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Alright so this is going to inevitably end up being a ridiculously long & petty post of depressing self-pity, but I really feel like I have nowhere else to go - I can honestly say I'm currently at the lowest point of my entire futile existence. I'm one of those people who usually just compartmentalises all of their emotions & disguises their crumbling insecurities behind a veil of conceited confidence, so sharing my personal feelings is a huge deal for me & doesn't come naturally whatsoever - never has - I guess that's something of a typical consequence when you're an only child who has never really had any kind of entirely open & trusting relationship with family or friends alike. But this has simply gone on too long so I figured now is as good a time as any to finally vent some of my endless misery since I've found many other inspiring posts on this site to be of great help in understanding & coming to terms with this stream of shit I seem to be stuck in; even if the meaning & reason of this struggle is more unclear to me now than ever before.
As a fair warning to those who have considerably more pressing issues than listening to some pessimistic teenage rant of regret - as much as I will try to keep the details relevant - this is going to be an unnecessarily long & most probably entirely worthless post for the majority of individuals.
***STOP READING HERE IF YOU CBF WITH IT - I UNDERSTAND THAT I OVERTYPE/THINK THINGS SEVERELY & YOUR TIME COULD BE SPENT MORE PRODUCTIVELY/POSITIVELY***
But I've finally come to this breaking point after realising that the mistakes & most of all the missed opportunities of the past are what will truly haunt me forever. It's just completely bemusing to me that I could have so much to regret in life already - when I've only just turned 19 two months ago.
One of those painful missed opportunities was undoubtedly in not getting my lazy arse on here after my earliest signs of acne 5 years ago & not having the balls to share my insecurities & concerns even in a place where so many others like myself soldier on through far more impressive waves of shit & continue to do so with the majority of their sanity intact. That kind of strength & courage is deserving of far more than I have made of my own situation. Maybe that's what has made me so reluctant to sign up for all this time, even though I can recall reading threads from as early as 2008 (maybe 2007), because I was so embarrassed about how redundant my issues seemed in comparison to what I see so many of you have to go through each & every day. But you know what. Fuck it. I've come to terms with the fact that things are pretty much only going to get worse from here on out - so even if this is nothing more than a truly self-indulgent display of my disgustingly neurotic narcissism, well at least it should give most of you some comfort or even humour in knowing your lives are nowhere near as ridiculous & unnecessarily fucked up as mine. You might still feel you have had to endure worse with your skin, but at least what you've done & achieved with the circumstances & what you were given should be of some reconciliation since you didn't throw it all away like I have done over the last half decade. Then again, you may just be pissed enough to want to kill me for being such a complete & utter idiot about it all. I certainly have felt that urge in recent times. You might call it karma, but in reality to me it seems I was the only one who damned myself in my own downfall from the very beginning.
Anyway, I've basically lost myself to disillusion & apathy (as well as slight anxiety/OCD/BDD) over the last 5 years suffering pretty much purely from the impact of acne; whether it be physically on my skin or psychologically in my mind. It has almost quite literally pre-occupied my every sober thought since the first fucking spot I got. After all of this time I truly feel completely stripped of my humanity, bare to the core of my withering soul. & yet I've only really come to terms with much of this seemingly endless path of self-destruction in recent weeks. It's a tough pill to swallow; one that I've been choking on for what seems like an eternity. But to be honest, things could not be worse in my world so I guess it's worth a shot just to see if I'm somehow worthy of redemption in some of your eyes; cause in mine I passed that point a long time ago & I'm not sure I actually see a way back anymore...
A year ago I was still pretty much a typical 18 year old guy. I still had my friends & I was still seen as this generally popular & (over-) confident individual, with a good dose of humorous pessimism. I was that awesome, witty, intelligent, funny kid who just did everything the way he wanted - & quite simply didn't give a fuck. Class A narcissist really, I know I am, & that's how I must've seemed to most people at least. Only thing is, beneath that veil of cool collected confidence, the truth is that I was completely incarcerated in my own feeble-minded insecurities - & had been for the past 4 years spent in endless fear & self-loathing. In reality I knew I was just being weak, but at the end of the day, I was that *guy* who for some reason or another just couldn't even leave the house without a full face of make up on to hide all of the horrid marks that no matter what I did would seem to engulf my entire face every morning. Yep that's the person I was & had been for what was meant to be the most enjoyable 4 years of my life while I was unable to rid myself of the only real thing that had held me back all of this time since the very first day I met it - acne.
