My first job was waitressing and I remember being so mortified that I was serving food with like flaky skin falling off my face and obviously like I couldn’t cover it because I was asked to wear like black T-shirts so I had my arms out and my neck out and I remember being like, every time being so nervous someone would confront me and be like That girl shouldn’t be serving food cos her skin, because when it’s dry, obviously it comes off and that was really horrid and I was so aware of it whenever I was working. But other than that, no I worked in a school on my year abroad and, with 11 year old boys, they have some nerve when speaking to adults and they would make remarks but like by then I could like stand up for myself and by then I’d be like Actually like that’s really unfair and it’s completely out of my power and I could say just has horrible things about you and you’re facial figures which are equally out of your power and that’s kind of, cos I was a teacher I was able to kind of take it back and like teach them a lesson and be like You can’t say that.

I’ll always come back with like worse eczema than when I started out at the weekend and I know that’s because of sex and like yeh it is definitely linked and I think that’s why the doctor, the smart doctor, didn’t let him come in because he was wanting to talk about that. And I think it’s the hormones, I think when my hormones go all over the shop which is the same thing from periods stuff, as soon as my hormones are kind of like jangled my skin reacts to it.

It was so pivotal in my decision to get the coil cos I went to the doctor here and was like I’m so bored with the pill, it’s so bad for my eczema and then just like I need an alternative and she was like Well, the coil’s really great a) cos there’s an non-hormonal one and b) because the hormonal one is only the equivalent of half a pill a week, so you’re taking six and a half less pills than you would be on the pill. So I was like That sounds great and it has been great, it really has been fine with my eczema, thank God.

I just wanted to do what everyone else was doing cos I was that age when it was like everyone wore the same clothes, awful clothes, and everyone was like trying make-up for the first time and everyone was kissing boys for the first time and I just wanted to be doing all of that and because I couldn’t do the make-up thing then I felt like I’ve been robbed of everything because obviously the make-up thing was so like linked like kissing your first boy and like going to parties and being this confident, beautiful girl. Like I felt like all of that was because of the lack of make-up and therefore the double lack of confidence, it all kind of started to kind of knock on to all the other stuff.

I think in a weird way it’s actually made me like more confident. Because, since it’s got better, I’ve now been like two fingers to you, eczema’ and [laughs] like taking back my life. and it kind of doubly doesn’t faze me and I’m almost proud of my eczema to be like What’s wrong with it, like if you’ve got a problem with it I don’t really want to hang out with you, not that I’ve ever had that confrontation with someone [laughs]. But yeh no I think actually now it’s better, it’s only had positive impacts. Obviously like if I hadn’t had it in the first place I’d be, I actually think I’d be such a different person today if I hadn’t had it in the first place, which I’ve never really thought about [laughs].

In what sort of ways do you think you’d be different?

I think I’d have never had, I actually potentially might not, might not have been as confident as I am now just because I’d never of had the wobble to kind of teach, like pick myself up from and kind of fight against. And I think, I don’t know, yeh, that’s probably like the key one I think my confidence is probably actually up on the fact that I’ve suffered eczema in a really weird way, I don’t know.

She would come home with kind of creams from like health stores and stuff and those like tried and kind of like herbal like pills to take that would like cure from the inside and stuff and like definitely tried them but if, I’d get so frustrated because if I didn’t get an initial, an immediate, if it didn’t immediately get any better I’d just get so angry that it wasn’t fixing it. And just there’s, there’s nothing, to this day there’s nothing that like will, other than the steroid cream, that will overnight fix it. And so obviously none of that was when it was really, really bad because today the steroid cream fixes it overnight but I never, it’s not as bad as it was then so I’d just get so frustrated I wouldn’t actually like see through all these hints and tips, that was probably half the problem [laughs].

Did your mum sort of also do online research about eczema and?

Yeh I think that’s probably where she picked it up. Also mum’s really good at chatting so I think a lot of chatting to people and obviously loads of people suffer from eczema so I think, when it was really bad she was talking about it a lot because she was obviously worried about me and anyone, anyone who kind of, had the magic tip or like Oh this really helped for my son and daughter, she’d come home with immediately [laughs].

We’d kind of tell them what we were doing every time we went to see them and it was always, 90% of the time frowned upon but like obviously not to a point where they were like Do not do that, that’s such a stupid idea but it was never kind of well that, it was always kind of That’s not what we would recommend but good luck. the only kind of, as quirky as the doctor recommendations got was like recommending excluding such and such from my diet and stuff but other than that it was just pots and pots of cream [laughs].

