I have recently started a YouTube channel – Emma Sharp Dalton-Brown (Jamaica Emma) – where I have been posting videos of poems that I have written and problems/issues that people are faced with each day.  The poems are, so far, based on serious topics – sexual abuse, domestic abuse, bullying, prejudices, etc.  The other issues are, so-far, husband-related – you know, the typical male behaviour that goes on in your house – light-hearted jabs at an otherwise lovely husband.

A problem has arisen from the latter, unfortunately, as one man, whom I know, accosted me yesterday at a theatre to tell me off, as if I were some insolent child, for my posts.  Picture a man approaching me…..I, of course, think he’s coming to hug/kiss me hello, so I reciprocate with a hug and cheek to cheek ‘kiss’.  The thing is I read it all wrong…..as I discovered within seconds.  This man in question was not coming to offer me polite pleasantries!  He wanted to know if and how my husband was putting up with my YouTube video logs that were about him!

Taken aback by his brazen accusation and assumption that my husband has a proverbial wooden stick up his @$$ and is unable to laugh with me, I told him that my husband has a good sense of humour.  So, said man would not accept this as a suitable answer and persisted with his complaints about my actions, to which I replied, AGAIN, that MY husband has an excellent sense of humour and actually finds my posts about him funny.  Well, that shut the man up, as he turned, scuttled out of the row of theatre seats and trotted down to his own row.

The truth is, I don’t like to upset people.  Really, I don’t.  However, I am equally going to stand up for my freedom to speak out on issues, my freedom to express when I am exasperated by a situation, my freedom to have a laugh and my freedom to post videos on my YouTube channel.  As I am a sensitive person, one who empathizes with others and hates to hurt anyone, my posts will not be malicious.  Anything you see will be in support of a cause or will have a humourous aspect.  For those of you who are concerned about my husband’s dear heart.  He can handle it.  He dishes out more than he gets, trust me!!

Thank you for your concern, but we are truly fine 😉  My husband is a honey, most of the time……but this does not mean that I am going to, overnight, be alright with his typical man-blindness or man-oblivion.  I am a woman, it’s exasperating and I will continue to make some of you laugh.  I can’t please you all….sorry, not sorry.

‘You’re looking fabulous.’; ‘You’re looking so well.’; ‘Great to see you looking better.’; ‘Your skin looks amazing.’

You’d think that hearing these words would make me happy.  In the past, they did.  Now, not so much.  It’s not that I don’t appreciate the intended kindness, because I do.  However, in my case, the tightening of my skin is far from a desired feature of my physical being.  Wait, what?  What did Emma just say?  Do you know how much money people pay to achieve the look that Emma is slowly gaining, naturally?

The skin on my legs, particularly on the stretch below my knees, is so tight that it has a shiny and young appearance, like I’ve been well moisturized.  My legs themselves are swollen when they get even slightly too hot or too cold, making my otherwise scrawny limbs look marginally better from the illusion of there being a bit more muscle on my calves and quads.  My face is losing those lines I gained from life and a longstanding period of another autoimmune disease (Neuro-Behcets) that has intermittently run me physically ragged for over twenty years (I won’t get into those details now).  In fact, most of the skin on my body appears younger.  I don’t need the airbrush to erase the wrinkles.

Don’t be fooled.  You can still tell I’m in my forties, or as one teenager told me six months ago, ‘You’re like fiftaaay!’  No, that would be my husband! (Though he doesn’t look fiftaaay either!) Unfortunately, the disease I have developed does not lift the fleshy parts that one would want lifted, which is a dead giveaway to one’s age.  My age, however, is not the point.

If you look closely at my hands and my feet, you will see that the skin has tightened so much that cracks have formed on the tips of my toes, heels and fingers, resulting in digital ulcers that appear faster than it takes to prevent them.  Digital infarction is a bitch!  All that’s needed is a simple graze of one’s nail, a mosquito bite, a soft bump, the smallest of burns, the opening of a water bottle, and a painful ulcer appears.  As for the younger looking legs.  When you take a closer look, you will see the variation in the colours of said skin.  If you focus on my mouth, the furrowing that started a little over a year ago has worsened.  Ask me to go ‘Aaaaaah,’ like a dentist or doctor asks, and my proverbial big mouth only opens 2 inches wide.  Oh, the irony for someone as talkative as I am!

I am physically uncomfortable most of the time – my skin, my muscles, my hips, my hands, my feet, my face.  My small blood vessels are damaged and I am producing way more collagen than I should.  However, I do believe that I inherited some seriously happy hormones from my parents, because the discomfort never brings me down for even as long as one day.  That said, I would still take feeling good and being healthy over looking good, any day of the year.  You see, what’s happening on the outside of my body is also happening on the inside.  I have systemic scleroderma, otherwise known as the disease that turns you to stone.