The Tale of a Very Large Zit

First of all, I promise funny on Friday because that entry is about St. Patrick's Day (I know, FINALLY) and that night had good stories.

But today I really want to talk about this: Pretty Babies.

Firstly, let me say that I know mothers who engage in this behavior, though perhaps not as extreme as this article lays out. But I do know mothers whose eight year old daughters get manicures and eye brow waxings. I surely do. And worse yet, I actually think those little girls look adorable with their perfect pink nails and their perfectly sculpted eyebrows. Much like I think that ear piercing in little girls is cute. And to a certain degree, I hate myself for thinking that because I'd like for little girls to just get dirty, too. And I could not promise that if I had a little girl, by the time she was 10 she wouldn't have been dolled up like that. But I'd like to think that I had trained her to be dirty, too.

Dirty in the play in the dirt way. Stay with me.

Okay, so, the first thing that happened in that article was this brilliant line about what happens when we make girls too pretty, too young ... and "How, without the ugly years, will girls learn to accept themselves?"

And I agree.

My "ugly years" were in my early to mid twenties, kind of that last year or so of college and the first years of San Francisco. First, I gained some weight, people. Seriously. I was smoking a lot of pot near the end of college, which of course means extra weight - especially when you live in a college town where half of the economy is driven by pizza delivery that happens after 3:00am - no pun intended. And then I moved to a city where the 3:00am shwarma is king and Victor's Italian was right down the road and my life become more sedentary because I had an office job. My clothing size was almost double what I currently wear, though I guess in fairness I was also wearing my clothes baggier.

And my skin went bad. My skin has always been temperamental, but when I'm stressed out about something my immediate physical reaction to it is to break out. And I was stressed a lot during those years, so there was always some skin issue of varying degrees going on. And sometimes it was embarrassingly bad. Bad like the "before" stories in a Proactive infomercial. AND I WAS USING PROACTIVE AT THE TIME AND IT DIDN'T HELP. For example, one day when I was living with (I Love) Paul Jack, I woke up one morning and my skin was broken out so excessively that I couldn't even physically open my mouth. I had to call a doctor and drink through a straw for a day.

I'm probably remembering most of this as worse than it was - but that's not the point because I'm sure that a teenager who goes through her ugly years then remembers her breakout and unibrow as worse than it was too. What I know is that I felt insecure and unhappy about the way I looked, and I had to find other ways to like myself. Or, at a minimum, because that may be an overstatement, I had to be able to look in the mirror at my big, fat butt or my incredibly broken out face and just be angry about it, not hate myself for it.

And eventually the weight fell off. That's not true. Eventually I worked the weight off through changing my late night eating pattern and making it a point to work out.

And eventually, though I still respond to stress with a big zit here or there, my skin pretty much cleared up through better product, better birth control and a dryer climate.

So, back around Super Bowl time of this year, I was very stressed. Because as you know, for the last several years Super Bowl has been one of my most stressful times of the year. And I developed a stress zit. Actually, it was more like a stress boil. Actually it was more like an alien child trying to birth itself from a pod on my right jawline. It was bad. It actually literally was about the size of a quarter and took about two months to completely heal/drain. You couldn't look at me without seeing "Frank the Zit" first. *I* couldn't look at me without seeing it first. And I am single and ready to mingle and a huge blemish on my skin is not ideal.

So, ToniK and Mike and I go to the Super Bowl. And we're hanging out in the RV one night and "Frank the Zit" decides that this is when he wants to explode all over my face, meaning that I will now have a big, draining, scar-ridden cyst for the next two days while surrounded by hot available men at the Super Bowl.

And my response to this?

Literally...

My response is to shrug it off and say, "I mean, you know, whatever. If I were a super model, I wouldn't be hanging out in an RV with you yahoos at the Super Bowl. And that would kind of blow."

But most importantly, I meant it when I said that.

And I mean, the point is, if from the time I was a tiny tot I'd had perfect nails and perfect skin and perfect eyebrows, would I still be able to kind of shrug off the BIGGEST SKIN BLEMISH ANYBODY HAS EVER HAD - EVER and not think that it was something that really detracted from the awesomeness that is me as a whole? I mean, who knows, but probably not. I probably would have stressed about that stress zit for weeks and spent money better spent on saving starving African children on treatment after treatment and whined like it was the end of the world.

So I see the author's point. It's important that we're not always perfect on the outside so that we don't start to expect ourselves to be perfect, either on the outside or the inside. Or, more accurately, if we start to expect ourselves to be perfect on the outside, the degree to which we're imperfect on the inside will grow.

I hope that Sadie and Rayna and Cienna all have ugly years. I just hope that they don't have the kind that scar them for life but instead the kind that make them closer to perfect on the inside.

And I hope that the next time I get a big old stress zit, it's on the right side of my forehead so that I can brush my bangs over it and just conceal it.