From the beginning, I was just far too concerned about my looks & far too embarrassed to even talk to anyone or do anything about it. & well, my skin wasn't really that bad back then when I first began what eventually seemed to be an endless cycle of countless hours spent in the bathroom trying to make myself look 'normal' - just so I could have the confidence to face the world & another day. It was that much harder for me though because I was regarded as one of the most attractive ('hot') guys in my school even after I started slapping on foundation & I was also that guy who was always up for a party & getting drunk & doing all the stupid stuff that 14 year old rebels love to do. For some reason I was always attracting the attention & company of older teens too & that led to even more of a 'bad boy' reputation since it made me so very uber-cool. That just built up the pressure for me to look good all the time since that was already the mindset I'd had since the days of pre-teen angst along with my impeccably obsessive vanity & the delusions of grandeur it all brought - probably the beginnings of OCD that I failed to recognise. In reality I never needed perfection though, that wasn't what it was about, I just wanted to have the normal skin so many of my friends seemed to be blessed with. So I guess my way of solving that was to fake up - with make up.
You won't believe that all of my 'firsts' were pretty much with a full face of foundation on. First drunken make out sesh. First time not remembering a thing on new years. First time spending the night with a girl in my bed. First time having sex twice in a row. First time smoking up. All of what were meant to be some sort of eternally memorable landmarks of adolescent adventure, all of it happened while I was completely self-conscious about the mask I was wearing to hide my true imperfections. I guess that's why it was so easy for me to just keep on putting everything else off & putting foundation on every morning, because I was actually living life the way I wanted without much regret. To me & my self-esteem at least - I looked good, so I felt good, & therefore I was good. It was like my daily dose of liquid confidence that I simply couldn't go without - becoming an addiction of sorts - because somehow that false image of perfection was worth the occasional once in a blue moon that I got called out on my audaciously feminine habit. To face the world & reveal my real skin & what lay beneath the mask, even for just a moment, always seemed like a far more daunting task than I could bear to imagine. I guess I never really thought it through, because for some reason I always felt like life as I knew it would be over the day I decided to go without. It was the fear of being an entirely different person in both my own eyes as well as others that stopped me from ever getting over it. Of course, I had always planned to stop wearing it once my skin got clear anyway...but the problem is that year after year, it just never did.
& I mean honestly the only real point of wearing make up for me was so I could attempt to live my life undisturbed the way I would have if I'd kept my clear skin. So I could pursue girls with the natural flirtacious flair & confidence I was gifted with if I'm to be entirely honest. Funny how that worked out in the end...but at the time it made sense to me since I've never had any kind of close relationship with my parents so I didn't even have proper discussions about my skin until years later when the situation had well & truly worsened. But anyway that initial honeymoon period of loving life lasted about a year.
Thereafter things all sort of started going downhill as I became ever more obsessive about my skin & used literally more than 10 crappy cosmetic products every day in an attempt to control things as my situation degraded into oblivion. But somehow each & every day just 'putting on my face' made everything better no matter how much of a pain it was. I mean it was torture to have to do that every time I wanted to leave my room, yet that paled in comparison to what I thought about my skin & the idea of facing the world without a mask to hide behind. I didn't know how I could ever talk to a girl like that. The fear of being judged was just too much for me. Even after most people basically knew I was some kind of make-up-wearing-freak, somehow I was still liked by so many & I was still regarded as one of the most popular kids in school thanks to my outgoing lifestyle & effervescent self-confidence & charm. & this just encouraged me to keep on doing what I was doing since I was getting by & supposedly had more of a life than many 'losers'. Sure I didn't actually get to have a girlfriend or anything, but that's not to say I couldn't have. & I still got to enjoy some moments of teenage promiscuity on a few occasions at least. It was more due to my increasingly reclusive ways due to my fear of more & more people discovering the truth & judging me that resulted in just basically having no desire to even contemplate the kind of shenanigans it would require to sustain a proper relationship. & yet nevertheless I always wanted one & that's all I really yearned for in my lonesome existence. That's why I couldn't just stop putting the make up on, cause for me it seemed as though that would well & truly eliminate all hope - the irony is that's probably all I actually had to do to get what I wanted.
Anyway, this surreal life I was living continued throughout the rest of my schooling career as my skin suffered more & more everyday for my naivety. I could tell my friends were getting increasingly impatient with my antics as I spent hours 'in the shower' trying to fix my face & was late to pretty much everything as covering things up began taking longer & longer. I was also restricted to pretty much exclusively going out at night & I began to choose the things I did based purely on the condition my face was in. I mean in all truthfulness I still had a pretty awesome social life despite my personal issues, but as things took randomly tumultuous turns for the worse, there were many more lonely Friday nights spent watching TV instead of going to parties with my friends as I usually would have done, plenty of missed opportunities that I wish I could've had the courage to make the most out of.
