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Shedding Skin - Confessions of an Itchoholic
Episode 6 (out of 10) - Abyss
Subheadings w durations
Reality (5.19)
Young Adult (4.44)
Brains (3.12)
The Veneer Cracks (15.53)
Lack of Wisdom (6.11)
Steroids (1.29)
In this episode - I’m 18 now, and enter the big wide world. It’s a disaster. I crash my car. My friend nearly dies in front of me. I am betrayed. I enter a prolonged period of intense paranoia. I see an old school friend on the nightly news, he’s having trouble too. I can’t breathe. I find a medicine, that changes everything.
Shedding Skin - Confessions of an Itchoholic is my memoir of growing up with a body that was not east to inhabit. It will be released an episode each week for a few months. Citing neuroscientists, philosophers and modern-day poets (rockstars) and exploring the 90s popular culture that shaped me (its music, movies and video games), Shedding Skin is a rollicking, humorous ride of self-analysis about the confusion and alienation of growing up with chronic health battles, the disorientating effects of coping mechanisms (like alcohol and drug dependencies), and my eventual flailing attempts to understand how to live a deep life whilst struggling with new parenthood.
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Shedding Skin was long listed for the Richell Prize for emerging writers in 2023
Chapter 6 – Abyss
In your head
In your head
Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie
What's in your head?
In your head
Zombie, zombie, zombie-ie-ie
Zombie by The Cranberries (1994)
Sung by Delores Mary O-Riordan
Reality
Imagine for a moment you are standing in a dark jungle at night. There is no moon out, and as you investigate the dense trees and vines with your limited human eyes there is not enough light for you to make out any shapes.
It’s pitch black.
Next to you is an owl. With its comparatively oversized and wide-opening pupils and large retinas, the owl’s night vision is far superior to yours and it can see the trees, the vines, and the ground quite easily even in the dim light. Owls have poor colour recognition even in bright conditions because their eyes lack many of the cones that exist in human eyes, but their black and white night vision is comparably brilliant.
Next to the owl is a bullfrog.
Bullfrogs can see a much wider range of frequencies of the light spectrum than humans and owls, so to the bullfrog, the jungle scene is not just visible, it’s also full of colour, and it can see objects such as insects emitting ultraviolet light that you and the owl cannot.
Next to the bullfrog is a python.
It can see heat in the form of infrared light, so when it looks out into the jungle scene, it is looking directly at a potential juicy rodent meal, however it doesn’t use its eyes to see the rodent, it uses sensors on its head.
What is actual reality in reference to this jungle scene?
Is the world dark, as the human experiences it? Is it light and colourless as the owl sees?
Is there colour and flashing bugs as the bullfrog sees?
Or it is dark, but with a heat map of living creatures appearing?
Or is it all these things?
The answer becomes clear: ‘what reality is’ is relative to who/what is experiencing that reality – it is all these things and more, much more. There is no complete, whole, ‘real’ world that any one creature can experience, each creature ‘creates’ their own reality using the limited sense data their biological systems can capture and their specific brain to construct a restricted experience of the ‘world out there’. Zoologist Jakob von Uexkull coined the German term Umwelt to refer to this ‘sensory bubble’ of perceptual diversity experienced by each animal. (49)
Neuroscientist Anil Seth again - he calls our experience of reality a ‘controlled hallucination’, in that our senses don’t give us direct access to an objective reality, but that ‘our perceptual experiences of the world are internal constructions shaped by the idiosyncrasies of our personal biology, and history." (31)
The human brain and the external world co-create our version of reality, we get only a slice of the available information, the brain acting as a sort of ‘restricting valve’ (Huxley) so that we can attempt to understand, process and exist in a complex, overwhelming world.
Author and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist rubbishes the ‘naive realist view of scientific materialism’ that there is “just a world 'out there' unaltered by our experience of it, which like so many Geiger counters or photosensitive plates we can do no more than register.” (49)
That’s how we process physical reality I hear you say. What about mental or emotional reality? Does each human have their own unique umwelt they process the social world through? Is our unique mental state involved in shaping how we experience reality?
