January 3, 2014 -- Updated 2217 GMT (0617 HKT)
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- CNNI anchor Zain Verjee climbed the ladder of the news world despite a secret
- The sometimes debilitating skin condition psoriasis plagued her physically and mentally
- Verjee tried many treatments and cures but found the answer for her lay within
Editor's note: Zain Verjee began her career at CNN in 2000 as an anchor in Atlanta and now anchors the Europe morning show for CNN International from London. She is a part- time master's student of creative writing at Oxford University.
(CNN) -- I have spent more than a decade of my professional career on international television, my face visible to millions each day. Yet I have spent a lifetime hiding.
For years, I guard a
painful secret: I can't bear to look in the mirror. I shrink from bright
light. A gaze that lingers a second too long makes me panic. A hot
summer day sends me into the shadows.
I have fish-like scales.
There are tiny red islands floating on the surface of my skin. They
combine to create continents with jagged surfaces. They turn black and
start to smell. There is blood and pus.
My scalp spits out silver
flakes. My ears are filled with crusts. I leave white specks wherever I
sit. I float in long, loose clothes. My hands betray me. The sores sit
openly. My nails are dented with pockmarks. I find strands of hair on
the sheets and pillowcases every morning.
I suffer from psoriasis. It's ravaged my body since I was 8. At its worst my plaques look like leprosy. I feel like a leper.
"Please can you leave the
pool," a woman once told me when I was 22, visiting the Dead Sea in
Israel, "we're not comfortable with you in it." She is horrified at my
body. I am ashamed. I hang my head.
The landscape from my neck down is chaos.
So I choose to look away.
I am able to dress perfectly in the dark. I can feel my way around a
room or a closet full of clothes. I instinctively choose the dimmest
corner of a restaurant to sit in. Winters are a relief only because I
won't stand out covered from top to toe.
My face is flawless. Not
a blemish. Not a mark. Compliments are endless. But I am acutely aware
that a horror film unfolds in secret beneath my clothes. I am
effervescent and radiant on the outside and rotting inside. Which is the
real me?
The cameras fire up, the
red light turns on. I am splendidly made up. I lose myself in the
moment. I am energized. I am focused. It's only my face. It is floating.
It's all that exists. It gives me confidence.
No one has it all. I
fight my body and myself all my life. I hit rock bottom many times
because of my disease. It seems futile to try anymore. "Who will ever
want me like this" I cry hysterically at home. "No one could ever touch
me." My mother pulls me out self-loathing and defeatism. When I want to
give up, she will not let me.
She becomes an expert on
psoriasis. She reads medical journals and approaches alternative
healers. She takes me for acupuncture and hypnosis. She mixes various
acids in a lab for me to use on my skin and soaks me in a tub full of
Dead Sea salt. The rest of the day, I am in a messy, smelly cream.
Endless personal research, trial and error bring occasional relief.
Imagine the nightmarish
teen years. I cower from close friendships. No one can know the truth. I
never date. Intimacy is out of the question. I have no sensation of
touch. The scales are too thick.
The itch is unbearable. I
try and ignore it. It's impossible. It agitates me. I use all my
strength and I tear at my skin. I am violent. I scratch back and forth
until there is blood. It is too raw to do any more. I am filled with
rage and humiliated.
So I disappear in my
head, create fictional stories and characters. I play out entire
conversations, lives and deaths, stories of courage and cowardice to
escape myself. My mind is living a separate life from the body beneath
it.
Somehow, my imagination
takes me far. I am in my early 20s, and it's the beginning of my career.
I am anchoring the prime time shows in Kenya. Tonight is a big
opportunity. My game face is on.
I've spent the afternoon
on hair and makeup. As I settle into the anchor's chair, I hear the
faint rustle of plastic shrink wrap. I have wrapped up my legs and torso
in the clingy film after soaking my scales in Vaseline so that the pain
is lessened and the putrid smell contained. The director calls out. The
floor manager cues me. The lights on, news copy in my hands, I smile
and welcome millions of Kenyans into the studio.
The contrast is sharp --
behind closed doors, I have given up. I am on the floor. I am crying,
screaming and itching insanely. My mother cries. I rarely see her cry.
The last time was when my grandfather died.
Then an angel arrives.
