I took my laptop outside yesterday, determined to get a little fresh air. You see, working from home + being an agoraphobic hermit person means I sometimes forget that the outdoors exists.

So I was super proud of myself for getting out and touching grass. I was wearing a tank top and shorts, which is also unusual for me as I typically dress like I’m visiting the arctic. The freezing cold air conditioning blowing beneath my desk is not my fave. But it was the weekend! And all of my warm things were in the washing machine.

Our dog, Molly, was overjoyed and bounded outside with me. It was, oh, maybe 11 in the morning? Not yet hot, nice breeze. I spent maybe five minutes walking around and inspecting the plants in the flowerbeds, making sure nothing had died or was being attacked by aphids, and bent over a few times to pull a few weeds.

Then, I parked myself on one of our patio loungers in the full shade of our rooftop.

For the purposes of this story, I need you to understand that I was not sitting in dappled sunshine beneath a tree, nor beneath a sun-rotted canopy. I was under the literal roof overhang that covers our porch. (Layers upon layers of shingles! tar paper! beams of wood! insulation! All, I thought, shielding my fragile Fitzpatrick type I skin from the hateful sun.

It was pleasant! I Marco Polo’d Leoh to say, “Look! I have emerged from my gremlin cave and am partaking in the outdoors!” And then I sat there, working on my laptop — again, I cannot stress this enough — in full shade, for about an hour? Hour and a half?

At one point, I got up to give Molly a drink from the hose, which was coiled up against the shaded part of the house, so did not yet contain boiling hot water. But I did stand in full sun for about a minute while Molly drank.

Fear not, this minutiae will be important.

As the sun moved across the sky, causing the line of demarcation between safety and burn-you-dead to creep along the lounger toward my toes, I went inside.

I did other Saturday-ish things: I rebooted the laundry, made a meal plan & a grocery list, and talked to my mother about our upcoming family reunion. Toward evening, I was feeling a headache coming on and noticed my chest was hurting. I went into the bathroom in search of Tylenol and was shocked — shocked, I tell you! — to discover that my forehead, nose, chest, shoulders, the fronts of my arms, and two streaks up either shin were fire engine red.

I stood there, staring stupidly at myself, mouth agape, trying to retrace my steps outside. In cartoonish consternation, I went to the back door and tried and tried to make my actual time in the actual sunshine add up to enough time to burn my skin, and I couldn’t!

When the sun went down, I even paced the yard. Timing myself as I mimed setting down my laptop, then walked around the flower beds. I remembered that I’d gone through the front gate, and timed that too. I could not account for much more than five minutes in the sun, and yet here I was, fully crispified. Even for me, this was unheard of.

Even weirder, the worst parts are the horrible “U” shape on my chest above my tank top neckline and my forehead. The time I’d spent out of the shade was spent bending over flower beds.

So then I googled what you, dear reader, probably already know.

The UV index had been at 11. ELEVEN. And on high index days like that YOU CAN GET BURNED IN THE SHADE. You can also — if you are also the color of milk — get severely burned in under five minutes.

Awesome!

I foolishly thought it had been a regular day. I had not seen any of the severe weather warnings, nor the alert on my phone that told everybody to stay indoors. And lest you think me incredibly dense, nothing outside signaled that anything was wrong. I could hear kids playing, someone was mowing their lawn, and Molly barked as teenagers rode by on a four wheeler. Were they all SPF’d up? Or were there others in my neighborhood lying in their beds last night with ice packs and ibuprofen?

Like many who were growing up in the 80s and 90s, I made a few, ill-advised attempts to lay out and get tan. Usually with just one week of summer vacation to go, I’d slather up with baby oil and roast myself in the backyard. Each time ended in painful burns that I remember treating with layers of Noxzema cream. Which sounds insane, but must have been soothing?

After that, I wisened up and embraced my lily white skin. I would bark at anyone who wanted to smugly hold their brown arm up to my see-through one, “ISN’T IT NICE THAT WE’RE ALL ALLOWED TO BE WHATEVER SKIN COLOR WE ARE?!”

Even when my dad went through (is still going through) his sunscreen-cases-cancer phase, I would remember how it felt to dip t-shirts in ice water, drape them across my tender skin, and lay in front of a box fan, crying into my mauve carpet. Nothing could stop me and my vat of 100SPF.

When spray tans became a thing I told anyone who would listen (and many who wouldn’t) about my brilliant idea for booths that would spray us — Mississippi-lessly — with the highest level of sunscreen available. They could be coin-operated and dropped near beaches and lakes and swimming pools and would dispense a bracelet that faded with the sun to remind you when you needed to go reapply.

Probably unsurprisingly, I never found anyone willing to invest in my brilliant business idea.

Anyway, when I accidentally get burned these days, I am filled with white-hot rage. It’s just so stupid. I have wide-brimmed hats! UV-blocking sunglasses! Rash guards and umbrellas and a beach bag that rattles with a variety of sun block! My moisturizers and makeup all have SPF baked right in! What is my excuse??

And I must confess, while I believe I have a high pain tolerance in general, there are certain things I am an absolute, bona fide baby about. These are: colds/coughs, headaches, and sunburns. All those man cold jokes? They’re actually about me. I have a working theory that because I deal with chronic health stuff on the regular, my endurance card is already filled up. So the minor stuff sends me over the edge and I have a hard time coping. Or maybe I’m just a baby.

I was so miserable with this one, I risked ibuprofen. Sometimes I can take it and it’s fine. Other times, it triggers my angioedema. I chased it with generic Benadryl and settled in for a terrible night with compresses of black tea & other witchy concoctions. Sure enough, sometime after midnight my lips started swelling inside my c-pap mask.

By morning, I looked like this poor lady. Except sunburned, too!

I’d love to swear off the great outdoors forever, but that aforementioned family reunion is coming up, and it’s on the water. So I dug out a high-necked, long-sleeved rash guard and one of those big floppy hats with the hole for a ponytail, and ordered swim leggings from Waterlust (they have longer inseams!).

For the remainder of the summer, my aesthetic is going to be Victorian ghost meets sun-phobic vampire meets FLDS gal gets to go swimming.