Re-imagining Disfigurement

Laura's new man joined us for dinner. He arrived late, stepping over the dogs, and depositing a bag full of new books on the old stuffed chair. After affectionate greetings, we dived into the bag of treasures, babbling our delight or dismissal as we passed the books around.

The most unlikely title held the tastiest meat. "The Church of 80% Sincerity" is the story of David Roche, whose facial disfigurement (grotesque bulbs and forms that kept growing despite surgery) consitutes a journey to full, vibrant and loving Life. He is a beloved speaker,
teacher, author, entertainer! The healing journey is not matured until one is returned to the community.

Incomplete until it is shared, like any work of art. We ourselves are the work of art, under destruction, under construction, sickening and healing in cycles, always in progress, yet perfect just as we are. There is another cycle beyond these, often requiring profound anguish and hopelessness, cancer, self-disgust, addiction, rage, shame, cynicism, vitiligo, lupus, accidents, -- all the ugly stuff unknown, it seems, to healthy and able people. It seems.

It took decades to buff my veneer of Okay-ness to a high flawless gloss. Then decades more to let it (though not my hair) go natural. The vitiligo spots and patches told of wounds, but were nothing compared to the bleeding fissures I cut inside. How incredible to be inside this instrument of opposites and extremes. Heaven and hell dance side by side, the swirl of life spinning its gossamer beauties and beasts, waltzes and dirges, friendships and abandonments, kisses and misses, the brutal, bounteous, vitalizing world I both flee and crave.

The dead-white spots of vitiligo paint a picture so simple. I have no need of science or seers to translate my skin. Where my mind learned to fear, the hands feared to touch. My aversion to asking was so severe I would walk around the table to get the salt. First in my fingers is where the flow of blood and life ebbed away, cut off cold, pulled inside, disabling nerve-endings and cells from their natural functions. Feelings and emotions benumbed in childhood manifested an epidermis where the nerves are benumbed, cells less responsive to the sun and to touch.
I was a skin-starved girl-ling, saved by cats and horses, and by the sexual revolution of the sixties despite the self-betrayal that went with it. My vitiligo child starved for the human touch of kindness and affection, of humans who held themselves in kindness.

Re-imagining vitiligo as a sacred messenger transforms it from plague to a neat pamphlet full of colorful and practical information on my own mental/emotional/physical vehicle of life. It is a personal in-house psychologist and doctor. Vitiligo is my Shamanesse, teaching her subtle language of love thyself, and thy neighbor as thyself, by showing me where I don't.