News

Contact: Jamie Leszczynski

Submitted by: Cali Hopp

I’d like to start this by telling you all how much I hate volleyball. 7th Grade gym class I walk in and am immediately met with massive nets and white volleyballs whizzing through the air. Now, I am a good student and try my best to participate, even in gym class. Well at least then I did. So,I power through the game for about thirty minutes and by then my arms are swollen and burning. This is really not my game. As I made it to my next class small pink bumps had begun to show up and spread up my arms. This same reaction began to show up in my day to day life. It occurred every single day until we visited my allergist, a small indian man who found joy in teasing me each time I was forced to visit him. If any of you have had to visit the allergist before you may know that it is a dreaded place. Each time I have been there previously I've been tested using a number of different needles. Well this time Doctor Singh had a different approach. He broke a popsicle stick in half and dragged it down my arm. The stinging of this small action stuck with me for the next 10 minutes. After this so-called test, we watched a raised welt appear in a straight line down my arm. And that was the first time I heard the name of my condition “dermatographia”.

This quite literally translates to skin writing disorder. A large number of things will now cause me to break out in hives, the biggest of which being pressure on my skin. I quickly came to understand that this would be something I would have to deal with for the rest of my life. My mom did endless research of things that could ease or prevent the outbreaks to no avail. However she did stumble upon a very very troubling fact. Many people struggling with this or related disorders have a significantly worse self-image. Massive red welts on my face, arms, and legs don’t exactly live up to the beauty standard. I never thought about how I looked compared to my classmates until there were long stretches where I looked different. This deeply affected my confidence. I wasn't used to having something noticeably different on my body and it really did bother me. I tried my best to cover it up with hoodies and long pants but all that did was make the hives worse due to the heat. After struggling with this for quite some time I discovered an artist named Ariana Page Russel. She has the same exact condition I have. She used these raised pink lines I hated so deeply to create art. Picture after picture showed her creating everything from triangles and heart to intricate patterned designs and even words with the hives that appear on her body. For the first time I looked at this thing about myself that I could not change and saw it as beautiful. I could be art. No, I am art. I learned to create beautiful patterns and lines on myself just as she did. And further than that I played tic-tac-toe on my thigh and even jotted down the chemical equation to glucose on my arm to survive an AP biology unit exam. I can now proudly say that I have learned to love this part of myself.

I know that most people do not have this same condition and cannot write and draw on themselves with nothing but their own skin. However there are still so many ways to appreciate yourself and your body as artistic. Recently I visited an art museum. As I walked down the halls of this museum I saw portrayals of bodies in all corners of the rooms. Everything from paintings and photographs to realistic sculptures of all different body types. I couldn’t help but think to myself that somebody found these people and these bodies so beautiful that they portrayed them as art. Art is a moment frozen in time. Someone found these figures so beautiful that they captured them as they are and preserved them for the future. However it was easy to notice that almost none of these artists portrayed their own bodies. We struggle to see the beauty in ourselves. So this is my reminder to you, from someone with an outside perspective, that you are art. I may not know you well enough to know your insecurities or perceived flaws. But what I do know is that there is an artist out there who would make a really, really cool looking sculpture of you in a heroic pose. We view ourselves in a much different light than others see us. It is time that we start recognizing the beauty in ourselves because we are art.