3 answers to a common vitiligo question:

Last Updated on 22nd September 2022 by Caroline Haye

Why me?

I want to share with you 3 answers to a common vitiligo question. A question that I bet you have asked yourself at some time in your life when facing illness or hardship… Why me?

Just like many other medical conditions, vitiligo shows no favouritism. It affects all ethnicities, old and young, rich and poor, male and female alike. It takes no account of whether or not you are a celebrity… Whether you are a good person… Or whether or not you deserve to have additional problems in your life.  And it certainly doesn’t care whether or not you feel sorry for yourself… Which, if we are honest, we all do from time to time. It’s just one of those things that happens to some people. And, depending on your personality and attitude to life, you may view it in several ways. You may regard it as:

1. An annoying inconvenience.
2. An unbearable blight on your entire life.
3. A situation that you learn to cope with most of the time. (But one that sometimes causes varying degrees of hassle, anxiety, embarrassment, depression or even anger… This was me.)
4. A blessing in disguise: something to embrace and take pride in.
5. Something that causes no concern whatsoever. (This one is rare.)

Whatever category you fall into, I’m guessing there isn’t a single one of us that hasn’t ever, at least once, asked the question… “Why me?”  So I would like to suggest 3 answers that I hope will help.

First answer

The first answer to this question should really be, “why not me?” The question is, after all, a pointless one. In fact, it is entirely the wrong question. For those of us who do not see vitiligo as a blessing, it assumes that fate chose to afflict the wrong victim. It suggests that we would prefer someone else to have been cursed with unwanted, unexplained white patches all over their skin. Or, even more nonsensically, it suggests that we might have preferred to have cancer or been paralysed in a traffic accident instead. It implies that suffering is fine – as long as it happens to someone else! Well, suffering is not fine, no matter who is doing the suffering.  But, sadly, it is a fact of life.  Most of the time, when we ask ourselves (or fate, or God) “why me?”, we know deep down that we are just feeling sorry for ourselves. (Which is OK, by the way – at least, it is human). The main trouble with the question, though, is that we are powerless to answer it.  And every time we ask it seems to reinforce that powerlessness.

Second answer

So, my second answer to the question “why me?” is that we should ditch that question for now and ask a different one… One that we have the power to answer.  Surely the most empowering question a person with vitiligo (or any other affliction or adversity) can ask is “what can I do about it?” And the answer to that question is – “a lot!”. (Since writing this blog, I have published another on this subject, entitled How I Control My Vitiligo.)

The sad thing is that comparatively few vitiligo sufferers are aware of just how much they can do to reverse their de-pigmentation. Or how they could revolutionise their health and happiness. And it’s no wonder, when you consider how little accurate information is available. Not to mention the misinformation that often comes at us, intentionally, from unscrupulous con-merchants… And even, unwittingly, from some well-intentioned but ill-informed doctors.

For nearly 5 decades I believed what others told me. I believed that vitiligo was a life sentence. That it was a waste of time trying to treat it and that it would only ever get worse. It’s no wonder that I felt sorry for myself from time to time. And I’m sure I would have continued to believe these things if I had not, more or less accidentally, become living proof that they were all utterly incorrect.  If you have read my story you will know that a somewhat half-hearted experiment with nutritional supplementation and sun exposure unexpectedly and wonderfully reversed virtually all of the 80% pigment loss I had suffered by that point in my life.  I can’t be certain that this recovery is permanent of course. But over a decade has passed since then. So I take the fact that I have had no relapse as a good sign 🙂

Third answer

So, I have recommended ditching the Why Me? question because it is not one we have the power to answer. And because it generally encourages self pity.  However, there are times when it can be a valid one to ask and actually does have a meaningful answer.

Once I realised that vitiligo was not the hopeless condition I once thought it was, I finally felt able to return to that initial question. But to ask it in a completely different way… A way that led me to an empowering and uplifting third answer.  And that answer to “why me?” is: “so that I can empathise with others who are going through what I went through”. Whether you think about it logically – or emotionally – there can really only ever be one helpful answer to the question “why do apparently random bad things happen to certain people”. And that is so they can overcome them and also help other people do the same.

This third answer was the primary motivation for starting my vitiligo blog soon after my recovery. And it is the reason I now spend so much of my time learning about what made that recovery happen. As well as reading up on research and corresponding with vitiligo friends. It’s not that I set out with any master plan to provide vitiligo support to others or to become any kind of information source on the subject. It has just naturally developed out of my extreme excitement and gratitude at having recovered to such an amazing extent. Though I must admit that it was also fuelled by frustration that so little genuinely helpful and accurate information is available to people living with vitiligo… So little to help them ask the right questions and to find the answers that do exist but that are still not common knowledge. My hope is that this state of affairs will improve with time – I really believe that it will.