Eventually the stress of it all really got to me & it kick-started a new breed of truly hideous acne & wounds that I struggled to cover up no matter how much crap I put on my face - along with a healthy dose of bacne & some flare ups on my chest & back of my arms too. That was kind of alright for me since I wouldn't be caught dead jumping in a pool anyway thanks to my face, but it was still severely distressing & there were some awkward situations I encountered due to that. My face had really started to get bad though, & it was always directly influenced by stress which just kept on accumulating with no real way to release all of my frustrations & anxiety. The worst part was probably when I started bringing my make up into school. Yep a little loreal compact. How cute. That allowed me to miss a ton of lessons & lectures purely due to my obsession over touching it up in the bathroom at every chance I got. Which eventually led to me just hiding out in the bathroom in a sweaty cubicle all day to avoid facing all the bright lights & glare when it was particularly bad. I never realised how pointless that exercise really was until it was too late. Eventually I couldn't even make it out of my own bathroom to see my friends. Honestly, I spent new years of 2011 in front of the mirror for something like 4-5 hours as I attempted to look somewhat good for a night that had promised what I'd been looking forward to for a long time: a girl to spend the night with. & yet there I was at midnight still toiling away at my stubborn face trying to just get my skin to look normal enough to be unnoticeable in drunken teenage stupor. But I couldn't do it, & despite making it out the door eventually & enjoying the rest of a pretty good night/morning with good friends, I didn't have the courage to follow through on my initial plans - & I still regret that decision to this day. Because that was the turning point for me in my life. Where it went from bad but manageable - to seriously fucked up beyond belief.
Suddenly all I wanted to do was hide from the world. & somehow what I had told myself would be a couple weeks spent 'finding myself' had turned into constantly dodging calls from all of my friends & getting so stressed out & anxious about everything that I couldn't even make it to sit my exams. So I talked myself into dropping out of school where my grades were already suffering immensely & it had all pretty much gone to shit thanks to the fact I struggled to even just show up every day as it became more & more difficult to cover up my hideous face. The school thought I was just an arrogant underachieving pothead anyway - which I guess I was. I wouldn't have been had my skin been in a different state, but it was all just too much for me. & I couldn't make that vital step to just face the world as an honest person. Honesty was always a slippery slope for me, cause my entire life was a massive lie in reality. & almost nothing else seemed to matter apart from my skin & the judgement I would receive as a result of it. An incredibly senile way of thinking in retrospect. Because I could've just stopped wearing make up & started all over again, which is all it would've taken. But I just couldn't force myself to do it. Even though I was so concerned about the damage I was doing to my skin every day due to wearing the shitty pore-clogging crap that my mum bought me, facing the world without it seemed to be a far more unthinkable task.
So I decided to stop wearing it, but due to my ridiculous anxiety, that also meant I would have to stop living life for a while. One of the worst decisions I ever made, but at the same time school was never going to be part of my ultimate plans in life anyway as a musician/guitarist. I'd wanted to drop out two years prior really. So school wasn't going to be missed. & to me it felt like I didn't have that many true friends around anyway, so my social life was a sacrifice I was more than willing to make. I was wrong about that of course, because I had what seemed like hundreds of phone calls everyday for the first couple of months spent in self-imposed solitude & exile. But at the time I was thinking solely of my own interests & goals, & for me I just needed to take a few months of time to myself & concentrate on getting into guitar college once my skin had cleared sufficiently. I even started up my own guitar selling business so I could focus my time & energy into something productive. Well things took a turn for the worse after that as I had ongoing issues with my parents since they couldn't come to terms with my decision, education was always at the forefront of their minds despite full well knowing I had little to no desire to pursue anything that required a formal certificate of my intelligence, & so I ended up becoming just as frustrated as they were.
I've been hiding out in my room for the vast majority of the entire past 12 months. I quite literally have not even been able to make it out of my own front door for 95% of the time. Not even just to go to the gym. Or to take a walk. Or to have a smoke. Or to see an old friend (as if..) The only brief moments I would venture into the world outside was to complete deals with clients for my business since substantial sums of money were just about enough to motivate me to slap on some make up again & just deal with it for an hour or so. But I'm not even joking when I say I spent pretty much all of 2011 staring at the TV or my computer & feeling sorry for myself. Clearly 2012 isn't going to be much better...
