The past few years have been an incredibly long and hard journey for me and my skin. I hate to be the person who focuses so much on my external appearance, but it’s difficult to not focus on every detail of your face when you look at it so often. Comparing every detail of our skin to that of the photoshopped, blurred, colorised photos of people on the internet.
As time has gone by I have been on a journey to learn to accept it, turning it into a healing process, despite it being a long and tumultuous journey.
This journey has been one that has been both a financial burden and emotional burden. Nobody tells you, but when you’re unhappy with yourself, you seek every “helpful” article/video/blogpost to find something that will “fix” your skin. Not only that, but all of these articles/videos/instagram posts of people posting elaborate claims that this product cleared my skin in 3 days. Not to shit on those people’s posts, but what a bullshit thing to post. When you’re feeling your worst about your skin, totally helpless and unhappy these posts give you hope that they’ll have a miracle remedy to your problem. False. All you’ve done is wasted your time researching and purchasing that item.
Everybody’s skin is SO DIFFERENT. Every factor in their life contributes to that individual persons skin. Just because swallowing 20 Vitamin A tablets a day helped that person clear their skin, doesn’t mean it will work for you. Truthfully, for a while I had considered it. In all honesty, I’ve read the majority of these posts and thought I should try all these different products, consuming different products. Don’t. It will probably just aggravate your skin over the long term. I learnt that the hard way.
If I could tell myself this just two weeks ago. I would scream “trying different products often will probably just further inflame your skin, drying it out and causing a disruption to your skin barrier!”. Sending me into a spiral of unhappy thoughts and bouts of moodiness, because I was both angry at myself and my skin.
This process of healing hasn’t been easy, the past 4 years I’ve spent countless amounts of hours researching what products I should best use. Money spent on products that I end up tossing away and wasting, and money on vitamins for skin hair nails. All tossed away. Dermatologist appointments, doctors appointments and all the above. The ups and downs are constant, some days I look at myself and I’m incredibly grateful for the skin I have, and other days I’m angry at myself for having done something, when really every single part of our life will always have these ups and downs.
My emotions have been tied to my skin for so many years. Days where I considered changing plans because of my inflamed skin, days where I’ve had to call in sick to work because of an allergic reaction on my skin, causing my entire face to puff up. Feeling helpless tends to leave you feeling sad and defeated, but what that’s where the internal healing has helped me place less of my emotions on how my skin looks that day.
You learn that nobody else looks at your skin like you do. That pimple isn’t even visible from the distance most people stand from you.
Finding the positive affirmations to speak to yourself will heal you both inside and out. The journey is long and hard, and sometimes you just want to scream at how you’ve taken 20 steps back, but keep going. One day it’ll be so easy, you’ll forget that you once didn’t know how to speak positively to yourself, and how your emotions ran rampant based on your internal feelings of your external appearance.
Stay strong. You are not your skin.
