I have had trouble falling asleep my entire life. As a baby, I kept my parents red eyed with constant midnight crying, and nowadays, I keep my flatmates awake with my late-night clattering in the kitchen. I have spent countless hours staring into my ceiling willing myself to sleep and stressing over early alarms that keep creeping closer and closer. However, there was one period of my life where my inability to fall asleep was a little more bearable.
I was maybe eight when my dad told me one especially sleepless night that I should not worry too much. He told me that just lying there and resting was almost as good for me as sleeping. After countless attempts at consolidation, this one sentence put me at ease in a way nothing had before. I let go of the stress over not getting enough sleep and, for about two years, I slept relatively well — it was out of my control, and I was getting rest anyway, why worry?
Unfortunately, this bubble burst when I asked my dad a few years later to confirm that resting was almost as good as sleep, and he laughed it off as nonsense. The sleepless nights came back but I learned something that I believe can be helpful in how we deal with acne as a society.
I have struggled with acne since the age of fifteen and it has, at times, completely dominated my attention. I know my case has not been especially bad and that many have it much worse, but I do know how it feels to see my face as being topographical. How it feels to think of your forehead as having a ‘terrain.’ I have avoided mirrors and hissed at strong lighting. Like many in my position, I have scoured the internet for what I can do to mitigate my acne. I have avoided cold showers, hot showers, dairy, meat, greasy food, and dirty hands. I have changed pillowcases religiously and used face washes, moisturizers, and medicines with overcomplicated names. I believed for a while that sunlight helped, only to learn that it would forever darken my scars.
Many times, I have felt like I am over the worst of it and that the acne will soon be gone forever, only to curse my incredible naivety come December and vowing to never let myself believe in light at the end of the tunnel. That being said, my condition has consistently gotten better during the past few years so there is no reason to give up hope.
Having acne is always going to be hard. In our shared cultural language, acne has become synonymous with an unhygienic gamer stereotype just as glasses have always been used as a symbol of the nerd. American TV-shows, and international ones, always cast fair skinned maidens for their star roles and only look to the pimply pile of actors if they need to portray a loser. This is a big part of the self-hate and dysmorphia that acne brings but what really drives us insane, in my mind, is that having acne is always sold to us as a choice.
“If you follow these easy steps and these daily routines even you can be saved” they tell us. Acne becomes a mark of the lazy idiot who either can’t be bothered or does not know they can be fixed. This casts acne less as something that happens to us, but something we do to ourselves. “Oh, you eat yoghurt, well that explains it!” or “You just need some stronger antibiotics.”
Constantly looking for fixes and racking your head asking what you are doing wrong in a reality when the ebbs and flows of acne are largely out of our control is madness and is terrible for your self-esteem and mental health. There are endless studies that point to small changes in acne due to countless factors, but they are almost all extremely minimal. This brings me back to my dad’s white lie.
I believe that I, and more like me, would be much happier in life if we stopped the constant search for some kind of fountain of eternal fair skin. If we could believe it is out of our control (as it largely is) and see it as something happening to us, not some self-inflicted and unhygienic condition. If we could be ‘blue-pilled’ (not a part of my usual vocabulary but useful in this context) into reversing the decades of cleansing routines and dietary advice and living in blissful ignorance of the many microscopic things we could be doing to fight acne.
I know this kind of mass reversal is unrealistic, but what is not unrealistic is a gradual change of attitude. Many suffer horribly from painful acne and strong medicine can be a lifesaver in such cases. However, the rest of us get little out of constantly obsessing over small missteps in the pursuit of beauty.
There is a critique of capitalism angle to this as well. The industry providing and peddling ‘solutions’ to your acne ‘problem’ is massive and it profits off of your self-hate and desperation.Body dysmorphia en masse feeds their quick-fix business model, and I would like to see more restrictions on the problematisation of mild and moderate acne. It is human and normal to have acne. You do not have to love it, but please try not to worry too much over what you can do to fix it.
Illustration by VectorElements on Unsplash.
