I love my zits

I am one of those despised dermatological unicorns: a person blessed with great skin. One of those people for whom actual blemishes are so rare as to make each one memorable. Like the Great Squee of Oh-Seven,  flaring in the night with its own evil incandescence.  And, more recently, the Tenacious Tunnelling Blackhead of Two-Kay-Thirteen.

Occasionally - and I mean as occasionally as a baby elephant - a single pimple would happen. Always on my chin, within a one-inch sweet spot - my very own personal crucible of pustulence.

I would peer in the mirror at it, mystified.  A lone zit seems as unnatural as a hen laying only one egg, a cob of corn with a single niblet, a green pod cradling a lonely pea. Shouldn’t whiteheads come in crops? In festering flocks of clogged-pore goodness? In a murder of mandible-cloaking crow heads? But no. Not on this body.

Until now. These days, my skin’s threatening to unleash all the zits it horded during my teen years. After all these years of restraint, I dread a lynch-mob of white suprema-cysts. So far, production seems to be at a simmer, not a rolling boil (ahthankyou!)

But still. I count precisely two on my chin… and five on my back. My back! For the love of fuzzy baby animals, when did my back become fair game?

For me, this verges on traumatic. But those plagued with acne all their lives laugh at me. "You're freaking over a measley seven zits? I can't remember a time when I didn't have at least ten." They smirk at my primadonna horror and hand me tea tree oil.

Why oh why is this happening? It's partly to do with my age. Peri-menopause can be a sort of second adolescence, hormonally speaking. Experts also attribute worsening of acne to stress.

Knowing this brought a realization: I love my zits. Because these crimson craters mean I've survived to reach middle age. That's no small thing for someone with anxiety issues and a family history of breast cancer that makes medical professionals indulgent.

I love my white-capped wonders because they show I am brave. In the past six months, I've made a host choices and decisions.  Each has stretched me to greater levels of exposure and vulnerability. There are things I need to do, things that scare me into acne-studded alertness. And I am doing them, one spot at a time.

So when you see me, salute my latest dermal conflagration as the badge of honour it is.

I Love My Zits by Monica Meneghetti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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