I am like most other teenage girls....I love music, hanging out with my friends, talking to and about guys...

But thats not what my story here focuses on...so I will start from when I first noticed my breakouts.

I got the chicken pox when I was about 11-12 years old. Now that was a traumatizing experience let me tell you...It was horrible, those ugly gross pimply things ALL OVER my body, I couldnt touch myself anywhere for days. I lived in oatmeal baths.

The chicken pox lasted for 1 1/2 weeks.

After, I started to get little pimples all over my forehead. And i squeezed and picked...oh how I picked! thats one of the things I regret, I have tiny little scars on my forehead from that constant picking. I knew it was bad, but once you start, you dont stop!

Fast forward to about 15, starting high school, still nothing major from what I saw (in fact it never even bothered me) then it all started when my doctor suggested I needed a Benzoyl Peroxide cream to clear up my pimples...I was quite offended but I thought well if my doctor says I need it then I must. He told me, "It might get worse before it gets better"

So then comes the few months of redness and burning, and after I finished the first tube I quit. It just wasnt doing it for me.

But it had happened....I started to become *Obsessed with skin*...it wasnt to the degree it is now, but then again most things start out slowly before they escalate dont they.

For a while, probably a year or so I just cleaned with regular old Oxy pads for oily skin or those Olay face clothes and those seemed to help, of course I still broke out but it really wasnt so bad (of course I didnt think that way at the time) then one day, my mom and I were walking past a counter at Sears and this lady stops us and says " how would you like to try this fabulous

three step face cleanser, it worked wonders on my daughter...not trying to point out your acne or anything"*nervous laugh*...and of course I was more than willing, and my mom agreed, paid the 100 something and we went home happy. Well that simply "fabulous" three step program was bullshit and did nothing cept some more redness and a little more breakout. So back I went to Oxy pads.

Fast track to when I am 17 and I decide to go get a deep cleaning facial with my aunt and my mom (both who have great skin by the way, its so damn unfair!)...I came out of the facial redder than ever but the next day it didnt seem too bad. They gave me some type of acne bar and some cream let me know "it might get worse before it gets better” and a pamphlet of success stories and I was on my way.

The acne bar sucked ass, it dried my face horribly, made me breakout on places I had never even broken out before, now I had redmarks on my forehead from all those lovely picking days, some new pimples on my chin and cheeks and I was starting to get miserable.

I went back faithfully for my second deep cleaning mask. And thats where my whole outlook on life changed.

I woke up the day after my second facial with SCABS and pimples on my entire face. I am not kidding, as soon as I saw myself, I didnt want to believe it was me in the mirror, I was praying that maybe it was a sick joke. All I saw was redness, green pimples and scabs. It was a sickening sight. I stayed in the house that entire day...and then I had to go to school on Monday. Since this was literally an overnight change I felt like the whole school was staring at me in shock...well I wouldnt know for sure since I spent that day looking at the ground as much as I could get away with. The shocked-trying to quickly recover- looks on the faces of my friends told me how horrible it looked...I was not imagining it. But we didnt talk about it, cause to them to do so, they were probably thinking was too rude. (And I was glad we didnt because I certainly wasnt in the mood) Now I was still able to be optimistic about it, so I continued using that drying acne bar, and I thought ok how long will this take to clear, a week? maybe two?...three weeks later i lay in my bed with tears dripping down my face. My mom was freaked out; I was limp and staring off into nothing. She cried with me and promised she would find a way to help me. She promised me she wouldnt stop until she did. (I love my mom)

And she found a lady I will call T. Who is a naturalpath. We went to T's and she took my blood test, urine, saliva sample and what not and told me that I would have to change my eating habits. No sugar, wheat or dairy (I was thinking: and exactly what am I ALLOWED to eat!)

She also told me to stop using that acne bar shit and she would give me some natural products to use on my face. Then she told me in order to help my immune system get back on track, she wanted me to make a smoothie. This smoothie was real “yummy” it had things like prunes in it as well as a variety of powders that were made of minerals and vitamins with long names that I wouldn’t remember for the life of me.

Then she told me the phrase I think all acne suffers would love to never hear again: “but remember, it might get worse before it gets better”

But how worse! I cried to her, I was freaked (understandably) about just how much worse it could possibly get, I mean I had scabs, redness, infected pimples! How much worse did it have to get! Couldn’t enough be enough already!

And let me tell you, it most definitely got worse. If I am brave enough to say so, I would estimate that 90% of my face was covered in zits. When you are a 17 year old teenage girl, to look this way has to be a nightmare of all sorts. I can say there were times I honestly thought I would be better off dead, why would I want to live as the acne faced girl everyone felt sorry for. No I didn’t see that as an option at all. If my mom hadn’t been there to cheer me on I might not be writing this today.

