Foot Warts

You stand on them. Every day. Warts on the soles of the feet — plantar warts, as dermatology calls them — do not grow upward like other warts, but inward. The weight of your body presses them deeper, until every step becomes a small stab. What begins as an inconspicuous thickening of the skin eventually becomes a point you can no longer ignore. You feel it while walking, standing, stepping. Precisely where you make contact with the ground.

Dermatology explains foot warts as a viral infection — the human papillomavirus penetrates the skin and multiplies. That is accurate on the biological level. But the psychosomatic perspective asks a different question: why your feet? Why your soles — precisely where you stand on the earth, where your foundation is, where your contact with reality begins? And why do they grow inward instead of showing themselves outward?