the great and terrible unveiling.

last night, in my anthropology theory class, i was out of control insane.  it probably had something to do with the fact that i was operating on zero sleep and the room was about ten bajillion degrees and we spent about ten hours trying to understand how to play a trivia game, but it was also because i am insane.  that's me.  i tell crazy, snarky jokes and laugh hysterically and am just generally capable of acting like drunk when i'm perfectly sober.  as many people have heard (because i am a loud story-repeater), when i was two and a half my parents were so concerned about my energy levels they had me evaluated.  as in, taken to a child psychologist/behavioral therapist/guru for examination.  i recently found a copy of this evaluation in my long-lost baby book and all the doctor's observations are pretty much still 1000% accurate.  he used many fancy medical terms to describe me, all of which boiled down to: high energy, super friendly, easy wound up, sensitive, crazed.  that's who i was when my brother sam and i forced our grandparents to watch us perform selections from "the phantom of the opera" over and over again in their front room, and when i chased my friends around with the corpses of my freshly dead pet fish (which i did all the time, traumatizing melissa for the rest of her life and perhaps illuminating why i shouldn't have fish as pets), and when i dated the boy next door in ninth grade.  i plastered my room with "i love me" stickers (plastered it, guys), created dance routines for school talent shows and was a sprinter.  when i was 15, all that changed. whereas before i would do anything to claw my way into the spotlight, as a teenager i did everything within my power to avoid attention from anyone.  i became the girl who didn't dance at gatherings, refused to sing karaoke or been seen in a bathing suit.  i stopped voicing opinions, stopped going to the beach, started genuinely hating who i was.  i suppose maybe that happens to a lot of people in their awkward youth.  however, for me, my perhaps requisite teenage self-hate was compounded by this:

this is me.  august 2006.  in a south carolina hotel bathroom after i'd just privately washed all the caked concealer off my face and had a major breakdown about how horrible i felt i looked and how equally horrible being in the muggy south in the dead of summer was making me feel about the situation.  you can't seen in this shot, but my chest and back are also tragic (no pictures of those parts of my body from this time of my life exist, which really isn't too surprising.  i pretty much pretended the parts themselves didn't exist and therefore never thought to photograph them.).  i was a month shy of 20 and going on my fifth year of uncontrollable acne.  i'd done countless rounds of useless antibiotics, slathered my face in acids, spent sunny days desperately trying to sunburn, hoping the uv radiation would kill the pimples.  i'd stopped all treatment and washed my face with only water.  i'd changed my eating habits and stopped touching my face.  i saw several dermatologists and started the same treatment programs over and over again.  salicylic acid, antibiotics, salicylic acid.  by the time i was actually effectively prescribed accutane, i'd attempted to get it from two other doctors who couldn't figure out the paperwork necessary to obtain the medication.  (accutane, being one intense chemical cocktail, is probably more difficult to catch than a unicorn is.  the prescription came with a three-ring binder full of warnings and rules.  seriously.)  

it's difficult for even me to see the extent of the damage in here, because the picture's so tiny in this blog form, but what still absolutely kills me is the look on my face.  that devastation is what i felt every time i saw my reflection as a teenager and that's why i stopped being a bubbly pixie from the land of absurdity.  i was miserable.

the few people who i allowed to see me without makeup (which essentially did nothing but make me feel like i had some small control over what i looked like) tended to tell me i was lucky that the acne wasn't cystic or that i was vain for letting my skin issues take over my life or that it wasn't "that bad" or that i should get over myself or something equally as hurtful or insensitive.  (it was "that bad" for me, assholes.)  as i was figuring out how to deal with something that effected me so negatively, i was also constantly apologizing to other people because they thought i was being ridiculous.  thus, the way i know i am unequivocally over that part of my life is that now, i don't give two shits what anyone else thinks.  if an opinion is negative or insensitive or uninformed, i simply do not take it in.  i've lost friends, made bad choices, dated terrible people, missed out on countless opportunities and wasted enormous amounts of time feeling bad about myself and now, finally, i'm feeling very nearly over it.  i'm learning to sing to the radio when luke's in the car, dance around the house, be silly with the dog, wear bathing suits, and to basically fulfill the maniacal destiny laid out for me by my evaluator long ago.  i'm feeling ok with being the focus again because i deserve it.  i'm funny, i'm smart, i'm interesting.  i'm done with thinking i'm not worth it.

i've debated posting this photo/tony robbins lecture for literally about two years, because now, at this point in my life, i have a very different relationship with it than i used to and i feel like the transition from that girl to this one is one of the more hugely important chapters of my life.  the only reason i never put it up is that the picture existed only in digital form (obviously it didn't make it into any college albums) in a hidden folder on my parents' computer and it was never really a priority to get it back.  now, though, it seems appropriate to, because this year, i am feeling more like myself than i have in a long time.  also, as ludicrous as this sounds, i was seated next to a woman on the flight home from chicago who on her fourth glass of wine told me i was incredibly, profoundly mature for a twenty-four-year-old and asked me to share my secret. here it is.  this is my secret.  this is what made me the stunning person who blogs before you today (i have always preferred "stunning" to "mature").  i hated myself deeply for six years and had to slowly creep my way back to normalcy, and while i can't pretend that getting rid of the acne didn't massively kick-start the process, there was definitely enough of an emotional shitstorm left over after accutane to make me feel accomplished for having surmounted it.

...it just took four years.