Friday, August 26, 2011

Acne Hell

No one has ever asked me what it was like having a bad case of acne as a teen. It’s a topic that never comes up, partly because the embarrassment never dies. Here I’ll raise the question myself – but don’t worry: I won’t subject you to physical descriptions, except to say that, at seventeen, I would gladly have sacrificed a finger for merely the sort of minor pimple problem of the beautiful girls and boys you see on acne medication commercials. Ah, that embarrassing, isolated red zit! So annoying on an otherwise perfect face! Well, perfection was never a possibility for me, and I had no hope of hiding my condition under a few dabs of makeup. When it came to skin quality, my rival was the full moon.

The problem began when I was fifteen and lasted six or seven years – in other words, forever. I’ve thought about what that experience did to me, how it has maybe shaped my character. When I see a teenager with bad acne today, I feel the way old veterans of war must feel when they look into the faces of soldiers returning from the battlefields of today. There is nothing I can say to them, but I know where they’ve been, and I hope they survive.

Survival in this case is a moral achievement rather than a question of living or dying. Acne is not just embarrassing, but also morally suspect. During one of my worst outbreaks, a friend told me, “You should wash your face more often,” not knowing that he was speaking to someone with a very elaborate, secret face-cleaning routine, someone who spent many hours staring at a mirror and applying special soaps, creams, and ointments. But the moral suspicions run deeper than the issue of cleanliness. For Westerners, the face represents the soul. In America, it seems that we can forgive almost anything but an ugly face. That face in the mirror was both my enemy and the endangered soul I was striving to save. I had to keep believing that under the plague of acne was someone who could still be loved, someone who might someday have the right to love.

Needless to say, as hardships go, even among teenagers, acne is no match for muscular dystrophy or other disabling conditions. Yet, I felt at the time that a serious disease might have been preferable – something with an obvious explanation that would make my victimhood seem nobler or at least more worthy of pity and understanding. Instead, I gradually saw that I would need to be my own source of understanding, patience, and forgiveness.

I now believe that as I twisted my imagination this way and that in my attempts to escape the trap of self-loathing, I arrived gradually and with great effort, unintentionally, at a higher level of compassion than I could have achieved otherwise. Because I did survive it somehow, my acne problem made me more human. Or I survived it because I never lost faith in my own humanity. Those years in the social wilderness also made me realize how difficult it is to achieve humanity, and how hard it is to maintain it. It has to happen every day, in the face of all of the potentially damning imperfections of our own lives, not to mention the outrageous imperfections of other people. We should give thanks that the most superficial imperfections lead us down to the source of our troubles, into the heart of our own darkness, the only place where we humans can learn to survive.

Broadcast by Joe Chaney on August 26, 2011 • WVPE's Audio Archive
Customs & Rituals • Health • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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