As I already mentioned, I’m no psychologist, but of course it does. Does an angry person see things to be upset at in the world? Does a paranoid person see things to fear in the world? Does a shy person see things that will cause them to feel conspicuous or embarrassed?
We can boil this down to – you don’t see the world as it is, you see the world as you are. Your brain has created a map to navigate the world, but the map isn’t reality, it’s a heuristic - a mere “re”presentation of reality. As Laurence Fishburne playing Morpheus in the 1999 film The Matrix, asks and answers:
“What is "real"? How do you define "real"? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then "real" is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.” (50)
The Matrix was my generation’s allegory of Plato’s cave, two stories that explore that what you can see and experience isn’t everything, that there is more hidden.
Young Adult
Back to me….
I started my journey into early adulthood on my first year out of high school by unceremoniously crashing my car (the Nissan Datsun Bluebird Station Wagon I bought from my Mum for the princely sum of $2700), before quickly dropping out of university and settling on the primary life goals of smoking weed and playing video games. The removal of the structure of the school year, a structure that I despised, was a disaster for me and my physical health and this contributed to a reciprocal closing of my mind – the reality that I was experiencing began slowly closing in on me, and the more it did that, the more it did that.
My sister had moved to Sydney with her new boyfriend, leaving me as the sole focus of generational disappointment in our household, a role I inhabited with aplomb by staying up late, sleeping in, seeking out hedonistic pleasure (like watching late night SBS movies), getting drunk and avoiding responsibility. I regularly began drinking alcohol alone in my room - just enough to fall asleep, not enough to destroy me the following day.
It should be no surprise that this was the period of my life where my skin was at its worst. It was torn, red and angry all over my arms and legs, fingers, neck, scalp and face, constantly erupting and disrupting. I was dehydrated, exhausted, my stomach lining was a mess. I looked like a zombie from The Walking Dead. The pain of simple tasks like taking a shower in the morning then moisturising my dry skin was overwhelming - I would get overheated and need to sit for an hour to wait for the inflamed skin to settle before my body had enough energy to move into the day. Sweating my way through the hot Queensland nights with scarred skin that couldn’t breathe was not helped by alcohol and staying up late.
I was spending hours a day obsessing over my skin and my broken body. I wasn’t sleeping. I could barely function.
Whatever the world had to offer, whatever was objectively or subjectively true about the magical nature of being alive on this planet for the brief period that any one human gets and all the potential joy and wonder that could involve, I only had the mental scape and cognitive rigidity to experience it through my pain and suffering, cloaked in it, literally surrounded by it.
I struggled to exist in the present moment, and be present, so I would cast my mind away from the moment, looking to the past or the future to alleviate the pressure occurring right now. There was always a past that wasn’t as bad as this moment, and always a fantastical future me where I didn’t have to deal with any problems.
It was impossible to not fantasise about a version of myself that was free of suffering. This fantasy version was a cerebral concoction that existed solely in my mental scape, a simulated future person that didn’t have eczema or asthma or allergies and sicknesses and so could fully enjoy his life. He was an idealised version of my potential, all the good things about me minus all the bad things. I was attempting to will him into being, for example every time I blew out candles on a birthday cake for my whole childhood I would think “I wish I didn’t have eczema”. (“Don’t tell anyone what you wished for else it won’t come true!”). This fantasy was something to strive for, the wellness that I was told was possible and had to work towards attaining, if only I made the correct decisions about how to medicate and treat and care for myself.
The problem was, he didn’t exist. He never would. The real me was living in upheaval, and regularly making terrible decisions that only made my health worse. What began as an ideal to reach, a goal of a ‘well life’ used to motivate and inspire, ended up a ghost haunting my thoughts. Repeatedly I would catch myself wishing I was different whilst still being stuck in the same place, over and over again wondering how I would be, who I would be, if I wasn’t constantly ‘impeded’ and restricted and impaired.
As I stared out into the ‘dark jungle’ of my experience of reality, all I could see was what my limited frame and limited brain could translate and reflect to me – that I was a lonely creature in a confusing world.
