Gürtelrose

It begins with a burning beneath the skin — a feeling as though something were glowing from the inside out, something not allowed to come to the surface. Then come the blisters, the redness, the pain. A sharply defined stripe on your skin, often one-sided, often along a nerve, as though someone had drawn a borderline. Medically the picture is clear: the varicella-zoster virus, dormant since childhood in the nerve roots, is reactivated — usually when the immune system is weakened, under stress, or in older age.

But the psychosomatic perspective asks deeper: why now? Why does something old, long forgotten, break through again at precisely this moment? And why does it trace itself as a burning line on your skin — like a fence meant to imprison or exclude something?