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A family friend
approaches mum. "Your daughter looks unwell. She is losing her hair.
What is the matter?" My mother, at her wits end, tells the woman the
truth. "George," the angel says. "Tell her to go to George."
George is a small town
in South Africa. I learn there is a clinic that specializes in treating
severe skin disease. I adamantly refuse. I have had enough of doctors,
hospitals, foul smelling topical creams and hopes dashed. Mum convinces
me.
In a week, I find myself
there against my wishes. I withstand the indignity, once again, of
being naked, the grotesque lesions under neon light, and I listen to the
shocked gasps of the doctors and nurses.
"We've never seen it this bad," one says in the tiny examination room.
I glance dully outside
the window of my room to see a blue lake and a blue sky amid green trees
and grass. Postcard perfect. I count the hours.
Who could imagine where I am? I am a celebrity in Nairobi, making it big.
"What do you do?" I am asked.
"Nothing," I respond
curtly to any one who dares make conversation with me. I certainly don't
want to start a conversation about being on television or hosting a
radio show for that matter. What would my viewers on KTN and listeners
on Capital FM Radio think of me?
Mind, body and spirit
are the focus at this clinic. It sounds insane to me. I am told to do
mediation, deep relaxation and creative visualization three times a day.
I lie on the floor listening to the voice in charge.
"Every day in every way I
am getting better and better. I have no desire to eat the foods I know
are bad for me..." I brainwash myself. It works.
I eat yogurt or bran for
breakfast, salads or fish for lunch and chicken for dinner. Nothing
tastes good. I yearn for Tabasco. I drink only herbal tea and torrents
of water.
I write a long letter to
my psoriasis, describing how it causes me pain, how it hurts my
relationships, how it makes me weak. I blame it for not allowing me to
be free. I blame it for my rage, my violence, my bullying and my
inability to feel loved, for my need for praise and constant
reassurance.
I berate and belittle
it. I coax and cajole it. I remind it of my sexless life. I beg and
plead for it to go away. Then I thank my psoriasis. It has taught me to
have no vanity, more compassion and to withhold judgment.
I am crying, emotionally
drained, and hot underneath my long sleeves and jeans. I take a shovel,
pick a spot outside and dig deep. I place the pages into the hole. I
plant a tree. I use my hands to touch the earth. Nature seems
surprisingly reassuring.
In this instance, I bury
my past. I have said everything I needed to say to my skin. The tree
will give life, oxygen. Perhaps it will give me a chance to breathe
again.
A breakthrough.
It has been two weeks,
and I see something no one else can see -- a tiny shift. In the center
of one thick plaque, there is a slight thinning. I can discern this
little dent only because I have been touching my skin.
This small success
galvanizes me to stick rigidly to the tough diet I have promised to
undertake. I am ecstatic, fully of new energy. My smile is real. I am
positive.
I return to Nairobi with a new mindset, a sense of control. I maintain the regimen like a military staff sergeant.
Every 28 days, I see
progress. It is small. But it is there. The months pass. The smell
stops. The centers of the lesions disappear like small mountains
collapsing on themselves. They turn from red to pink to white.
I watch with fascination
the metamorphosis of my skin. The continents on my body move apart with
the seismic change in my mind. The scales no longer build. Then they
are gone. I can't believe it.
It has been six months. I am clear. I am in remission. I have no scales. I am normal. I am finally free.
And there is no medication. Only food. "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food."
When I walk triumphantly
into my dermatologist's office, she is startled. I healed myself with
the power of my mind, I announce. She is shocked. She later tells me she
believes there is a place for natural healing in medicine.
I can't say what will
work for others, but I believe that diet, mindset and a wonderful
support system were the best long-term answers for me. There is a place
for light therapy or steroid cream or biological medication, but back
then I healed myself from the inside out.
After my transformation, my family takes me to Mombasa, on the Kenyan coast. I don't dread it for the first time in my life.
I have a new bikini,
dark blue with a yellow rim. I have never worn one. It is so soft. It
feels feminine. I have never felt like a woman the way I do when I put
it on. I see all my curves in a different light. The mirror is not my
enemy any longer.
Zain Verjee's
psoriasis went into remission for 10 years. She still battles the
condition today. Has a health problem ever defined your life? Share how
you dealt with it in the comments section below.
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