I was soon to have 3 events occur that would shape my young adulthood and the direction of my life.
Welcome to the jungle
Watch it bring you to your (sha-na-na-na) knees
Welcome to the Jungle by Guns N Roses (1987)
Sung by Axl Rose
Brains
The first thing that happened was one of my best friends James nearly died right in front of me. We were at my house (my parents were away camping once again) sitting on our back deck having a few beers (scratch that, I was swilling incredibly cheap and nasty bourbon). He was perched on an old dark brown bench seat, leaning his elbows on the corresponding wooden table near the Jacaranda tree that towered over the rear of our house, growing out of a hole cut in our back deck.
Having a swig of his beer, James made a soft noise “Ohhh” and lowered his head into his hands.
“I just got a headache.” He said. I looked over, dismissively.
“Yeah, I’ve got a bit of a headache too”, swigging my disgusting concoction.
“Nah, I’ve never had a headache before in my life.”
Sure, this was odd for a person who developed a healthy addiction to coffee in his high school years, and was known when younger to butt his head against large objects as a party trick, perhaps in response to the Ritalin they pumped him with as he struggled to pay attention to his schoolwork. (didn’t we all?). Never a single headache? What a blessing! Your first one? Welcome to the club!
I looked at him again. He was fine. I didn’t think much of it.
James had just suffered a massive brain haemorrhage. A malformed artery in his brain that was most likely there for many years had burst in that very moment and was bleeding inside his skull. Not long afterwards he staggered off to bed, but it would take a few days and multiple hospital visits for the doctors to realise that he had suffered a life-threatening aneurysm.
He was lucky to survive in the end considering the misdiagnoses and the long time between the event and the hospitalisation, however, in time he was treated successfully and eventually made a full recovery.
James’s trauma was a singular event (that he thankfully survived) and he was able to quickly integrate it into his personhood to make (some) sense of it. There was the time before his brain haemorrhage, the event, then the time after it. This clear delineation allowed him to move forward into his ‘new’ life, and he began this process by firstly drinking less beer (good move), then studying medicine and Radiography. He is now a father who works as a Radiographer on the Sunshine coast taking x-rays and scans of people who may find themselves in a similar predicament that he did.
Much like the chronic health suffers inability to have a clear line of definition between ‘being sick’ and ‘being well’, in contrast to James, I was still stuck in my disastrous health patterns and cycles, unable to ‘move forward’ because my event hadn’t ‘ended’.
Now, I’m not saying it’s preferable to have a brain haemorrhage – jesus christ no – I’m comparing the difference in experience of an acute situation versus a chronic one. His acute scenario was also life threating whereas my chronic scenraios wasn’t life threatening, only life ruining.
I got a bad disease
Out from my brain is where I bleed
Insanity it seems
Has got me by my soul to squeeze
Soul to Squeeze by Red Hot Chili Peppers (1993)
Sung by Anthony Kiedis
The Veneer Cracks
The second thing that happened to me during this period, not long after James’s bleeding brain, was I had what can best be described as a psychological break. I was spending a lot of time with some guys I went to primary school with who lived in my neighbourhood. We would drink beer and smoke weed a couple of times a week, play video games, listen to music, and just generally wallow as discontented and demotivated youth with few (perceived) prospects.
These particular gentlemen also took to the habit of injecting methamphetamines, A.K.A speed, into their veins a few times a week (or whenever they could afford it). I retained enough sense somewhere in my confused brain space to not follow their lead and ever do this myself, despite the practise becoming normalised by its frequency.
Over the months these young men began to be all consumed by their pursuit of the next high. There were always schemes to rustle up more money (which often involved visits to cash convertors to hock sellable items), always plans to score more drugs and always the need for another chemist visit to pick up a sharps kit. They began to interact with each other in a progressively strained way, with increased suspicion and oftentimes aggression as their dependencies began to tighten around them like a reticulated python, squeezing them of their sovereignty and agency. I realised that the only good moments between us were directly after they found relief in the form of drugs, that the drugs were needed to return to a sense of ‘normal’, but once the high dissipated the stress and anger and confusion would slowly seep back in.
