Acne

My years of being ‘spotty’ in school.

I USED TO BE REALLY ‘SPOTTY’. I had ‘moderate’ acne, on the medical scale that goes from mild —> moderate —> severe. I didn’t have the big, painful nodules and cysts required for a severe acne diagnosis, but I most certainly had the voluminous scatter of red, white, and blackheads, clumped in pockets of pus on my cheeks, jaw, forehead, temples, mouth, sides of my nose, and then on my neck, back, chest, and thighs. I would show you a picture of how bad it was at the peak of the condition, around 15-16 years old, but I don’t have any pictures in which you can see it. None at all.

My acne was easily the most prominent, quite possibly the only, serious thing affecting my mental health throughout my school years. I saw acne, especially facial acne, as one of those afflictions that rendered a person ugly, no matter what else they had going on. To 15 year old me, Dorian Gray himself would’ve been disgusting to look at, were a few spots to grow on his cheeks and forehead. This is clearly an absurd point of view, and one I have grown out of with age.

But acne ruled my mind throughout secondary school. I’d count the new spots as they formed on my face each morning. I’d know, and note, where they’d popped up, two new ones on my left cheek and oh, great, a slight reduction in the pustules near my bottom lip. I used to wish that I could take all my facial acne and put it on my back, because no one could see it there.

I really just wanted to look like a grown-up already, I think.

And I tried every single treatment out there, the creams and the ointments, the balms and the drips, the lifestyle changes, the diets, the sweat-reduction, some less intense pills, sleep, all kinds of sobrieties, everything - I tried everything. Things would work for a bit and then stop, or flare-ups would happen when I overloaded on those methods which seemed to initially yield results; either way, it didn’t get better throughout school. It bothered me so much, because my face was the first, really the only thing people saw in a school where the uniform policy was just a blue, black, or grey suit, and so I felt that I looked so unprofessional, so immature, so boyish, surrounded by peers who looked as though they were starting a job in IB at Goldman Sachs tomorrow. It didn’t help that I had braces during this time, either.

I felt like a kid, which is a calamitous thing to feel at 15, especially in an intensive, extremely sophisticated grammar school.

So I struggled pretty badly with the mental effects of acne throughout school. Ironically enough, the physical condition itself never bothered me that much - it was rarely painful and never seriously so, and the ‘bacne’ rarely flared up or got in my way. But I was just so self-conscious about it all, and so acne became an ambient thought, something I rarely had to bring to the front of my mind because it was alway there. Any time a mirror passed or a camera was brought out or I had to talk to a clear-skinned peer of mine, I was always thinking about how reflective the light was, how sharp the camera, always charting the wandering eye of my interlocutors, assuming they were counting my face, and judging me for it.

Sometimes in weaker moments I would look at the pictures of severe acne that the NHS had on its website, because I wanted reassurance that there were people out there in the world who had a worse acne experience than I did. If they could exist in society, then I could too. It goes without saying that this is a ridiculous thing to think, to concern yourself with, but I was so insecure at this time that I just needed something to hold on to, to show me that this wasn't anywhere near as bad as it could get. This didn’t stop me from catastrophising anyway.

As school passed and I went off to university, my acne improved. This was due, as far as I can tell, entirely to age; my hormones settled down, auxiliary things like my diet and lifestyle improved, and I finally started to understand I was coming out the other side of it. I also stopped using all products during this time, washed my face pretty much exclusively with water, which I still tend to do most of the time today. But things improved, and I was happier, and more confident, and thought about it a lot less.

But that was just, kind of, all there was to it. It got steadily better, and today (going into my final year of university), it’s pretty much all gone. You wouldn’t say I ‘have’ acne, the condition, at all. I have a few spots here and there, and after a few bad meals or late bedtimes things will flare up occasionally, but long gone are the days of counting the new spots and positioning myself in those ridiculous mental contortions. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that my acne’s gone now. I observe this, every day, to be true but I’m not entirely out of the headspace yet.

I don’t know what I was expecting to feel when my skin finally cleared up. I’d been fantasising about it for years, and when I realised that it had indeed gotten better there was nothing but gruff recognition, a realisation that, yeah my skin was pretty clear now, great, haven’t got to worry about that anymore, but that was kind of it. It was an extraordinary anticlimax. This had been the bane of my existence for years, pretty much my entire teenage career, and now I had finally slain the dragon, I was practically unbothered.

I have matured between 15 and 20, or so I would hope. I like to think that even if it were as bad today as it was in Year Nine, I wouldn’t be so bothered, because of that maturity that I've gained. I suppose there’s no way to know, really, and perhaps I would be just as much of a blubbering mess now as I was at the time. Perhaps I still do scan over my face every morning, but I just keep coming up empty. Perhaps, if it came back just as strong, I'd be no better than the inconsolable 15 year old, desperately rubbing his face with all manner of soaps, hoping it’d all be gone in the morning.