Day 298: Skin

My acne has been worse again recently. Not bad enough to make me anxious, but enough to chip away at the edges of my self-esteem. 

It’s a weird one with acne. There’s a very clear point at which it transitions from annoying to actually traumatic. It’s like string bending on guitar (I’ve been playing guitar a lot today): you are playing one note, which you are bending upwards, and upwards, but it feels like the same sound, albeit modified - and then suddenly the pitch rolls over, and it becomes a new note entirely.

I don’t mind having a few spots. I always have a few, at the corners of my lips, under my beard, around my temples. Blotchy cheeks where I sleep against my pillow. Smatterings on my forehead if I have the audacity to wear a hat for even the half hour walk to work. I don’t love it - like a string bend, you can feel the note, in this case your sense of physical self, being stretched, becoming taut - but it holds. You don’t want a picture of yourself on a billboard fifty feet high, you get nervous when people stand right in your personal space, but mostly you’re fine.

But then the acne accumulates past a certain threshold, or you get a breakout of large swollen spots, or a nodule right on the end of your nose, and suddenly you’re in new territory. Suddenly it’s difficult to look people in the eye. Suddenly you sense the world noticing, you walk down the street and you have warning signals flashing in your head, you feel on edge, you sense that you stand out from the crowd. You get on a bus and you feel strangers doing almost imperceptible double-takes, or more likely holding themselves just slightly more composed than usual - the same tension you yourself feel when you have an interaction with someone who has a stammer, or a burn down their face, or a congenital hand deformity, or the like. Some straining in the present moment between you and them, some information you are both aware of and yet cannot state. This is what you feel from everyone when your acne is bad enough, that your skin stands revolting and seeping and pustulating out there in the space between the two of you, that it is a wall that blocks off even the gentle intimacy that may otherwise arise between strangers.

Or else you imagine this, from past traumatic experiences, from moments of adolescent social failure; you assume people notice more than they do. Certainly you yourself only pay brief attention to people you see with deformities, before going back to thinking about yourself. It’s safe to assume others are the same. But you can’t help that stress, that jaggedness. You tell yourself anything you want, it’s still there when you set off out of your house. 

When my skin is bad enough there’s no pep talk I have yet found that can make me confident in facing the world.

Perhaps it is something unique to acne. There are far worse deformities, to be sure, but they tend to be fixed. You are born deformed, and have a fixed image of yourself, or else you become deformed, and you readjust. Like putting a capo on your guitar and playing two frets up. The change is permanent.

Of course every deformity brings its own struggles, obstacles, suffering, pain. But the thing with acne is that your image of self becomes a note bent up and down continuously, the string pulled out of shape, sometimes close to one note, sometimes another, then back down to near where it started, then back up again. It is ever shifting. You adjust, and it changes, and you adjust, and it changes again. Maybe the best analogy I can think of is if you go to bed slim and healthy, and then you wake up having put on fifty pounds in the night. That weight falls slowly off you over the next two or three weeks, until you're back around where you were, and then another day you're ten pounds heavier, then twenty the next day, then forty the next, until a week later when you're severely obese. You stay that way for a week, then it falls right off, and you're back to being relatively thin - until a month later, when you balloon again.

Imagine that happening consistently from adolescence into your thirties.

My skin isn’t terrible at the moment, but it’s far from perfect. I’ve spent close to 20 years struggling with acne, I’ve tried every cream, wash, pill, and diet. It looks to be something that isn’t going away. I will be pushed into that altered state of anxiety by it again in the future. So I guess what I should focus on is getting better at talking about it, being more open about it, bringing the suffering out into the light - and in that way attempt to decrease its power over me.

......

Music: Crosscut Saw, by Albert King. I'm all about that classic blues at the moment. Just listen to that guitar. Sumptuous.

Day 194: Memories

Blog once a day? Stuuuuupid! I don’t wanna. Nope nope nope. I wanna lounge in bed with South Park on in the background and fiddle with photographs on my phone and browse indie games on my Switch and roll over and go to sleep. I’m too tired for this.

Ooof. OK. My eye is falling out. My eye is a putrid lumpy mess. My eye is… I have a stye. That’s what’s happened. I have a stye. There’s nothing to do but put warm compresses on it and wait for it to go down. Work today was grim though, I felt self-conscious, took me right back to days of my acne being bad. Struggling to make eye contact, scanning the faces of everyone with whom I interacted, noticing them noticing, fighting the constant desire to hide away. I told myself at the beginning of the day that I wasn’t bothered, although I’d woken up with the stye huge and inflamed and poking into my eye with a big whitehead on top of it, I’d said to myself that these things happen, I’m too old to care what people think, and mostly they don’t notice, people don’t; you’re the centre of your own world but to everyone else you’re just passing through, you barely register, if at all, and your embarrassments are tiny and external and distant to them.

