Acne Should Really Have an Expiration Date
It’s so hard to be confident at that age to begin with, and when you have bad acne on your face, your self esteem just plummets at the beginning of every day. When it’s hard to look at your face in the mirror, it’s hard to look at other people in their faces, it just is.
I remember a conversation I once had with my father around the age of seventeen or eighteen. There had been a few glorious months where my acne had cleared up for the most part… but then it returned — ugh — in full-force my senior year. I couldn’t believe it was back, and I just wanted it to be gone for good.
I asked him, “When will I stop getting pimples?”
He barely even hesitated before he responded with, “Twenty-five. After twenty-five, you’re home free.”
Twenty-five. Okay, not great news, but exactly bad news either. I still had another seven or eight years of potential misery with acne, but at least there was a firm end date on the horizon.
And as soon as I left for college, I had the sense that pimples were one problem I was only going to have to deal with a little bit longer.
I would go a year or more without thinking of it much (what I thought more about during that time was my debilitating stomachaches, but that’s another story for another time), but then occasionally I’d wake up on a Saturday with three pimples on my forehead, or a big zit on my chin, and I remember thinking, just get to twenty-five, Brian, you’re almost there, you’re almost through this.
And it turned out my dad was right — at least for the most part! After twenty-five, I really didn’t have any issues. Sure, my skin could dry out sometimes, and here and there maybe I would get a tiny little blemish somewhere around my face, but for a few years, I was gloriously acne-free.
But then I woke up one day, about three or four years ago, and I realized before I even looked in a mirror that the menace was back. That my dad had been lying.
My dad was trying to make me feel better way back in my high school days and didn’t want to let me in on the truth!
And what nobody tells you about acne in your thirties is that it takes so much longer to heal than it did in your teen years.
Oh my God, this is the sad truth of the matter, and in ways, the acne I occasionally experience now is worse than the acne I experienced as a teen. Because back then at least the pimples would heal and fade within a day or two.
I don’t get a bunch of them on my face anymore. No, it’s always one stubborn pimple, usually somewhere on my face that nobody who looks in my direction could ever possibly avoid.
Two years I got a pimple on my right cheek that just grew bigger and bigger, day after day, and after I popped it, it turned into this giant red scab that took more than two weeks to fade completely.
I was teaching four days a week while this was happening, and you would have laughed if you had seen me that week, literally turned in a way at the front of the classroom so none of the students could see my right cheek. I lectured, I taught, for seventy-five minutes at a time with my right cheek facing the whiteboard!
And I did the same for anyone I talked to as well. Just always made sure my head was turned in such a way that nobody could possibly notice that red, pulsating horror on my cheek.
It was maddening. Godawful. And every second of that week I kept thinking about what my dad had told me. Twenty-five. Twenty-five? No way! I was thirty-two, dealing with possibly the most traumatic pimple of my entire life, and I wanted to cry anytime I walked by a mirror, anytime my mind stopped wandering to other more important topics and came right back to the way my face looked.
It kept getting redder and redder. Now it’s turned into this annoying little scab that’s centered in such a way that no matter in what direction I’m facing someone, it’s simply unavoidable.
I’m teaching in a few short hours. I’m just gonna have to suck this one up and look at all of them in the eyes. Embrace the pimple.
I’m turning thirty-five this year, it’s been a decade since the pimples were supposed to stop, and yet I still get some occasional acne. Don’t believe it comes to an end at twenty-five, or twenty-two, or whatever you’ve been told.
Of course there are the lucky ones who never have to deal with acne in their adult years. And of course there are the lucky ones who have never dealt with acne their whole entire lives.
But for those of you who still have it, I’m with you, okay? I stand against this injustice with you! Keep washing your face at night, keep fighting, keep doing what you’re doing, and stay strong.
Sooner or later, we’ll defeat this thing together.
Even if it takes until we’re fifty.
Brian Rowe is an author, teacher, book devotee, and film fanatic. He received his MFA in Creative Writing and MA in English from the University of Nevada, Reno, and his BA in Film Production from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He writes young adult and middle grade suspense novels, and is represented by Kortney Price of the Corvisiero Agency.
Acne Should Really Have an Expiration Date
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