I’m really lucky because my work gave me about a month of vacation within a 2 month period. Being on vacation has put me in a more relaxed state and my HH thankfully hasn’t bothered me too much because of this.

I’ve had a couple of interesting situations these past few weeks though.

First was when I went to my boyfriend’s softball game. He is on a team with coworkers and I was meeting them all for the first time. It was also a VERY hot day.

I was really nervous about meeting his coworkers because that meant shaking people’s hands. I was really hoping to stand a distance away and just wave! But I never want to make myself seem any more different than I really am, so I sucked it up and shook their hands. My hands were really sweaty, but thankfully no one mentioned anything about it…until the last girl.

After shaking her hand, she proceeded to wipe it immediately on her pants and was like, “oh, you’re sweaty!”.

I was so offended by this and distanced myself from her the whole game. I mentioned this to my boyfriend after the game as we drove away.

He immediately said, “Oh! I meant to tell you before that that girl always complains about her sweaty hands and how difficult it is to use her softball glove.”

OH! So, maybe this girl was just trying to relate to me and reach out to me. I felt so bad afterwards that I assumed she was just being rude.

I always assume that everyone else is normal and doesn’t have HH. This was a very eye-opening experience.

 

Also, during my vacation, I had a manicure. I don’t really enjoy getting these because my HH makes it very uncomfortable, but my brother was graduating and my mom offered to pay for it.

It was ROUGH! My hands were dripping so much. I almost asked the manicurist to skip the hand lotion because I have enough moisture already!

As much of an advocate I am for telling people about HH, I’m still scared to do it sometimes. I am upset with myself for not telling the manicurist what was going on with my hands. I spoke with my mom about this afterwards and my mom said that she would talk to her the next time she goes to get a manicure.

The other day, my mom told me that she spoke to the woman about me and to my surprise, the manicurist said nothing about my  hands at all. What she did say was that she thought I looked REALLY nervous about something.

Wow, I had no idea I was being perceived this way. Here I was, assuming that the manicurist was thinking all horrible things about me with my hands, but she really was just wondering why I seemed nervous.

 

It’s always very eye-opening for me to realize how HH is perceived by others, and these two experiences definitely surprised me.

Caryn Joan