Kermit the Frog sang about how hard it is to be green. It isn’t easy being spotted, either. I’ve known for a long time that Michael Jackson suffered from vitiligo. It is an auto-immune disease affecting skin pigment. A person with the disease might one day wake up to a small white spot on their hand or face and watch in horror as it expands, as others become visible and expand as well. Eventually, it can affect the entire body. When you have this disease, you are spotted.

Michael Jackson’s dermatologist said in response to an interview question regarding Michael’s skin tone that it wasn’t that Michael wanted to be white – he was seeking treatment for the disease of vitiligo and had begun to look like a spotted leopard. As a child and young adult, Michael Jackson was beautiful. For one so beautiful and for one constantly in the spotlight, becoming spotted must have been incredibly difficult.

I’m spotted, too. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t spotted. It’s a different disease than Michael’s but the results aren’t too different. As a child I was called all kinds of names and compared to leper, being called a spotted leopard might have been welcome. Lepers are frightening, diseased and weak but leopards are magnificent and frighteningly powerful. Yes, I think I might have like the leopard label.

I never had to become spotted because I started out that way. Michael Jackson had to wade through becoming and then being spotted. I could hide my defects under clothing, he had to find a way to cover defects on his hands and face. How do you do that when you are a famous performer? You design a sequined glove to cover an affected hand, you hire the best makeup artists to cover what they can while you are in public, you have your clothes designed in such a way as to minimize skin exposure without being too hot to perform in and at its most extreme you try to change things about your face that you can because you can’t change the one thing that changed everything. You have to re-create yourself, make it all up as you go along. It’s impossible to get it right, it’s impossible to be what you were when you weren’t spotted and it’s so hard to be what you have become.

My heart goes out to him and to those who loved him. There wasn’t much anyone could do to help him in his becoming spotted – he had to find his own way. As an artist, he was used to making it up as he went along, to giving himself over to his talent, to exposing his vision. It seems logical that he would be able to deal with this, after all he was used to being oogled and stared at. But when it comes to skin diseases, it’s a very different thing. Perhaps that is why more than almost any other chronic disease, skin diseases are linked with mental health issues. When it comes to our skin, we seem to be at our most vulnerable and our most desperate. I started out as a leper and became a leopard. He was a lion, who became a leopard and then a leper. He was, despite everything else, devastated by it. He was, despite his incredible talent and his artistic courage, only human after all. I truly wish he had been spared from it.