A chronic inflammatory skin condition that causes red or itchy patches. Or some red spots that never seem to heal no matter what! Even if you see lots of survivorship bias online about this condition, if it is real, it is real at the current moment so it will have to be acknowledged. It inevitably uses up time for skincare and decreases sleep! The negative parts cannot be suppressed that much; otherwise, by definition they would not be so damaging!
Sweating during exercise is normal. But people with eczema sweat
less, which traps heat in the skin and puts them in a dilemma,
especially in the summer.
Eczema hinges really close to minimizing "harm" from sunlight etc.;
there is no silver lining. "Having to work harder than other people" is
not an effective praise. It is simply more suffering.
Non-understanding, non-fellow-sufferers would often think that there
is a silver lining like "building resilience". This is a bad habit left
from school. They think that futile grit of "grinding" for exams has some
greater purpose than the ends: the grades.
For eczema, though, it actually relates to the greater pains of
doing something undesirable: exam-grinding itself! Often, when doing a
past paper, eczema disrupts me frequently.
Most people simply cannot see a pure evil with no silver linings
whatsoever - after realizing nothing can help the treat it as an
unchangeable fact of life, both the sufferer and observer - and blame
the sufferer itself for "not being able to control scratching" or such,
when stuff like wanting to clean the skin or scratch are the
lowest-level impulses of our species that often cannot be overcome by psychology.
Others cannot see an unjust world in comfort; and they don't realize the mental pains converted into physical pains might not be counterable, and their demands bring more stress.
Hustle culture stigmatizes most forms of downtime that are not related to school/work itself, basically treating us like robots. Robots have no skin. That is a false equivalence.
It mostly annoys during downtime. Biological impulses overpower boredom. However, sometimes intrinsically interesting stuff can overcome those impulses. Yet life often denies such things.
When eczema doesn't disrupt focus, but by definition focus is hyper focus ignoring distractions, so it stops me from entering it in the first place.
Society hates to see that I am suffering. But I already had been all along. From their perspective, from "normal" skin to red skin, it's like a total loss, but sometimes for me the mental pains are much stronger! However, they don't see it! So they see the ruining of the skin as even worse! (This is not justification; rather, it is just an explanation of why eczema can seem so much worse with other people.)
Eczema is still contradictory to safetyism of beautiftyism. Their standards are too high relative to my realism. Unlike my idea of not having expectations. Kinda FORCED to not have expectations of others because otherwise few fit me. They have the idea that harmfulness is bad, ignoring the fact that not simply accepting is even more harmful? Because eczema clearly is not beautiful and not uninjured skin.
The most basic defense, if you are unconsciously scratching, is cutting nails extremely frequently, to the point that their length is negligible. But a more important defense mechanism is caring less! If you focus so much on the suffering (which is REALLY EASY to do, since it does affect me a lot), it imposes secondary negativity into something already negative, which only increases suffering even further in a loop!
Eczema actually shares some things with doomscrolling; ideals being absence, but physical impulses. Eczema is worse, though, because it also causes ugliness, is less understood, and, unlike tech, you cannot escape the physical body.
It also involves a short-term desire that thus becomes quite disruptive: in boredom, the desire comes. Because the cravings (even for bad things) exist, so at a certain point the cumulative effort from the weirdness lingers. It might get stronger or weaker. I'm still not sure. But it still exists for a very long time.