My Skin Enters the Room Before I do by Rosamond Lin

The air conditioner in the ballet studio always found the open wounds first. Cold air slid against the raw skin on my arms and shoulders, stinging so sharply that I had to resist the urge to scratch at them again. The previous night, I had clawed at my skin in my sleep until thin red lines stretched across my body like hundreds of paper cuts. Again. In ballet, bodies are impossible to hide.

The girls around me stood gracefully in their tights and neat buns, their movements effortless and elegant beneath the harsh studio lights. I stood among them with my arms crossed tightly, my hands hidden under my elbows. Nobody ever directly asked me, "Is it contagious?" yet somehow I always felt they had already answered that question. During partner exercises, the other girls had already formed their groups, huddling together in clusters, piggybacking one another jokingly across the studio and linking arms between routines. I remained slightly apart from them. Maybe none of it was intentional. Maybe I only imagined the distance because I had already become so aware of my own skin. Still, the feeling followed me everywhere.

I remember rushing into class late one afternoon, my ballet slippers scraping awkwardly against the vinyl flooring as I hurried into position beside everyone else. One girl looked at me in a way I have never forgotten. Her eyes travelled slowly from my hands to my arms, pausing at the dry patches, the cuts, the scars that had faded and returned over and over again across my skin. She never said anything aloud, but she did not need to. Her expression said enough. I knew what people saw when they looked at me: your skin is disgusting.

"You should wear something longer," my mum once told me. "No one wants to see those wounds. They look too gory."

By that point, I did not even feel upset anymore, only tired. Tired of covering myself up in the middle of summer, tired of pretending I was not in pain (which I never really managed to do), tired of feeling like my body was something shameful that needed to remain hidden from other people. Eczema is not just a physical ailment. It is an invisible, continuous battle with both the skin and the mind. People imagine it as a minor inconvenience, something that can simply be solved with moisturiser and enough self-control not to itch. What they do not understand is that it slowly changes the way you exist around other people. It changes the way you dress, the way you move, the way you think about your own body. Eventually, you begin to feel as though your skin enters the room before you do.

When I was younger, my best friend had eczema too. Knowing someone else carried the same struggles as me made me feel less alone. We joked about how painful hand sanitiser felt on our broken skin and compared which creams burned less when we applied them to fresh wounds. There was comfort in being understood without needing to explain myself. But as we got older, her eczema slowly disappeared while mine stayed exactly the same. Her hands became soft and smooth, free from the wrinkles and fissures that we once both had. Meanwhile, my own skin was still trapped in the same endless cycle of healing and then splitting apart again. Sometimes the pain became unbearable. At school, there were days when I could barely hold a pencil properly because even gripping it hurt.

No one can truly understand what living with eczema feels like, not even other people who have it themselves. There is a spectrum of experiences. Some people carry it in small patches hidden beneath sleeves, while others wear it visibly across their entire body. Some people only experience it occasionally before it fades away with enough cream and care.

I do not think my condition made me stronger. People like to say things like that about suffering because it makes the pain sound meaningful and easier to accept. The truth is that it made me self-conscious, exhausted, and painfully aware of my own body in ways that other people may never fully understand. But it also forced me to understand something about human nature very early in life. People react strongly to visible differences. They stare at them, avoid them, misunderstand them, or desperately try not to acknowledge them at all.

Even now, when cold air brushes against my skin, I still imagine myself standing in that ballet studio, the bright lights reflecting against the mirrors, the neat rows of girls standing gracefully beside me, and the feeling of wanting to disappear inside my own body. More than anything, it has taught me what it feels like to be seen too quickly, before anyone has truly taken the time to know who you are beneath the surface of your skin.
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By Rosamond Lin
Year 12