I mean, I was actually happy with what I was doing for the first few months cause that's what I wanted in reality. To just hide away from the world & finally take some time to relax & focus on my life & my future - & most of all to get as clear as I possibly could for my planned return 5 months later. I had even formulated a plan for my own guitar sellling business to focus my time & energy on something productive, it's still going strong today. But shit happened in between & my entire world capitulated into absolute & utter senile emptiness as my own parents decided that my reclusiveness (due to not being in touch with my friends) & anger (due to their lack of understanding my situation) was endangering my life just as much as their own, some paranoid delusional belief that I still can't quite wrap my head around since I never directed any of it towards them, & well I'm just not the suicidal type. Otherwise I'd be long gone that's for sure. I just gave up talking to them because they wouldn't listen to what I needed, & therefore I didn't see any point in giving them that same luxury.
So they came to the conclusion that I was severely depressed & that it was necessary for me to be abducted from my own bed & put in a mental hospital for the sake of my sanity. Seriously, I was carried off by 5 men including my own uncle & shoved in a car because I was trying to deal with my skin & come to terms with a new way of living without the crutch I always wanted to rid myself of…I have no idea if I'm even going to have kids one day but I sure as hell know that I would never force them into an institution like that & undeniably fuck up their life forever. To make it just that much worse, this was at a point where I had finally healed 80-90% of the marks on my face after making so much progress without the stress & pressure of social life that had torn me apart from the inside, I had the clearest skin I'd seen in a long time, & for the first time I had really started to understand the narcissistic bastard I was as I began to feel, enjoy & appreciate life in an entirely different way. I was right on track with all of my plans to brave life with my bare face. That's all I wanted. To be free.
But instead I was plunged into the depths of despair & depression as I suffered severe trauma & anxiety thereafter, because you truly can't imagine the kind of screwed up experience being in a mental hospital was for someone who was entirely sane in reality. The sheer iniquity & injustice of it all was beyond anything I had ever encountered before. I tried to be positive & laugh things off in there & just think of it as some kind trippy mindfuck that would be over soon enough because I was told it would be a few days at the most. But being deceived by doctors & still stuck there more than a week later had already ruined me forever. At that point I actually felt well & truly depressed about my life for the first time. I'd never had those kind of feelings of complete & utter hopelessness before, & it fucked with my head, it really did. Because the moment I finally got out of there after two weeks, I should've been free to go & live life to the fullest exactly the way I had planned it all 5 months prior.
June was the month I was meant to return to my former life, but as a different person. The new me without the make up. Instead my skin had become a complete mess along with my mind as for the first time I felt previously unknown anxiety & a distinct jitteriness from the medications they had forced me to take whilst being haunted every night by freakishly vivid dreams that I had never had to experience & endure until then. Suddenly I was back in a world I was completely afraid of. & the progress I had made with myself & my skin over the months of self-exile was rendered entirely redundant. Nevertheless, I tried to see my friends since I had to tell someone about the ordeal I had endured, but it forced me to return to what I had tried to rid myself of all along - hiding behind the make up. & although I almost had my life back at one point...I was just too fucked up from everything & couldn't do it. I ended up more withdrawn than ever for the next few months & barely did anything besides watching TV, even what I once loved more than anything in playing guitar had become nothing more than a chore.
But I did manage to eventually gather myself & had regained resolve through being inspired by my passion for music once again. & I even managed to relax & appreciate the little things in life the way I hadn't been able to for months. Then suddenly after a new regime of skin care my face actually miraculously cleared up & looked the best it had done in years. It made me want to live again, to go out into the world & redeem myself for all the shit I had done. It was like starting over a new leaf. That was 3 months ago. I had finally recovered my mind & realised how much time I had wasted. I understood that life was all about choices & decisions & I had based mine on all of the wrong things - I was ready to make up for all that I had missed out on. With as clear a face as I'd seen for a long time I simply felt invincible. Everything was possible. & it felt good to finally be able to look myself in the mirror & say that the struggle wasn't for nothing. I managed to enjoy one of the best weeks of my life with my head filled with all of the ideas & potential I had been ignoring for too long. But then of course I had to go & fuck absolutely everything up entirely...
