Firstly, I’m guessing that most people reading this are no longer in the throes of adolescence, however, I’m writing it in hopes that if a member of your family or community is currently suffering from the woes that accompany our teenage years, this post will be of some small comfort.
I was a very unfortunate looking early teen. 5ft by the time I left primary school, I then didn’t grow at all for years. Everything was all over the place and I was getting lumps and bumps in all the wrong places (I also had an unfortunate astigmatism), and worst of all, I had horrendous acne. I mean, horrendous. By the time I was in my middle teens, I was having all sorts of hospital treatment for disfigurement grade acne, which is essentially cysts, boils and pustules and other agonising eruptions. If I developed one on the border between by cheek and the thinner skin around my eye, it would usually come out as a big, livid black eye as if I’d been in a fight or a car accident. Any fellow sufferer will tell you that the ones that develop on skin ‘borders’, like the edges of your eyes and lips are absolute pigs and very painful. People were forever telling me not to touch my face or ‘pick’ at it, which I very rarely did in my defence, as there was no point making an even bigger mess. This, as you can imagine, did not make school an enjoyable experience. There was the common assumption that I was somehow dirty or simply ‘unclean’, like a leper. We were a small year of 22, and I used to dread PE with a special kind of grim horror. Being told that I smelled (I didn’t), and having my usually rigidly covered up torso and arms under scrutiny was horrible. Teenage girls are horrible, by the way. Even if they are not, they keep very quiet and mind their own business.
I developed a lasting fear of cameras, and to this day I despise having my photograph taken. There are a very limited number of me as a teenager, thank God, as no one wants to be reminded of that horror show. Then, when I was about 16/17, I finally went ‘under the care’ of a decent hospital consultant who put me on a drug called Roaccutane, which is vile and contains thalidomide so you had to have a pregnancy test to get a repeat prescription, at the hospital (as if anyone would have touched me with a barge pole). Still, the humiliation was worth it, for the results, which were not miraculous, but definitely progress. Except the consultant forgot to prescribe the right topical cream and nose drops, so I began to suffer with debilitating nose bleeds and chronically cracked hands, feet and lips, which would also split, and bleed. Still, he got it right in the end. I grew four inches and no longer looked like a busty, boss-eyed homunculus, although the thalidomide shrank my kidneys to the size of walnuts so I eventually had to come off it.
By then, the very worst had passed, and my skin gradually recovered. Now in my late 40s, my skin is holding its own and I only have shadows of the scars that plagued those years. I was lucky.
The hatred of the camera remains, making me seem like a sulky adolescent again, in an age when people seem to want nothing more than their face paraded in front of the world at any possible opportunity. Ugh, no thanks.
So if you, or yours have or are suffering with true acne (not just ‘teenage spots’) my heart really does go out to you. Treatments are light years better than they were 30 years ago, as are doctors, so don’t suffer in silence. And look on the bright side, in your late 40s you’ll probably have fewer wrinkles than most 35 year olds. Or at least that’s what I tell myself! And if you are suffering and it’s affecting your confidence, do speak to someone, or encourage someone else if they are struggling with letting it define them. For me it will, but it really doesn’t have to last a lifetime. Big love, pals. Stay lucky.