Thought it was time to check in with you all.

Life continues to be normal. Of course, my skin isn’t perfect and glowing, but nobody would ever guess my skin is any different from the next person. Certainly nobody would suspect I had such bad skin I was practically suicidal just a couple of years ago.

I guess it’s also cause for celebration since I’m now over 1,000 days steroid free! I’ve been getting little itchy patches in the folds of my elbows and also on my neck lately, similar to the eczema I used to have when I was a kid. I think part of it is I’m living in a place with a cat, and I’ve been allergic to cats since I can remember. But thankfully any irritations or flares I get these days aren’t enough to upset my day to day life.

I remember I wrote on my Instagram a few months back “Don’t forget to be grateful when you get everything you prayed for.”

I was at the beach when I wrote that, and I remember thinking in the depths of TSW I would just dream of being able to go to the beach and take off my shirt and swim without worrying about how much it would hurt or how horrible I would look. And now that it had been given to me, I was constantly reminding myself not to take it for granted and be grateful.

That’s how I continue to live and so a little rash on my elbows is never something to be upset about for me. In honestly, probably everyone gets a rash somewhere every now and then, very rarely is anybody’s skin perfect so we shouldn’t try to be either!

I also want to say a big THANK YOU to everyone who has read Iron Skin. I sold over 100 copies in the first few weeks of release and while that might sound like baby numbers to me it was just amazing to think 100 people are reading my TSW story. I hope we can spread all our stories far and wide – it would do so much to help people understand what we go through and also prevent many thousands of people of suffering through this unnecessarily. You can learn all about Iron Skin and order yourself a copy here!

Anyway, not much else to say other than I’m alive and doing well and to remind you again that, yes, it gets better, healing definitely does happen and please don’t ever give up! So many good things are waiting.

Sending love

B