She came to me afraid. Afraid of the mirror, and of the rooms she’d sat in before. She’d carried skin problems since she was young. The treatments meant to fix her had done their own damage. The cortisol creams. The years of it. A face that got worse the harder they fought it. By the time we sp. oke, the fear had its own weight. She flinched at the word dermatologist.
She had learned, in her own skin, that being treated and being helped are not always the same thing. She had yellow buildup along her eyebrows. Seborrheic dermatitis, she’d been told. She was asking me bravely, openly, the way a person asks when they have run out of other doors: what do I do?
I know exactly what I am and what I am not. I don’t force anyone. I don’t stand between anyone and their doctor. But she was open, and she was asking, and I have learned something about the human body I could not keep to myself.
So I told her what I know. The body heals itself when balance returns. Every one of these symptoms is a sign of imbalance, not an enemy to be destroyed, a message to be read. Let me help you. Let’s balance your sebum first. The rest, your body will take care of.
For her eyebrows, I said: just tap the raw jojoba. Tap it, so it doesn’t run into your eyes, not because it’s dangerous, but because you have a day to live and I’d rather you spend it seeing. She tapped. That was all. The flow set on her face. Raw jojoba tapped into her brows.
And then the pictures came. The before, and the after.
I have spent years around skin, and I stood there not quite believing what I was looking at. The buildup, gone. The brows, clear. She had not attacked anything. She had not stripped or scrubbed or suppressed. She had returned her skin to balance, to homeostasis, and her skin had done the rest.
Then she went to her GP. And her GP looked at the before and after and said the thing I will not forget: Seborrheic dermatitis is usually managed with antifungal creams and steroids. But looking at these, what you’re doing is working. Keep doing what you’re doing.
She didn’t need the cream for her brows. Balance cleared them. And she is not finished; she’ll keep going, add the rose mist, the face elixir, build a living microbiome across her skin until the whole picture clears. But that sentence, from a doctor: it’s working, keep going. You have no idea what that did to me.
Because I have stood in this exact place before. Not with eyebrows. With my own brain.
There is a corridor I still walk in my mind.
My mother was at the end of it: chemotherapy in her arm, radiotherapy aimed at her brain, so much of it that it would take her legs and leave her paralysed. And halfway down that corridor, there was a door, and behind it a woman who could not move. I passed her every day. When I finally asked a nurse, she said three words: She has MS. I didn’t know what MS was. I didn’t know I was looking at a rehearsal.
I even bought a book in those months: yoga for multiple sclerosis for my mother’s paralysed body. I copied the movements from the pictures, moving her legs side to side. I bought it before I had any reason to. As if the table was being set.
In 2014, half my body went numb. They put me in the MRI, and when I came out I heard a doctor tell my father: It’s MS. The same three words, walking all the way from that corridor to find me.
For three years I was a good patient. Every visit I asked my neurologist, how many lesions do I have: one, two, three? And the doctor would smile; not kindly, the smile of a man reading a number off a page, and the smile said many, so many. In that little room he made me feel like a brain full of white marks. A body counting down. Come back for your prescriptions, he said.
And the medicine that was meant to save me gave me a second illness, and a depression, and a body that got weaker, not stronger.
So I stopped. And they told me I was playing Russian roulette with my brain, that my legs would go paralysed. They made me so afraid that the first time I sat down to simply close my eyes to meditate, to breathe, I thought I was killing myself. Imagine being that frightened of your own quiet.
The opposite happened. Within one week of sitting down to meditate, the sensation came back into my numb legs. That was 2017. I have not had a symptom since, and I am not on immune-suppressing drugs. I am not telling you what to do with your body. I am telling you what happened in mine. The drugs did not save me. Balance did. Homeostasis did. A body finally allowed to stop bracing and do the work it already knew how to do.
I kept walking. And I’m still walking.
I am not against medicine. Medicine is great for acute conditions, for the emergency, the acute, the thing that must be stopped now; medicine is a gift, and I will always say so.
But when the skin speaks the way hers did: seborrheic dermatitis, acne, eczema, that is not a body under attack that needs to be attacked back. That is a body signalling. It is saying one thing, over and over: I am out of balance, homeostasis.
It is not saying take your guns and shoot me. It is not asking to be silenced with a cream. A signal is not the enemy. Suppress the signal, and you have only turned off the light that was trying to show you the room.
A beauty person would have told her to exfoliate. Medicine, at least the version she had met, would have told her to shoot it. All she actually needed was balance. That is what cleared her eyebrows. And that, exactly that, is what I did for my own MS.
What’s the difference?
Look at her photos. The before, and the after. Then ask yourself what your own skin has been trying to say, in the only language it has, and whether, for once, you might listen instead of reaching for the trigger.
The body is not asking to be silenced.
It is asking to come back into balance, to homeostasis.
In her own words:
I had my GP appointment today. After showing the GP the photo of my yellow build up, they said it is seborrhoeic dermatitis. It is usually managed with anti-fungal creams and steroids. It is prone to having flare ups. However, since my skin looked okay, she recommended continuing what I'm doing and if it flares up, getting the anti-fungal cream from a GP then. I was happy about this news and her opinion.
Thank you for all your wisdom and support. It is wonderful to know there are people like you in the world helping people to heal.
I hope my story helps others begin or continue with their journey. I've been using Earth To You products for many years (not always as intended at the beginning - sorry Ezgi!) and as someone who experienced cystic acne for years in my early twenties and turned to holistic therapies when all else failed, I know how hard it can be to stay hopeful and keep going when the path feels challenging. The philosophy and wisdom of Ezgi and Earth To You products spoke to me in such a real and deep way. It changes everything, physically, mentally and emotionally. If my story can help someone else on their Earth To You journey, then I am very honoured.