Autumn in Michigan is my absolute favorite. Time for pulling out the scarves, pulling on the leggings, wrapping up in coats and strapping on boots for some serious leaf-crunching Halloween bonfire escapades.

There’s only one bad aspect that comes with the shifting weather: my seb derm has come back in full swing, on par with (if not worse than) last year.

While I have a super thick head of hair and am generally not worried, I’ve noticed my hair falling out much more than usual tonight. I’m trying not to pick at it (I do it compulsively and it’s really hard for me to stop), but my scalp is literally COMING OFF so I kind of have to brush it out and try to hide it as best I can. It’s red, it’s painful, it’s exceedingly annoying. I’ve been picking too much and there are scabs and sores. My hair is either very dry and flaky for very greasy and flaky. There are flakes of skin all over my room that I don’t notice until I tidy. This is my fucking reality.

It’s getting to that point where my at-home treatments aren’t working anymore and I’m trying very hard to convince myself it’s worth it to put my faith in another dermatologist. I’ve gone to so many over the years for all my various chronic skin issues and have grown to distrust them, but I think it’s time I finally found a good one and stuck with treatment. I just can’t get around the distrust right now.

I don’t even fully understand where it comes from. My skin and my self image have a fucked history that I can’t even begin to dissect right now. Long story short: getting your hopes up that something will work only to have it fail over and over again while you’re left with your skin falling off or breaking out on a persistent basis is a hard thing to keep subjecting yourself to. I try not to get my hopes up, but sometimes I’ll come across something that actually works until it eventually STOPS working forever. And shit just keeps getting worse.

This all sounds pretty dismal and perhaps my thoughts are in a dismal place, but I think it’s more fueled by frustration than anything else. My body is hard to love. It is a good body, but when it fails me it is very hard to look past it to forgive it.