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.
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.
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.
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.
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