Fourteen Years

What fourteen years of TSW taught me about healing, and myself

by Nina

Fourteen years is a long time to be at war with yourself.

I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I thought I was healing. I thought I was fighting for my health, my skin, my life back, and I was, in the way you fight for something when you don’t yet know what you’re actually fighting. June 15th is coming. Fourteen years since topical steroid withdrawal began dismantling the life I thought I was supposed to have. And I am sitting here with a face that is hot and tight and red, eyes too blurry to see clearly, open wounds on the palm of my hand, writing this anyway. Because something has shifted. Not in my skin. In me.

I want to try to tell you what.

A few months ago I had a realization I wasn’t ready for, even though somewhere very deep, I had always known. I am a highly sensitive person. Not in the soft, manageable way that sounds like a personality quirk. I mean the real thing: nervous system, soul, the way I came into the world wired. I took the test. I scored the highest possible on the spectrum. There was no denying it anymore.

I had been told this most of my life. I had spent most of my life running from it.

What followed the realization wasn’t relief. The first few days felt like being handed a diagnosis I hadn’t braced for. Like a doctor sitting me down. Like something closing and something else, something I hadn’t prepared for, opening in its place. I was in shock. Real shock. And then came the grief.

I had never grieved like that before. Not even in the early years of TSW when everything was falling apart and I didn’t know if I would ever feel like myself again. This grief was different. Bigger. Because it wasn’t about what the illness had taken. It was about what I had been trying to do to myself all along.

I had spent fourteen years trying to heal the sensitive part of me away.

That is the sentence that cracked something open. All this time, every protocol, every elimination, every desperate attempt to get back to some version of myself that felt acceptable and manageable and okay, underneath it all was a quiet, insistent belief that the most essential part of me was the problem. That if I could just get through this, if I could just heal, I could become someone less porous, less affected, less raw. Someone easier. Someone who didn’t feel everything so much.

But here is what the grief has slowly been teaching me: the sensitive part is not the wound. It is the center. It is what everything else organizes itself around. It is, in the most literal sense I know how to use, my soul.

Fourteen years of trying to heal my soul away. I am still sitting with that.

The grief that followed that realization threatened, in those first months, to swallow me whole. I went back through my whole life. Every time I had hidden that part of myself. Every time I had made myself smaller, harder, less. Every time I had apologized for feeling too much, needing too much, being too much. I grieved all of it. I grieved the girl who learned very early that the world did not always have space for what she was. I grieved the years. I grieved the war.

Now, months later, the grief is still here. But it feels different. Less like drowning, more like something I am learning to have a relationship with. Something that moves through me instead of consuming me. What’s coming now, slowly, is integration. Not resolution. Not the end of hard days or flares or blurry eyes or wounds that take too long to close. Integration. The sensitive part of me, coming home.

When I think about June 15th arriving, my belly tightens. There is a swelling in my chest. A tiredness in my soul that is real and that I will not pretend isn’t there. Fourteen years is a long time. The body keeps its own record, and mine has kept careful records of all of it.

But underneath the tiredness, and this is what I couldn’t have said in year three, or year eight, or even year twelve, there is something else. A steadiness that wasn’t accessible before. A sense of myself that doesn’t depend on what my skin is doing on a given morning. A strange, hard-won, still-fragile feeling of being more connected to who I am precisely because I have stopped fighting her.

I am not on the other side of this. I want to be honest about that. The flare is real. The grief is real. The anniversary lands in a body that is still healing, in a woman who is still integrating, in a life that is still being rebuilt one layer at a time.

But I think that’s the point. I think that’s what fourteen years has actually been.

Not a war I was supposed to win. A long, slow, painful, necessary process of coming back to myself. All of myself. The sensitive part. The soul part. The part that feels everything and always will.

I spent fourteen years trying to heal her away.

I am finally, at last, learning to let her stay.

healingthelayers.com