The Slow Burn

Before the fatigue.
Before the inflammation.
Before the brain fog, the supplements, or even the first time a doctor dismissed me...

There was this quiet, heavy feeling:
something’s wrong with me.

I was just a young girl when my skin started to change.
It began with one spot — a small bump on my right cheek.
That was the beginning.

And you never forget your first —
although what I’m talking about is probably not what you’re thinking.
Haha.

Over time, that one bump became two.
Then five.
Then dozens.
They spread slowly, silently, across my body.
Like a secret I couldn’t keep.

No one knew what it was.
Doctors didn’t have answers.
They stared.
They poked.
They prescribed things that didn’t work.

My parents did everything they possibly could.
Eventually, I found myself at the University of Minnesota —
surrounded by medical students under bright fluorescent lights,
being studied like a zoo animal instead of a human being.

It was called Grand Rounds.
But it didn’t feel grand.
It felt humiliating.
It took six people to hold me down for my first skin punch biopsy —
and yes, it felt exactly like a punch.

I wasn’t a girl anymore.
I was a case.

And then came the words I’ve never been able to forget.

My older brother once said,
“No one will ever love you.
Because when they run their hand down your arm,
they’ll feel it.
Bump… bump… bump… all the way down.”

He thought he was being funny.
But little did he know those words would stay with me forever.

Something in me cracked open that day —
and something else quietly shut down.

That was the start of the silence.

Not just with other people —
with myself.

I stopped trusting my body.
Stopped looking at it with kindness.
Stopped believing I could be loved fully,
without first apologizing for the way I was made.

I spent years covering myself up.
Physically.
Emotionally.

My body became something I hid behind —
not something I lived in.

And before I ever got sick,
before there were test results or diagnoses or prescriptions...

I had already disconnected.

This is the part of the story that doesn't show up in lab reports.
But it matters.

Because this —
this shame,
this silence,
this quiet self-abandonment —
is when it started.

If you’ve ever felt like you had to hide your body…
your story…
your truth —
I want you to know something:

You’re not alone.
And you’re not too far gone to come back to yourself.

The moment you stop apologizing for how you were made
is the moment you start remembering who you are.

Healing doesn’t always start in a doctor’s office.
Sometimes it starts right here —
with truth.

With heart,
Rebecca