Oh like 15, 16, 17 when it was affecting my self-confidence, that was when it was kind of like trial and error of everything and we, mum was taking me to these witch doctors, not witch doctors, but these people who were like trying to figure out if it was because I had a weak liver or weak lungs or whatever that was making it particularly bad or whether my like circle was broken and like kind of weird stuff like that, which mum thinks is the bees knees and I’m really not sure about to this day.

She would come home with kind of creams from like health stores and stuff and those like tried and kind of like herbal like pills to take that would like cure from the inside and stuff and like definitely tried them but if, I’d get so frustrated because if I didn’t get an initial, an immediate, if it didn’t immediately get any better I’d just get so angry that it wasn’t fixing it.

There was one cream that was amazing which they discontinued and I can’t remember what it was called. And then the steroids are just really hard to get hold of even if someone’s prescribed them to me before, they’re always like Are you sure you need them again? and it’s like well now you’ve given them to me and I’ve like adjusted my life and like routine with eczema to be with this cream I kind of do need it [laughs]. But they always do prescribe it eventually.

At first it was such a chore because you don’t realise how much it’s in everything and it literally is in everything and actually really, really luckily so the first year it was kind of just finding the products that didn’t have it and then now I’ve just got, I know what shampoos I can buy and what shower gels I can buy and what not. And so and kind of like 12 months after we found out about parabens, it kind of came trendy not to have parabens in because I think everyone should avoid them apparently but me especially [laughs] so that’s been really lucky and that like now brands will advertise This is paraben free’ which kind of has broadened what I can use. So now it has like so little effect but for a long time it was really frustrating like taking my whole make-up bag and like chuck, chuck, chuck [laughs] and now, but now I know what to buy so it’s fine.

For example I had a glass of wine last night, I woke up and my eczema’s like exactly the same but if I went out and got drunk with friends and was in a night club sweating, dancing, outside smoking and then got into bed, fell asleep for a couple of hours, God knows how many hours, anyway wake up knackered obviously, hung over obviously my skin literally will be red and fiery but usually here [points to body part off screen to arms?] which is really weird, that’s where I kind of get it from alcohol. And so that’s kind of consistently bad now I’m a student [laughs]. But because it’s kind of there, people don’t think its eczema, people think it’s a rash or I’m really contagious [laughs] and avoid me, they don’t really. And so yeh I know when I go out on a night out that I will wake up with a rash if I’ve had excesses amounts of drink. But kind of on a day-day basis, its fine and it never flares up so much. I mean I say that, if I was doing like a week of loads of partying I’d bring, and if I wasn’t at home, I’d being loads and loads of cream and I’d probably be putting on the steroid cream before it was even flared up, knowing that the alcohol was going to kick it all off.

There was one year when my eczema was really bad and then it scarred that summer and then the following summer I was so nervous about getting tanned and had made such a conscious effort all year not to scratch because it was almost like because you couldn’t see the eczema, the scars were really horrible because no one, everyone, I kind of felt like everyone would’ve been guessing what they were because they were literally just blotchy skin. And I hated it, I was, that was as, I was as insecure about the scars as I was when the eczema was visible. and the scars have gone, so now I do get scars here [points off screen] but like I’ve always, always, always had scars there so I’m used to that and that’s never, I’ve kind of grown like to kind of be unfazed by that. But the scars on my face and my chest I hated, but I don’t get those anymore.

At school, when I was at boarding school, I shared a room with a friend and I used to wake her up every night scratching my skin in my sleep so when I was, this is a really bad example today, they usually, my nails when my eczema’s bad the first thing I do is cut my nails down as far as I can so that I physically cannot scratch and even if I do its just flesh on flesh. So my friend used to make me sleep in gloves just because for whatever reason, even having cut my nails, I’d find a way to wake her up from all the scratching because that’s how raw my skin was so how loud the noise was. Really horrible for her but so she’d tie these gloves to my hands, so horrible to sleep in, so that I couldn’t wake her up and also so I couldn’t harm myself cos I’d wake up and just red raw skin bleeding sometimes just from desperately trying to like ease the pain. But I’d never wake myself up in those instances; I have woken myself up before scratching.