I wasn’t any better, wanting to continue escaping my predicament with alcohol and weed, I was a slave to these high moments as much as they were. These sorts of friendships, ones built around drug taking, are often co-dependent – you need these people to meet your requirements of getting high - but like all co-dependent relationships, whether friendships or marriages, a sense of frustration and feeling stifled eventually emerges.
One evening I had an interaction with 2 of them at my house when my parents were interstate where I became suddenly shocked to discover these 2 gentlemen, my so called friends, were not as convivial towards me as I had previously understood – in fact they had decided they very much disliked me and had designs to betray me (for reasons that I still don’t quite comprehend, but most likely something that happens frequently when drug-fucked people hang out too much). They in fact covertly and unironically drugged me, most likely as a prank, but probably in order to express their hatred for me and to ensure that I had a disturbing and perhaps paranoid experience. They got their wish!
When friendships end, sometimes it can be a long, slow fading good night where each party gently goes their separate ways along different paths, close mateship petering out over time like the fading of exterior paint. Sometimes they collapse in a moment and meet a precipitous and shocking end like a house fire, a moment of clarity that reveals there is nothing in the relationship to maintain it and it instantly implodes, flame blasted to oblivion. Not only did my relationship with both of them end that evening (I never saw either of them again), but becoming abruptly untethered from these friendships, however tenuous they turned out to be, coupled with my unconsenting brain’s reaction to smoking weed that was laced with meth (or whatever it was), set off a reaction inside my mind that would lead me to the edge of understanding the way my brain worked.
I experienced a prolonged state of deep paranoia.
The parts of me that I so meticulously kept separate for the entirety of my high school years (the happy, ‘normal’, funny Nick and the broken, obsessive, ‘sick’ Nick) brutally collided and merged to form some sort of super-organism, a confused golem forged in a violent mashing of the Yin and Yang and a collision of the dark and light.
It was as if I suffered my own metaphysical brain haemorrhage.
The paranoia felt like this: everything that was happening that I could sense was construed by my mind as a reflection of my conspicuousness and the feeling that I was a deeply flawed, hateable human. I felt as if suddenly the entire world knew of me, knew of my broken life and of the truth of my obsession with my skin. In public places I would notice people look at me, and in my mind, I could sense a feeling of recognition – that I was known by them to be the crazy aberration of a person who couldn’t function normally and whose life was spiralling. And that they were laughing at me.
The perception that people ‘knew’ me was transferred to every single person I saw or interacted with without exception, even people on TV or in movies. This was a deep paranoid episode that lasted months.
Everywhere I looked, my conspicuousness was reflected back at me. Every sound was a snicker at my horrible nature, each strangers smile a concealed ‘knowing’, every far-off laugher was a cackle about my weaknesses. My mind was a hurricane of thoughts, of rampant apophenia - which is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things - of out-of-control pattern recognition firing in every direction.
Dylan Lewis from Recovery was watching me through the TV and knew what I was thinking.
Nothing that I could experience was not a part of this plot, because it was a plot created by the very mind that was the arbiter of my experience. There was a deep, all-consuming suspicion that my life was being recorded by hidden cameras and broadcast to all corners of the globe, Truman Show style, to the glee and delight of the voyeurs who enjoyed watching and laughing at my suffering.
The part of me that I reflexively attempted to keep hidden, the concealed parts of my addictive and OCD behaviour, of my red and torn skin, and the pain and anguish of my health battles that I had cordoned off for so long were the parts that ultimately would feel exposed by my paranoia, dangling on display like a Lady Gaga meat dress. The barrier between private and public dissolved in my mind and the horror of my most private of secrets felt known by everyone I encountered. The privacy of my room became ‘the world’, the local became global.
I could be seen by all.
My mind was asking and answering for me the following question - what are people thinking of me now that they know the truth about me? The answer my mind gave back was not pleasant.
The real truth, of course, was I was an unwell and addicted person with a confusing chronic health condition who was using paranoia inducing drugs as an escape from his physical situation and who had also just gone through a big life change – finishing high school and being thrown out into the jungle of the big wide world after so many years of curated and organised structure. Not to mention nearly losing a friend to a medical emergency and losing two more to addiction and the cruelty it evokes.