But immediately once at work I was back into that mindset of the spotty kid shamefaced and looking down at the ground, keeping my head turned away from people, pretending to be distracted and avoiding conversations and closeness.

I spent years doing that growing up. Years and years. It’s no wonder I’m so screwed up now. It’s no wonder I have issues with confidence and intimacy.

My skin was always bad, so I always had to deal with the low-level anxiety and misery of knowing people could see, knowing it lowered you in their eyes, even if they felt compassionate you were still below them, knowing my pain and shame was right there plastered across my face for everyone to stare at and there was not a thing I could do about it. And I just plodded through it, tried to ignore it, tried to reframe my thoughts. But it was always there in the background gnawing away.

And then there were the times my skin got really bad, covered in pus-filled nodules and red raw and disfigured, painful to smile, worrying I would burst spots and spew yellow juice everywhere if I frowned or laughed or chewed food. And then the voices of shame ramped up into top gear, and I would do anything to get away from other people, from social events, from school, uni, work.

Part of the shame was not being able to talk about the shame, so I couldn’t just say “I don’t want to go to the party because I feel like a monster.” So I made up excuses. And friends came to know me as flaky, disappointing, a let-down. And I knew they felt that, and I knew I couldn’t say anything, and I hid in my room alone and festered.

… Hard memories tonight. My skin has been far better since going on Roaccutane when I was 25. These days the breakouts, regular though they are, are mild enough that I would have killed for them a decade ago. Yet still sometimes it’ll be a bit worse, or I’ll get a stye, or a rash, or something, and it’ll trigger that social anxiety response, and I’ll be right back there again, an ashamed and awkward creature, wanting to scuttle away along the sea floor and hide under a rock.

Our issues never truly leave us. Some scars go all the way down. I guess we just have to be as honest with ourselves as we can be, as caring, and treat ourselves with kindness on the bad days. We can’t help being the way we are.

And remember that other people seriously do not give a shit about the ways we think we're ugly. They are far too concerned with their own massively important pains and woes, of which we know little, if anything. And on it goes...

Day 81: Speaks

Iya. Turns out it's easy to get up at seven in the morning. You just need to have a training session you're giving at work later that day to be awake for already and worrying about.

By the time my alarm went off I'd been sat up in bed for half an hour running through my presentation in my head. It was only some basic beer training for the staff, going over some fundamentals that I thought they should know, but still, I was feeling stressed about it.

I abhor public speaking. I spent ten years of my life growing up with really severe acne. My skin is still not good. I do not like the spotlight being on me in social situations. Even just in conversations with one other person I've been known to get sweaty and nervous when I sense attention shifting towards me. Having a group of people all focusing on me is my idea of absolute hell. It makes me want to crawl up inside myself and disappear.

But I knew I had to give this training session. I knew it wasn't objectively a big deal. So I tried to be as prepared as I could be in the time I had. I made sure I was solid on all the points I was talking about. I ran over the presentation again and again, muttered it to myself while changing barrels in the cellar, practised key parts over lunch. And in the end it all went fine. Yeah, I was nervous to begin with, but I settled into it, and I think I managed to teach a few things, and hopefully the staff had fun. They certainly didn't seem to hold the same opinions as the negative voices in my head, which like to tell me how pathetic and worthless I am every step of the way.

So it was good. And it was another test that I have faced down and made it through while completely sober. I wanted a slug of whisky so badly before starting, that moment when the staff began traipsing in and I realised I was going to have to actually do it, and I thought of my opening and how unfunny and lame it was and how I'd made the whole thing too esoteric and how I was going to lose my words and trail off and blush and spontaneously wee myself and cry in front of everyone. I really wanted some whisky right at that moment.

But I didn't have any. And in the end I didn't need any. Chalk public speaking up as one more occasion where being sober isn't just possible, but perhaps even preferable. I was present for the whole thing, alert, and I'm not going to wake up tomorrow with a hangover.

But I am going to wake up tomorrow. And I am going to wake up early (for me), and go to work, so for now I will leave this here, and bid you good night.

Good night, lovely people, and take care.

A new plan, again: Day 30

Well, here's the big one. 30 days of not drinking, of getting decent sleep, of writing on here every day come rain or shine or horrendous bank holidays. 30 days trying to face up to my life.

