by Anonymous
My whole life, well until I was about 19, I had perfect skin. I am not trying to brag, I am trying to establish that skin was not something I lay awake at night contemplating. If anything, I rarely thought about my skin, it wasn’t something that I was consciously aware of. I was lucky.
When I turned 19 and got an eyebrow piercing, something changed. I know you must be thinking, “What does it have to do with the eyebrow piercing?!?”
Honestly it could be unrelated, but after I got an eyebrow piercing in the fall of 2019 my skin broke out with vengeance. It was textured, it was red, it was volatile, and it was all consuming. At first I overlooked this minor meltdown that was happening all over my face, I thought it was a blip in an otherwise perfect timeline. I assumed it would all return to normal in a few days.
That was not the case. My skin became all I would think about, like an AM radio trapped in my head playing the same song everyday, I was in purgatory hell. When I walked out my front door the first thing I thought about was how ashamed I was about my skin on a scale of mildly ashamed to embarrassed to be a human. I was so paranoid I would watch where people’s eyes wandered during conversations hoping their internal monologue wasn’t a brutal review on what I now considered my worst feature. It made me want to isolate myself from the outside world because I no longer felt as worthy to be seen as someone with perfect skin is.
To cope with this, I did what I think most of us might do. I tried to regain control by trying to “fix” this problem. Now I am a psychology major, not a dermatologist, but either way I was determined to find my own solution. This was the beginning of a very long journey of trying many different positions, elixirs, diets, and homemade hacks that promised beautiful skin overnight. Every time I would find a new “cure” online I would feel this little glimmer of hope. Every morning when nothing had changed I would feel my self confidence hit a new all time low as I swung from hope to despair.
The worst part about all of this is that my newly found troublesome complexion really changed how I viewed myself. Before this whole debacle started I was a very confident person, I thought highly of myself and did not have any self esteem issues (for the most part this is relative). Now it felt like my skin had infiltrated the capital control center where my confidence was located and infected all departments with soul crushing self doubt. I was no longer a good worker, I was an eyesore. I was no longer a nice friend, I was the friend with acne. I was no longer a daughter, I was something my mom was ashamed of. Again, this was all happening in my head, but this powerful narrative spread affecting every part of myself I used to feel proud of.
Looking back on this whole journey, one of the most troubling things about it is that I stopped looking in the mirror. Everytime I would enter the bathroom, I would turn the light off. I didn’t want the light on because that light would act as a microscope highlighting everything I felt was wrong with me that I was unable to fix. I spent years peeing in the dark, brushing my teeth in the dark, finding my mascara in the dark and generally living in the dark to avoid my own reflection. It was terrible.
Now I can’t leave this story on such a sour note. So I will give you an update that now almost 3 years later, my skin is pretty good. I wouldn’t say it’s as good as it was before that fateful day in the fall of 2019, but I also don’t think it’s anything to be ashamed of. My skin is normal, it has its good days and its bad days. How I got my skin to “calm down” is honestly beyond me. I think the hardest part about skin care is it’s completely individualized, what works for one person might not work for another person.
Regardless, I am not here to give beauty advice, I am here to tell you I am still learning how to turn the light on in the bathroom when I pee and to embrace my reflection. Learning to look in the mirror again has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
This journey taught me I put way too much value into my outward appearance and that basing your value on how you look is in short, toxic. You as a person, yes YOU, have so much more to offer the world than perfect skin. Our value and our worth needs to come from the inside, it needs to come from the values we hold and the values we act upon everyday. Your skin doesn’t define you, my skin doesn’t define me, and I hope together if we say it enough times eventually we will believe it.