I felt singularly alone in the world during these months. I couldn’t trust anyone. This deep fear of ‘being seen’, ‘being noticed’, my bare Achilles heel, was exposed and being fired on by arrows from all around.
After months of living inside the pressure cooker of my mind, finally a crack in the façade of the all-encompassing feeling of conspicuousness appeared. A part of me, however small, was able to reason that there seemed to be a mismatch between the prosaic nature of my actual life (ie, I barely left the house, and I wasn’t doing anything remotely interesting), and the rampant enjoyment my paranoid mind was telling me others were getting by constantly surveilling and mocking me. The very fact that my brain was still able to compute some form of logic during this mental turbulence is fascinating, a kernel of ‘truth’ emerging through the hurricane of paranoid thoughts, my previously prized rationality coldly surveying the facts to reveal my paranoia as the delusion that it was.
Also, everyone was in on this? Even actors on TV knew about me? Hmm, quite suspicious.
Another part of me reasoned I might have to embrace the absurdity of it all, that on some level I had to except the (however unlikely) possibility that my worst fears were true, that I was being watched by everyone. Once I did that I kind of had to embrace myself under their watchful and judgemental all-seeing eyes. Perhaps this is the first tentative step towards self-acceptance. Perhaps this is how some people see an omnipotent God. It was a reckoning with the part of me that I had always looked to conceal and to hide, even from myself, but could hide no longer.
There was a slimmer of power in this sensation.
Ha, I’m still alive and you can watch me all you want! I asked myself, was I really that much of a fuck up? Was my every action worthy of mocking? Perhaps if people had nothing better to do than to log into the 24/7 video stream of my life and gawk at me for hours then that made them as stupid and ridiculous as me!
Another rational question landed in my head - how did they get such high-quality video streams of me anyway? Our home internet could barely keep up with me downloading small jpegs of penthouse pets let alone stream my misery to the world live and in HD.
I began to realise that perhaps the entire world was not about me. I mean, how self-focused can you be? Well, paranoia in the ultimate self-focus – everything is about you. Every sensory input runs down the same pathways in your mind, enacting the same pattern and the same reaction– you are faulty and people know. Luckily, I thought, “you appear not to be that interesting!” What a relief! And finally, a use for those nihilistic propositions that your life isn't special, and you are merely one of billions and billions of people trying to make sense of a complex world. Thank God I'm a useless pustule on the ass of the world and its myriad citizens could care less about a boy/man living with his parents who had a skin disease that makes him feel conspicuous and vile.
It’s clear to me now that the unrealistic and uber judgment of these imagined watchers was really my own judgement of myself, my life, and in part my decisions. There were things about me that I needed to face, my obsessions and my tendency to conceal, but I was, unironically, hiding from them, trapped in the cage my mind had built, a long way from being able to make sense of them because their cause was still running roughshod over my body each day.
The experience of paranoia is fascinating to reflect on. Everything outside, even completely irrelevant things, are taken in as important and erroneously labelled as having meaning. Every sensory input into the mind reaffirms the original malformed view of the sense of self because the mind is the filter that shapes (or warps) every perception, co-creating the conspiratorial reality. The ultimate, controlling umwelt.
Professor Michael Barkun lays out the 3 laws of conspiracy thinking as so:
"Nothing is as it seems. Nothing happens by accident. Everything is connected". (35) My paranoia was the ultimate conspiracy, visited on the very mind that concocted the conspiracy - mine.
As an adult I've noticed there are many people who live their lives like this. Not as fully paranoid people per say (although there are a lot of conspiracy theorists out there), but as people who take things that happen in the world very personally and unconsciously make events about them. There is always a way that a wounded mind can frame an event as having significance to it. Our nervous systems are often coiled up and ready for fight or flight, our minds grasping towards certainties, readying ourselves to go on the attack (with judgements), projecting the ‘inner’ insecurities onto the ‘outer’.