How am I feeling? Lonely and low, today. I had a plan of how this post would go, but I'm depressed now and I don't know if I have the energy for any of it. It's like feeling the strength drain from all your muscles. Every cell in your body giving up at once.

Really don't think I can plot out a post and jump through the hoops to say how well I've done getting here, what challenges I've faced, where I want to go in the future. All that prosaic stuff. Ung.

But what I can do is the last thing the depression is expecting, which is tell the truth about why I got depressed today.

What happened was two people talked to me about swimming.

I was feeling tired and drained anyway, which makes me susceptible to mental illness, like the unstable air before a storm. And I was lonely because Fran was looking after her mum and my friends were busy elsewhere and I had a day off by myself. I went shopping in town and I mooched around and read my book and everything was a bit flat.

But the spark that set the storm in motion (I know sparks don't set storms in motion but it sounds good so let it go) was two different people bringing up the idea of going swimming. My housemate said she was thinking of joining the gym down the road, and asked if I liked swimming, maybe would I like to accompany her. Then my friend at work, when I dropped in before walking home, casually mentioned she was spending her day off tomorrow going out to a lake in the countryside with her boyfriend and going swimming.

I don't go swimming. I don't go swimming because I've got acne scars on my chest and back and I don't take my top off around people.

I hate saying that. I don't take my top off around people and I don't talk about it either. What am I even doing saying this?

I guess what I'm doing is being brave because it's the end of 30 days in which I've been a tiny bit brave over and over, and I should be properly brave now or there's no point in any of this.

I've suffered from pretty severe acne since I was 15, which I've written about before, and though it's mostly under control these days, I still get bad breakouts, and I've still got scars all over my body, and I never take my top off around people. I don't do sports, I don't join gyms, I don't go on beach holidays, and I certainly never go swimming.

I never talk about this because I was bullied pretty badly at school for being weird and different, and as a defence mechanism I think I learnt to try to hide any aspect of myself that stood out jaggedly, to feel intense shame over the bits of me that people might mock. And also because everyone hates to be ugly, and acne makes you inarguably ugly.

You never see people with acne on TV or in movies, unless maybe they're the bad guy, or they're someone sad or detested by the town. You never see models with acne advertising perfume or fashionable clothes. Companies make money hawking miracle cures for acne that (spoilers) don't really work. Society inherently knows that having acne is just plain yucky.

A girl at work the other day was tongue-in-cheek joking about how she was a nine out of ten on the attractiveness scale, but because she had a spot coming up on her chin that knocked her down to a five. I couldn't see the spot at all. I walked away and thought about what I would be on that scale. I didn't think I would be very high.

I still remember a sleepover as a teenager where we were playing this Would You Rather card game marketed as "gross-out" and "adult-only" and whatever. I had new friends from the ones who'd bullied me, and though my face was obviously a mess I kept the spots on my body a secret, felt that the worst thing in the world would happen if these friends found out my back and chest were an alien planet of pimples and pustules and lesions. I'd been to change into my sleeping shirt in the toilet so no one would see or know. I came back just in time to hear the question, "Would you rather have toes sprouting all over your face, or back acne?" My new friends all yelled "Eww" at the same time and sat for what felt like eternity discussing how repugnant either of those would be, how they couldn't even make a decision. I shrunk down into my sleeping bag and blushed and stayed silent.

So, I don't like talking about any of this. At all. But also -- because I've been being brave over and over this past month, and because I'm not 15 anymore, I'm 33, and because we're all dying and this might be the only life we get and if we don't seize this brief flickering beauty now as it hurls itself apart all around us we might never get the chance again -- because of this also what I think is very much fuck it.

Everyone has their thing about themselves that they wish they could change. Gap teeth, small tits, squinty eyes, hairy arms. We're all warped and hirsute and wobbly in some way. Yes, some have it worse than others. For many the worst thing about their appearance is that their little toe curves under its neighbour, or that they have a double chin in some photographs, or strange elbows. For some of us the deformities are more difficult. We're not all born physically equal, it's true.

But some beautiful kids are born in Aleppo, or in the slums of Dhaka. Some women with immaculate hourglass figures are sold into prostitution in Venezuela. Some men with the most perfect creamy unblemished skin imaginable have to kneel and watch as their families are executed in front of them in South Sudan.

It sucks to have acne, for sure. But a lot of things suck in this world.

All we can do, I think, is bring as much light and warmth and grace to this oft-desolate, oft-achingly-painful Earth as we can, while we are able. There are scars on the surface, but there is so much beauty below, if you can be brave enough to look for it.

I'll let you know what I'm doing with the blog tomorrow I guess. Right now I'm going to go collapse.

Lots of love x