You did not ask for this.
Maybe it started with a piercing.
A small cut.
A surgery. A burn.
A scratch that should have healed and moved on like every other scratch before it.
But this one did not.
Instead — something grew.
Slowly at first. A little bump where the wound was. You thought nothing of it.
Then it kept growing.
Past the edges of the original wound. Raised above the surface of your skin.
Darker than everything around it. Harder. Sometimes tender to the touch.
Sometimes burning and itching so intensely at night that sleep becomes something you negotiate rather than something you rest in.
And then the growing stopped being just physical.
Covering your ear with your hair. Wearing higher collars. Choosing outfits that hide the chest, the shoulder, the arm — wherever it sits.
You stopped wearing the earrings you love. You stopped the hairstyles that would expose your ears. You avoided the occasions where people might look too closely.
And somewhere along the way — without consciously deciding to — you changed how you move through the world.
Smaller. More careful. More hidden.
All because of something sitting on your skin that you did not choose and cannot seem to get rid of.
You have tried things.
The corticosteroid injections at the hospital — painful, expensive, and the keloid came back.
The silicone sheets — worn faithfully for months, and the keloid barely changed.
The local remedies your aunt swore by — the onion juice, the shea butter, the mixture someone in the market told you had worked for their neighbour. Nothing.
Maybe you have even considered surgery — but you have heard what happens when keloid-prone skin is cut again.
It grows back. Bigger.
"This is just my skin. This is just how I am. There is nothing that can actually fix this."
Before you accept that — I need to show you something.
Because the reason nothing has worked is not that your keloid is unfixable.
It is that everything you have tried has been fighting the wrong battle.