This can also extend to people’s obsession with ‘what other people think’ of them. We are conditioned as social animals to avoid ostracisation, most likely because in ancestral times being forced out of our tribe would have been a death sentence, but many contemporary people live in an unhealthy hyper-vigilant state, as I did. Take this constant worry of what others think of you (and obsession with other’s judgements) far enough, and you arrive at paranoia.
I often felt that it was dangerous to behave in a way that would potentially ostracise me, and that fear helped me conform to ‘cultural norms’, whatever they happened to be, to absorb the story of how to be a person by acting in restricted ways to ensure I was accepted and loved. Almost like Imy entire life was a giant Asch Conformity Experiment – (remember from Chapter 4, when the individual subjugates themselves to conforming to the group, defying their instincts even when the group is clearly wrong). This created in me the always raging battle between conformity and authenticity, between the way I was told to be and the way I felt I needed to express myself.
What is the evolutionary purpose of being paranoid? Surely the original reason is as a function of the brain to make the person aware of some type of danger so they can avoid it. This ‘alert’ mechanism, taken to the extreme, can become predatory.
Much later as a fully-grown man (if I have reached that lofty title at all) I would discover that the only way for me to be somewhat comfortable in myself was to embrace radical honesty, to fully accept all that I am, which required the illumination of the worst parts of me, Freud’s ‘shadow side’, to bring it to the light so I could understand it somehow. Back then it felt like this secret, hidden, shadow life rose like a mythical dragon and preyed on me like the mighty Smaug to the defenceless Bilbo Baggins.
Soon after these events my parents approached me and said they were selling our house, my home for the all-important second decade of my live, and we were moving out to a more rural setting in Brisbane. We evacuated the the urban scene of my formative years and the young, drug addicted adults who lived there. They say that a change is as good as a holiday (from your own paranoid mind), and that turned out to be true of me. We moved house and my paranoid state gradually faded into the background.
My possessions are causing me suspicion but there’s no proof.
From the song Don’t Dream It’s Over by Crowded House (1986)
Sung by Neil Finn
Lack of Wisdom
Piecing myself back together somewhat, I struggled with the burdens that needed to be shouldered in my newfound and reluctant young adulthood. I searched for wisdom, but at the time, said wisdom was perfectly distilled (and satirised) by George Thorogood, who sang:
“Get a haircut and get a real job.
Clean your act up and don't be a slob.
Get it together like your big brother Bob.
Why don't you?
Get a haircut and get a real job.”
When you finish high school, the prevailing wisdom of the time seemed to suggest, you are supposed to do 1 of 2 things:
1. keep studying, which will eventually lead you to a job (or *gasp*, even a career), or
2. simply just get a job now and begin paying your way
Everything else is downstream from that. A person who cannot pay their own way is framed as a stain on our capitalistic society. For me, one very important thing was upstream from being able to hold a job, and that was surviving daily in my body.
I wasn’t the only one struggling to shoulder the burdens of newly acquired young adulthood. One night I was sitting watching TV and I saw Steve, the guy I went to high school with who had eczema (mentioned in Episode 4), on the nightly news.
He had jumped the fence at Ballymore during a Rugby Union match between the Queensland Reds and the Durban Sharks, ran onto the field and at full speed crash tackled the South African fullback from behind. The player’s head snapped back from the force of the surprise hit, and when Steve got up and ran away to escape, he was grabbed and held by a member of the crowd until he was taken away by the authorities.
After showing a clip of the pitch invasion, the news coverage cut to the front entrance of a courthouse in Brisbane, and out walked Steve to a small scrum (pun intended) of reporters. The first one to speak asked him
“So do even you like Rugby?”
Steve stopped. He looked at the reporters and the cameras, and from somewhere deep inside his nervous system he got the signal that words would be of no help here, that his intoxicated actions on that fateful day couldn’t easily be justified, and that it would be of no benefit to anyone if they were illuminated as to whether he did, or did not, like rugby. Anxiety washed over his face. So he turned around, and ran off, his freshly bought neck tie flapping in the breeze. The cameras rolled and the news segment rounded out with Steve in full escape mode, hightailing down the city footpath in the sparkling Queensland sun.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve found myself in a situation when asked a question, I wish I could, instead of answering, simply remove myself physically from the location by way of swift bipedalism. So, I had much sympathy for Steve in that moment (not for his drunken antics, but his inability to respond to, in this case, unwanted attention).