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Acne Would be More Bearable if We Could Let Go of Control
I have had trouble falling asleep my entire life. As a baby, I kept my parents red eyed with constant midnight crying, and nowadays, I keep my flatmates awake with my late-night clattering in the kitchen. I have spent countless hours staring into my ceiling willing myself to sleep and stressing over early alarms that keep creeping closer and closer. However, there was one period of my life where my inability to fall asleep was a little more bearable.
I was maybe eight when my dad told me one especially sleepless night that I should not worry too much. He told me that just lying there and resting was almost as good for me as sleeping. After countless attempts at consolidation, this one sentence put me at ease in a way nothing had before. I let go of the stress over not getting enough sleep and, for about two years, I slept relatively well — it was out of my control, and I was getting rest anyway, why worry?
Unfortunately, this bubble burst when I asked my dad a few years later to confirm that resting was almost as good as sleep, and he laughed it off as nonsense. The sleepless nights came back but I learned something that I believe can be helpful in how we deal with acne as a society.
I have struggled with acne since the age of fifteen and it has, at times, completely dominated my attention. I know my case has not been especially bad and that many have it much worse, but I do know how it feels to see my face as being topographical. How it feels to think of your forehead as having a ‘terrain.’ I have avoided mirrors and hissed at strong lighting. Like many in my position, I have scoured the internet for what I can do to mitigate my acne. I have avoided cold showers, hot showers, dairy, meat, greasy food, and dirty hands. I have changed pillowcases religiously and used face washes, moisturizers, and medicines with overcomplicated names. I believed for a while that sunlight helped, only to learn that it would forever darken my scars.
Many times, I have felt like I am over the worst of it and that the acne will soon be gone forever, only to curse my incredible naivety come December and vowing to never let myself believe in light at the end of the tunnel. That being said, my condition has consistently gotten better during the past few years so there is no reason to give up hope.
Having acne is always going to be hard. In our shared cultural language, acne has become synonymous with an unhygienic gamer stereotype just as glasses have always been used as a symbol of the nerd. American TV-shows, and international ones, always cast fair skinned maidens for their star roles and only look to the pimply pile of actors if they need to portray a loser. This is a big part of the self-hate and dysmorphia that acne brings but what really drives us insane, in my mind, is that having acne is always sold to us as a choice.
“If you follow these easy steps and these daily routines even you can be saved” they tell us. Acne becomes a mark of the lazy idiot who either can’t be bothered or does not know they can be fixed. This casts acne less as something that happens to us, but something we do to ourselves. “Oh, you eat yoghurt, well that explains it!” or “You just need some stronger antibiotics.”
Constantly looking for fixes and racking your head asking what you are doing wrong in a reality when the ebbs and flows of acne are largely out of our control is madness and is terrible for your self-esteem and mental health. There are endless studies that point to small changes in acne due to countless factors, but they are almost all extremely minimal. This brings me back to my dad’s white lie.
I believe that I, and more like me, would be much happier in life if we stopped the constant search for some kind of fountain of eternal fair skin. If we could believe it is out of our control (as it largely is) and see it as something happening to us, not some self-inflicted and unhygienic condition. If we could be ‘blue-pilled’ (not a part of my usual vocabulary but useful in this context) into reversing the decades of cleansing routines and dietary advice and living in blissful ignorance of the many microscopic things we could be doing to fight acne.
I know this kind of mass reversal is unrealistic, but what is not unrealistic is a gradual change of attitude. Many suffer horribly from painful acne and strong medicine can be a lifesaver in such cases. However, the rest of us get little out of constantly obsessing over small missteps in the pursuit of beauty.
There is a critique of capitalism angle to this as well. The industry providing and peddling ‘solutions’ to your acne ‘problem’ is massive and it profits off of your self-hate and desperation.Body dysmorphia en masse feeds their quick-fix business model, and I would like to see more restrictions on the problematisation of mild and moderate acne. It is human and normal to have acne. You do not have to love it, but please try not to worry too much over what you can do to fix it.
Illustration by VectorElements on Unsplash.
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