Hot Mess

Slathered in a True Blue Spa Mud Mask, hoping to dry out my face.

This post is some of the terrible. There's no twee in this one. It is self-critical and brutally honest.

My skin is my enemy. When I was in 5th grade, it began to break out, and my mom freaked out. She would take sewing needles, sterilize them with a lighter, and dig the blackheads out my pores. Yeah, that left some obsessive compulsive tendencies in my psyche when it comes to breakouts. I would never repeat the 'ol needle trick, but I do have a blackhead extractor that I take to my face sometimes and end up frustrated, because my blackheads are so deep in my pores. Ugh, my pores. They're awful, huge, and constantly ooze oil. "They" tell girls with oily skin to be thankful because wrinkles will be kept at bay because of the oily skin, but I don't think "They" understand the frustration of a thirty-something that is sick to death of having teenage skin.

I hate to say it, but I am a picker (after many afternoons spent with my mother performing impromptu and painful blackhead extraction, it's kind of a given, it's ingrained in my head...get rid of it). I can't stand to have a pimple. It used to be when I worked full time, if I woke up, and saw a pimple, I would try my best to extract it, especially if it was the type that would be a nasty whitehead in a few hours time. Luckily, my acne scars are few.

I used to have oily skin, pimples, and the ever present giant pores and blackheads. Now, after having two kids, my skin has added cystic acne to the mix. This has been awful. It is hormonal, and once a month, I'm getting one or two nasty painful cysts around my jawline and mouth. They're so deep, there's nothing that really can be done except watch it turn red and inflamed, and hope that I don't accidentally touch the thing, or move my face in such a way to disturb it. It seems that as soon as they're finally resolving, my face is kicking into hormonal overdrive and starting the cystic cycle all over again, and I have new cysts to deal with on my face.

I don't have any desire to have children anytime soon, so I'm thinking about going to a dermatologist and talking about going on Accutane. I'm willing to suffer the dryness, peeling, etc, if I could just get rid of this stupid oily acne ridden face. Dryness would be a blessing, compared to the oil slick my face is two hours after cleansing it.

November 2010, meeting my indie uber-crush, MC Lars for the first time. Yeah, I'm wearing makeup, but my skin looked wonderful, comparing it to it's present state.

I think my worsening acne may be caused by my birth control pill, Junel. It was the only HBC pill that actually got my hormonal uterine rebellion under control. I'm terrified to stop taking it. I was unfortunate enough to be in that <1% of people who had an IUD failure. And it failed spectacularly. This happened at the end of 2010, when this picture was taken, though I didn't know it until right after Christmas. It was terrible, and required three hospital trips, surgery, an overnight stay, and two courses of methotrexate (which made me nauseous and made my hair fall out.) I don't trust IUDs. I have to find a new OBGYN since mine is 1500 miles away (which sucks, because I've been seeing him since I was 19), and I think I'm going to switch to Implanon, and hope against all hope that it will A) be an effective, long term BC, and B) help to halt this never ending cycle of suck that is my face.