withdrawal (TSW). My skin burned, cracked, and shed in ways that made everyday life feel impossible.

But underneath the surface symptoms, I began to unravel something deeper — war trauma, abuse, medical harm, and all the memories that had been silenced in me for decades.

What started as a physical collapse became an opening and awakening into so much more. I realized healing wasn’t happening in a straight line. It was unfolding in layers — physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.

These are the layers I write from.

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The Physical Layer

The physical layer is where my story began: burning skin, sleepless nights, and endless shedding. For years, my body screamed what my voice could not.

Every flare, every crack, every wave of pain was more than just a symptom. It was a language — my body holding everything that had been suppressed, everything I had been taught to endure in silence.

My TSW journey wasn’t only a medical withdrawal. It was the surf ace eruption of war trauma, abuse, and years of being silenced. The steroids had numbed my skin, but when they stopped, my body became the messenger I could no longer ignore.

The Emotional Layer

The emotional layer revealed itself slowly. Beneath the skin, I found grief that had been buried for decades.

Illness brought me face to face with sorrow I hadn’t named, with anger I had learned to swallow, with fear that lived in every cell. These emotions surfaced in waves, often as relentless as the physical symptoms.

Instead of resisting them, I began to listen. Each emotion was a voice from the past, asking to be acknowledged, felt, and finally released.

The Mental Layer

The mental layer carried its own patterns: stories I told myself, beliefs I inherited, identities I clung to long after they stopped serving me.

My mind was a survival tool, sharp and watchful. It replayed the war, the abuse, the betrayals — trying to prepare me for what might come next. But what kept me safe as a child began to keep me trapped as an adult.

Unraveling this layer meant questioning everything I thought I knew. It meant laying down the armor of vigilance and allowing space for new ways of seeing myself, my body, and the world.

The Spiritual Layer

The spiritual layer was both the last to emerge and the one that carried me through all the others.

When everything else was stripped away, I began to sense that healing was not only about repairing the body or soothing the mind. It was about remembering the soul underneath it all.

In silence, in nature, in prayer, I touched moments of peace that no flare could burn away. I began to see that the journey itself was a path of remembrance — peeling back layers to return to something whole, something sacred, that had never been lost.

Healing in layers is not quick and it is not easy. It is raw, messy, and often unbearable. But it is also the place where tenderness is born, where remembrance returns, and where something sacred begins to breathe again.

This is the work of my life and the reason I share my story here. Not because I have all the answers, but because I know what it means to feel broken, to feel unseen, to feel like there is no way through.

If my TSW journey or these words resonate with you, I invite you to walk with me. Explore the layers, write your own, and find the threads of healing that are waiting in your story too.

For more information and resources about TSW, please visit www.itsan.org