The Root: Childhood and Trauma

I am twenty eight years old.

I have done engineering. I have worked in corporate for a global MNC. I built a business in India. I moved to the UK to do my MBA, graduated, and now I am building a business again.

From the outside, it looks like a life that was always moving forward.

I am an eldest daughter. I am an artist. I am an engineer. I am a Hidradenitis Suppurativa survivor. I am a human. And I love me. And I love my life.

But before I got here, I want to tell you who I have been.

I have been loved. And I have been lost.

I have loved deeply. And I have been abused.

I have suffered. I have been suicidal.

I have created. And I have fallen apart.

I have hated myself. I have hated everyone around me.

I have failed at many things, in many ways.

I have been in a toxic relationship. I have been molested.

I have lived in the shadows for a very long time.

But now, I know me. I love me. I love my life. I will always do what is best for me. And I love my journey, every painful, messy, confusing part of it, because without all of it, I would not be who I am today.

I wouldn't change a thing.

This is that story.

To understand my HS journey, I need to take you back further, to where it all began. Not at seventeen, when the condition first showed up on my skin. But much earlier. To a little girl who already felt invisible.

Growing up, my parents were busy with work. I was raised primarily by my grandmother, who was already seventy when I was born. As a child, I didn't understand that my parents were simply working hard to provide for us. What I felt instead was abandonment. I believed they didn't like me enough, that's why they left me behind. I was introverted, isolated, and quietly angry. Angry at a world that felt like it had already decided I didn't matter.

My grandmother loved me in her own way. But she was old, and her heart was divided. Her son, my uncle, was an alcoholic, and he consumed most of her worry and attention. Because my parents were absent, I was often taken along when she visited him. I was a child forced to witness toxicity, manipulation, and chaos. Shouting, fighting, drinking, and despair. My body used to shiver every time we walked through that door. I learned early that the world wasn't safe. I learned to stay small and stay quiet.

And then there was my cousin. Close to my age. Where I was quiet, she was loud. She projected every insecurity she had onto me, body shaming me relentlessly, picking at everything about my appearance. Even as a young child, I started praying for impossible things. That my skin would change overnight. That my body would transform. That I would wake up as someone worthy of love and attention. These weren't passing thoughts. They consumed me. I researched every surgery: rhinoplasty, liposuction, skin lightening, eye colour procedures. I fantasised about waking up in a completely different body while everyone around me thought it was always me. That is how much I hated myself, before I even had a reason the world would recognise.

And from childhood, I cannot remember exactly when, maybe five or six years old, this same cousin sexually abused me. For years. I didn't know it was wrong. Not until puberty arrived and suddenly the shame hit me like a wave I hadn't seen coming. All those years, I had been carrying something I didn't even have a name for. And because I had never felt safe enough to speak, because who would listen to me, who would believe me, I carried it completely alone.

There were other incidents too. A stranger's hand on me on the road. An older man at an educational institution. A construction worker at our home. Each time, I said nothing. Each time, the shame settled deeper. My father knew one of those men. I was terrified that if I spoke, I wouldn't be believed. So I swallowed it. All of it.

I also carried guilt that wasn't mine to carry. When I was around eleven, walking through a railway station with family, I let go of my grandmother's hand for just a moment, distracted, talking to cousins. She fell. After that, she needed a walking stick for the rest of her life. Until the day she died at ninety two, I carried that guilt. I used to close my eyes passing flower markets, terrified of seeing funeral garlands, terrified of what might happen to her. She was the one person who had always been there. The thought of losing her was unbearable.

Then came puberty, and with it, a new kind of confusion. Suddenly I was getting attention from boys. Just after my public exams, when I was entering high school, a boy stopped to speak to me outside our home. My father saw it. He came rushing from work. He slapped me. My glasses flew across the room. And then he told me, you are not beautiful. Not like your cousin.

Those words landed in a girl who already hated herself. Who had been hating herself for years. Not because she was told to, but because every message she had ever received, from the abuse, from the isolation, from the neglect, had already told her she was not enough.

What followed was depression, withdrawal, and the deepest self loathing I have ever known. I stopped singing, even though I had been going to singing classes for years. I shut down, one part at a time. Studies were the only thing I held onto, the only area where I could prove I had value.

And then, at seventeen, my body started showing me what I couldn't say out loud.

HS arrived. And it didn't arrive quietly.