Within a period of little more than a month, I managed to do the unthinkably idiotic & burned a permanent scar into the middle of my forehead with AHA after a manic skin picking episode, whilst simultaneously grinding my perfectly good teeth down to a chipped gappy smile & ultimately slipping into the terminally depressive state I now find myself in as a result of it all. Then my acne suddenly flared up & returned after my misguided overuse of manuka honey somehow believing it was a miracle cure for my problems - it seemed to work with amazing results initially since it was helping to heal the wound on my forehead, but I screwed it up just like everything else. & now I'm experiencing the most severe acne I've ever encountered in my life. Not to mention I've hardly had a good nights sleep since then due to my insomniac night-owl schedule being obliterated by daily renovation work right outside my room, along with the relentless nightmares I constantly endure in my brief moments of restless disturbed sleep. One of the worst parts of all this might be that I can no longer enjoy one of the few things I had left to freely appreciate & be thankful for in eating glorious food as I developed TMJ disorder due to my nighttime clenching & grinding & now have to experience disturbing sounds & sensations whenever I chew too enthusiastically, which means to say as a normal hungry person would do & as I always have done my entire life; I can't even sing the way I used to. My teeth also don't come together properly anymore due to the removal of so much enamel, which makes chewing an even more challenging task. It's an effort just to sustain myself to keep on living..I was eating one meal a day & sometimes even less than that. & yet starvation just didn't even seem to matter to me. Nothing did.
I couldn't have possibly envisioned how acne could've affected me so adversely & without any reprieve. So I'm left here in an unfamiliar world of never-ending sorrow & remorse as I'm forced to reflect on everything I have done wrong in my short time, & more heartbreakingly everything that could've been had I not been so naive in my endeavours. To me, it almost feels like the end is near. Mentally, I'm on my last legs really - & physically I'm probably not too far behind after constant self-imposed malnutrition & semi-starvation with absolutely no activity whatsoever besides changing the DVDs or killing time on the internet researching my own paranoid thoughts; sometimes I can barely even be bothered to do that much.
I'm a mere shadow of the person I used to be. Even simple every day tasks have become an unbearable hardship. Life has become meaningless. & I've become socially awkward beyond belief. Despite seeing some old friends recently in an attempt to turn things around since I've finally accepted my appearance, it's almost as if I'm completely brain-dead most of the time. I just feel like I have nothing interesting to say & draw complete blanks in regular discussion. My mind is a vapid maelstrom of anxiety & regret. Which makes me afraid to speak due to being maddeningly inarticulate, something I've never had to deal with before. I just don't feel like myself anymore. 3 months ago I felt like I could've salvaged things at least, because I'd seen the light & had hope for the future - I was still my same old self for the most part - but now I'm stuck here staring into the empty abyss. More alone than I ever have been. Completely lost in my thoughts of remorseful regret.
It's so frustrating to know the person I've let fade away is still here somewhere even though I can't seem to find him right now. It's worse that my old friends notice how distinctly different & silently serious I am - I must be fucking outright creepy to be honest. I wouldn't even be the same person to most of the people I left behind a year ago, compared to the ridiculously sociable pretentious rockstar attitude & image I used to project. I just always seemed to have a way with words & incredibly sarcastic sense of humour that made me an articulate connoisseur of language & an equally interesting & enjoyable person to just talk to or hang out with - the perfect cover for the insecure mess in my head. & yet I sit here having taken days to type this simple post concerning the emptiness of my soul. The former wordsmith in me would have had confident & illustrious sentences flowing across the page with all of the heartfelt over-exaggerated emotion intended, & in a far more concise form than this ridiculous essay, but instead I find myself second guessing every single move I make & every single thought that comes to mind, just stuttering in the darkness swallowed by endless apathy & regret.
On top of all of this, my skin is in the worst condition it ever has been. The damage done is now permanent & that's what makes things so much harder to accept. I can't accept the life I've thrown away all for the sake of my own vanity & need to fit in. Not when I have absolutely nothing to show for it after everything I've put myself through - & not when the physical & emotional scars are now going to haunt me forever even if I do get clear. All I have now are the memories of a past that promised so much; yet delivered so little.
I'm more than willing to admit how superficial & pretentious I am, I've never met anyone else more so & I guess that's why I've fallen victim to my own fatal flaws & imperfections. But I wouldn't wish this kind of suffering on anyone in the world, because although it may seem like nothing more than pathetic self-indulgent vanity for most of you - & you may even think I deserve what I've been dealt - it is truly soul-shattering to have to relive every wrong turn I made every single moment of every day the way I do now.
I honestly don't know how much longer this can go on, I'm surprised that I'm still here at all. I want to live, I really do. I just don't know how to anymore.
Edited by EffThis, 31 January 2012 - 04:27 AM.