So there I was with my face horrifying, getting probably 2 new pimples a day (I was scared because I thought that there wouldn’t be room to fit anymore soon)

And the stares…oh the stares are a thing I wish I could erase from my mind all together. Ones like my in-car driver, when he hadn’t seen me for a while and I had a lesson with him, the look he gave me, made me almost want to jump out of the car and cry. And just the regular stares of people from my school hurt too. And for some damn reason NO ONE at my school seems to have ANY ACNE! What the hell happened to the time when all teenagers suffered from some sort of acne!!!...I guess not at my school…oh I can remember the times I spent cursing at my friends in my head because MY FRIENDS COULD EAT ALL SORTS OF JUNK AND HAVE THE MOST BEAUTIFUL FUCKING SKIN! And here I was eating the healthiest ever in my life, and fucking breaking out even MORE!

The most hurtful and humiliating things I think that ever happened to me so far in my life were:

One day I was with some friends in MacDonald’s ( No I wasn’t getting anything, I wasn’t allowed!) and this lady out of no where pulled me out of the line and whispered in my ear “I can get you something for your face, believe me you need it”…It took all my strength not to cry… or punch her.

The second, I got an eye infection and as we were in the clinic, the doctor looked in the eye quickly told us how to treat it, then said “ I want to refer you to this guy upstairs, he can give you something for your acne. It is really bad and I don’t think any girl should have to go through this, you have such a lovely face, and you shouldn’t have to live life this way”…um yeah thanks doc, like I didn’t figure that one out by myself.

…thank god for Christmas break.

My mom being a sweetheart let me stay home an extra week….and I think I deserved it! The shake I was still drinking at the time made me tired (T told us this was common) so I spent the first week sleeping, the second watching tv and only going out to walk my dog and the third avoiding any phone calls so I wouldn’t have to use old excuses to avoid going out with my friends. I looked in the mirror constantly! And it seemed to be just as bad all the time (figures)…I thought the despair would never end. Its amazing how many deep feelings you get from acne. The amount and depth of anger, frustration, despair, loneliness, sadness… the list goes on. Those feelings tear at you and rip you apart from the inside. Acne changed not only my appearance but my whole self. I used to be fun loving and almost care-free. Holding my head up high whenever I saw a cute guy because I knew I looked good.

Ha! Looked good is a thing of the past. I can hardly get the days where I feel ok anymore. That’s one of the things I hate most about acne. I’m not trying to come off as a bitch or full or myself, but without acne I was pretty damn fine! I was a nice looking girl…acne has a way of taking pretty and making it revolting.

After about a month and a little of the smoothie, I had had enough! I tearfully told my mom that I couldn’t take it anymore and I was quitting. Being back at school had made me really self conscious and I just wanted it to end somehow. So we told T that we would continue to use her face products and keep the diet but not the smoothie. Oh she protested saying that it was clearing out my system, think about my liver!...but no one could change my mind.

So off the smoothie I went, and just continued using the skin products and my new no sugar (I cheat sometimes…shhh)no wheat or dairy diet…and let me tell you rice milk and other rice products I find taste better than normal milk, so I guess I lucked out in that department.

And here I am today (as I am writing this) February 2nd 2005. in the pictures you can see how it was and how it is now.

The redness I hate and I am trying to stop it by tanning….yes I know, how horrible! But I find it works well by drying the pimples I have now and it gives me colour during the damn winter months (my least favorite) and apparently it gives you vitamin D??...who knows? All I know is I don’t look how I did two months ago and for me that is amazing. It has been a long road since November 2004 and I am surprised to be writing this, but I think I am actually getting near the end of my acne journey.

And what a journey that was! Too bad I didn’t keep a journal during those times cause I’m sure I missed a lot of the emotions and pain in this simple condensed version…but here you have it, my story so far, of ALMOST reaching my goal: CLEAR SKIN!

I now have this new obsession with other people’s skin. As weird as it may sound, whenever I meet someone knew, I look at their skin, every poor, blemish, texture, I analyze it and I cant seem to stop. Before my acne I never did this, but I now find myself amazed and jealous about just how many people really do have ‘the perfect complexion” I mean it looks like they don’t even have pores! I don’t know what I deserved to end up this way, or what the reason behind these past months was, but I am coming out of it a totally different person. And I’m not totally sure if I like the change...I am so paranoid of getting bad acne again that I wash my hands like a madwoman, even when I dont intend to touch my face. I am trying to stop picking at it, as hard as that is, and I am just recently trying to look people in the eye again when I'm out and about...definitely not like I was before.

You might not agree with, or like my story for whatever reasons, but this is it, its true and you cant change the facts. I just wanted to try to tell people my story, maybe it will help someone out there, maybe it wont. But there are thousands of stories so much like mine and at the same time so different. This is just one of those countless stories. To you, maybe a sob story. But let me tell you, if you yourself have not experience acne then please don’t try to judge this story because you really have no right to. Because what I and so many other helpless victims of acne go through has to be lived and experienced to be understood.  And believe me, I doubt many would volunteer to try.

**Also I know I made points of how terrible acne is for teenage girls and if your a guy and thinking umm it is for us too I didnt mean it like that! :)...Just writting from my point of view!

And! *knock on wood* so far I have not had to go on accutane which I am kind of scared of, so I hope I never have to!