A huge, bizarre fat person, shaped roughly like an upright pig. Gray, with tough rough skin, like a shark. Only... that's all it has, this thick skin. All it is! It's a flayed human skin, walking around! It hasn't rolled back up into human form; that's why its legs and hands are so strange. The spread-out skin gradually grew a gray leathery backing a few inches thick, creating false flippers and tails from its flat skin-flaps.

The monster's grumpy. Understandable, I guess. It tells me "You caused this, it's all YOUR fault!" The skin speaks in a voice very unlike its appearance: Australian or Brit dialect, high pitched, maybe a woman--I'm not sure. It (she?) complains that "Now I have skin cancer, too, and when you're all skin, that's just too much!"

I'm willing to consider the possibility I have SOME link to its plight, but I don't feel fully responsible, and not guilty at all.

You see, I think the skin WANTED this, asked for it, because it loves to complain.

At last I snap "Fine! Stop, heal, stay healthy, roll up and go back to your body, then." But will it?

After all, then the skin would have to trim the fat, do its job, be happy... and shut up.

NOTES ON WAKING UP

• Gray and sick: I AM sick right now... is THIS the voice of my illness? Even before I got sick, I felt grubby, gray and stressed out for days. Was I mistreating myself?
• Complain:Today I read a story in The Sun on a sick homeless woman. Intelligent, literate, an Anglophile--but she loved to complain, in tones much like this gray skin. Is it not illness, then, but my own whining?
• Cancer: ominous!
• Thick skin: strong defenses? But ALL skin: all defense, nothing else!
• I tell the monster "OK, quit!" Today I told my friends Dawn and Zooop "I just want my fear ended--never mind anything else right now. I'm gonna work on it till I'm not scared all the time." So is the skin not whining but fear? Fear I've INDULGED?
• My work is cut out for me! Flayed, in fact. How to work on chronic fear?
• ACTION: I indulge complaint and/or fear. And to be well, I have to give it up.

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