Day 353: Stoics

Skin update: The Differin is yet to have an effect. If anything, it's making my acne worse. My face is tight and a touch waxy, more red than usual. My cheeks are blotchy, I'm getting the odd small lump under the surface around my nose. My chest is as bad as ever.

But it's only been three weeks or so. The cream is supposed to take up to eight weeks to even start making positive progress, so, although frustrating, it's entirely expected.

And I'm trying to take advice from the philosophy of the Stoics, passed on in a video I stumbled across recently from Sean Tucker, a photographer and YouTuber I greatly admire. That advice is:

You can only change what you can change.

One of those truisms that turns out to not be so obvious, or so easy, when you try to live by it - although the truth of it certainly runs deep.

You can only change what you can change.

There are things I can control, and things that I cannot. What I can control are my thoughts about events, and my actions leading from those thoughts. There is personal responsibility, there is free-will, and this is where it pivots.

But pretty much everything outside of that small locus of responsibility is out of my control. It is up to the fates.

I can't control whether the sun rises tomorrow, whether it will be hidden behind cloud. I can't control the vastness of the socio-economic system in which we live, the fact that everyone wants money for goods and I have to do things I don't feel like doing in order to earn that money to pay for goods. I can't control taxes. Donald Trump. Death.

And falling within that remit is the acne with which I have suffered since I was fourteen.

I can control my diet, but that seems to have a negligible effect. I can take the strongest drug, and only potential cure, that Western medicine has fallen upon for people in my situation. I did that, a decade ago, and my skin was clear for five or six years, and then started getting worse again. And I can try out this Differin cream at the insistence of my GP, using it as preventative maintenance every night, although it's a hassle and reports suggest it is only moderately useful.

But I can do these things. I can also work on the emotions that arise when I think about having damaged skin, do CBT exercises to more correctly place and play out the worries of social failure and ugliness that I have in my head.

And although that, certainly, can be hard, what's great is that I don't have to worry about the rest. It's out of my control, and therefore not appropriate to waste time ruminating over.

Put on the cream, try to feel lovable and worthwhile despite scarred skin, and forget about everything else. Go to sleep, get rest, wake up and get on with the things I want to do.

There is only this. Everything else will take care of itself.