the witness👁, the friend💛, the skin you're in...
Friends, who needs them? Our current body politic is illuminating something fundamental about what it means to belong to and tend to one another—including our own bodies.
We’re about to find out what happens when one mistakes looking out for one another as weakness in a system where friendships are how things survive.
We exist by grace. And among those graces is friendship—the privilege of having people near to us who help us reckon with our blind spots and come to know who we are. They witness us.
They attend our glorious propositions and our untenable moments. They see something essential in us and remain steadfast through the parts that are impossible to conquer alone.
But there are things even best friends miss, but our skin misses nothing.
Skin belongs to us in a way almost nothing else does and we belong to our skin. From birth until death it adapts, protects, repairs and negotiates our relationship with the world. And it remembers.
This remembrance isn’t poetic. Research from Dr. Elaine Fuchs and her laboratory at Rockefeller University has shown that skin stem cells can retain a biological memory of previous inflammation.
After an injury, these cells remain primed to respond rapidly when wounded again. Just think about that: skin isn’t simply repaired and returned to an original state.
Experience can change how skin responds to what comes next…amazing.💫
Skin holds another remembrance—our visible biography. Freckles exhibit our dialogue with sunlight. Scars reveal our reparative resilience. Calluses record our labors while stretch marks note growth. Facial lines carry years of expression—laughter, concentration, worry and time spent here.
Skin bears witness to our lives which raises a question about an industry obsession with “flawless” skin and sees evidence of lives as something to be erased.
What could flawless possibly mean for an organ whose extraordinary intelligence lies partly in its ability to respond, adapt and remember?
But skin is a vital health organ, never meant to be a pristine canvas. It learns from what happens and protects us while bearing the evidence of where we’ve been and preparing us for what comes next.
Caring starts with our own actions—not with correcting, but with befriending the remarkable witness to our whole story.
So be a friend. What’s your skin need right now? How can you support it?
Friendship doesn't require us to have no history. A true friend knows that we have one and it belongs to who we are.
Who needs a friend? Everyone. And when it comes to taking care of your skin, you have a friend in me.