That ‘flash’ of attention that I’d suddenly find upon me, the gaze of consciousness of another person, perhaps the long tendrils of my paranoia, would course electricity through my body like the cold shock from a pool plunge in winter.
I would then, like Steve, be expected to immediately and with ease ‘represent myself in the world’ by way of speaking, and this task seemed harder that it should be.
“Use the oscillation of your throat to justify your existence!” my mind would shout. The problem (other than being ill-equipped to justify anything of the sort) was I would regularly run out of breath. As an oxygen breathing creature, it seemed important that I be able to breath oxygen, yet I would often have trouble getting enough of this precious gaseous chemical element into my inflamed respiratory system at the same time as ensuring the vibrations that left my voice box could be deciphered. What a conundrum – to breath, or to speak: that is the question.
Even as my paranoid break passed, I was still sensitive to ‘being seen’ and I couldn’t with confidence represent myself in the world, because these concepts of self and world were murky to me.
Perhaps some answers James Nestor lays out in his book Breathe that the softening diet of Western humans over the last few hundred years has radically changed the shape of our mouths and jaws, leaving us with crooked teeth and overbites that restrict oxygen flow and cause breathing issues.
He could not have explained my diet or my mouth more perfectly.
“Some cultures ate nothing but meat, while others were mostly vegetarian. Some relied primarily on homemade cheese; others consumed no dairy at all. Their teeth were almost always perfect; their mouths were exceptionally wide, nasal apertures broad.”
A future palaeontologist showing my skull and jawbone to a class of students may note:
"And here we have the skull of a man who lived at the turn of the millennium and subsisted on custard, gummy lollies and fermented grains, which they called 'beer'. All of these dietary decisions disrupted his endocrine system, rotted his teeth and atrophied his jawline resulting in sinus issues and respiratory problems which in turn wreaked havoc on all areas of his health. This person would clearly have issues breathing and talking at the same time. You can see the metal rods they drilled into him in an attempt to correct for his incredibly poor lifestyle choices. It's not clear why this person made such tragic decisions but it's a cautionary tale of the way our ancient ancestors forgot to honour our god
Even as my mind pieced itself back together from its paranoid break, there was still a mismatch between the physical body I needed to inhabit in order in to be the world, and my (in)ability to express myself socially with this particular and peculiar body with its weak jawline and congested upper respiratory. So much of my self was hidden like the proverbial iceberg, and the bit that was showing still felt exposed and fraudulent.
Steriods
The 3rd thing that shaped my young adulthood was I found a treatment for my explosive skin that worked (gasp!), and it radically changed everything.
This is when I got serious about trying to treat my inflamed body, because I realised that my quality of life was so poor that it was going to set the stage for my entire life if I didn’t make some headway in my early 20s. My friends were at university or dating or keeping regular work hours, and I was a hot mess of red, inflamed flesh on no sleep with low energy who was losing his mind in the constant cycle of anxiety and OCD.
I tried Chinese medicine, homeopathy, light/UV treatment, Cyclosporin, Methotrexate, innumerable topical treatments, exclusion diets, special bathing techniques, temperature management, calamine lotions, pine tar lotions, honey extract lotions, Every fucking lotion!
You name it, I tried it.
Nothing worked.
Until, something did.
I hit the “jackpot”, in a steroid called Prednisone.
The same drug they game me when I was born.
This medication changed everything.
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Thanks for reading episode 6 / 10.
If you would like to support my work which is free to access, you can donate here at Buy Me a Coffee
Find me at sheddingskin.substack.com and on Twitter/X @nick_gilpin_
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Vids, Links and References
Click below for the page of all the links, clips and references for this episode, including a link to the Shedding Skin Spotify Playlist that has all the songs that I quote and reference in this podcast.
S1 Ep06 - Confessions of an Itchoholic