Insensitive Skin

I have a type of acne called milia. Some people know it as pearl acne, because when they’re

extracted instead of being all like … gross … they’re just little pearl-like balls. They’re technically

bubbles of keratin that collect underneath layers of the skin but not specifically inside your pores,

which means they don’t have an exit. So they just sit there and they get harder and whiter and,

roughly speaking, rough. I hate them, because they never actually “come to a head” like regular

acne does.

When I was younger I don’t remember having them, or maybe I just didn’t notice them, because I mostly picked my blackheads and sebaceous filaments. Maybe I gave myself milia. I’ve read online that they can come from sun exposure, and I definitely get a lot of that, but I guess they can also come from friction, scarring, picking, etc, and I have all of that too.

I’m pretty sure my obsession with picking at the rough patches of skin on my face is due to a psychological problem - I mean, duh. Do I have an actual diagnosable problem like OCD? I don’t know, and I don’t love people who self-diagnose. 

I guess let’s say, signs point to yes. My hands find my face without my knowledge at any point in the day when there isn’t makeup on it, and I sometimes don’t notice it at all. I’ll be sitting on the couch, on my desk, and I’ll sort of “wake up” and find my hands on my face. Once they’re there, no amount of will power seems to be enough to keep them away.

If I immediately go put a sheet mask, mudmask, or something over my skin, my impulse vanishes. I used to think maybe it was because I thought I was pretty ugly as a child - I’ll have some posts about that later - and was trying to cover up and "perfect" my face, but I’m older now and I’m really happy with how I look, but even though I definitely pick at lot less I still pick if I leave my skin too long without something on it.

It takes about two weeks for my skin to completely heal after I go to town on it, but sometimes it doesn’t heal completely and I find new craters. I have my first crater ever on my right cheek about halfway down. And it's huge.

The night it happens - it’s usually at night, the day after something stressful like a fight with my boyfriend, a conversation with a family member, a rough day at work, etc. - my face is red and sometimes bleeding, blotchy in my cheeks up to my temple, swollen, and the little white dots have been replaced with bright red scratches. I feel disgusted in myself, angry at myself, exasperated, insecure, and unable to leave my home. The makeup I put on after this clings to my cuts and looks disgusting and often doesn’t stick where I’m actively bleeding, but I have to do it because if I go out without it, I’ll continue to pick throughout my day and make things worse. I become more irritable and less up for sex because I feel so ugly and disgusting.

The next day my skin is still red and healing, and dry patches where I scraped skin off my face start to peel off and separate from my skin. Peeling them completely off hurts and brings back the bleeding, so I have to leave them and paint over them with my makeup.

For the next few days I still have some picking going on but I struggle with it harder than normal because I’m so disgusted, so I don’t do as bad a job. The dry patches have peeled off and I’m left with scabs and dry bumps, and as long as I use all liquid products on my skin, the makeup starts to look a little better again.

Within a week the redness is gone, now I just have the little dry patches and my makeup solves the problem again.

After another week my skin is back to normal - normal being oily with enlarged sebaceous filaments and white dots everywhere on my cheeks and chin. I go back to enjoying my makeup and my skin and am able to sometimes wear my skin bare, but not on mentally tough days.

And then one day I have a tough day, and if I happened to leave my makeup off at the wrong time, it all starts over again.

The cycle used to repeat so fast that I never got to the third day, sometimes I didn’t even make it past the next day. When I was married it was the worst. I remember one time I went into the bathroom and didn’t come out for an hour and a half, just tearing my face to pieces. I had never, in my adult life, known what my skin actually looked like until the last few years. Like, it was always red and pockmarked. I didn’t even know what milia looked like until I started getting ahead of the picking and started letting my skin heal enough to see them. I used to just pick, then pick, then pick again the next morning, then again, then my ex and I would fight and I’d tear open the scabs.

Breaking my heart every time. It hurt a lot, because it was a part of me I just hadn’t integrated maybe, or something I hadn’t figured out yet, and something I literally couldn’t control. And it just was so painful because while I think I’m a smart person, while I think I’m really talented and self-aware, there’s a self-destructive tendency that I could do nothing about.

My parents did not understand. But like, how could they understand? Like, how could they. 

Almost exactly two years ago I moved out on my own for the first time. I had just gotten kicked out of a boyfriend’s house and Covid had just hit, so I was crashing at my dad’s house when I got the phone call to come back to work. I had made a bunch of money from unemployment during the crisis, and a lot of it was in my savings account. And I decided it’s time to start looking around for somewhere to live, maybe with a couple roommates.

I didn’t have a car - that’s another post - so I needed to move somewhere close to my job.

I found a place with a bunch of other girls on a busy street the town over from my job, but there was a bus stop right outside that could take me most of the way. It wasn’t a traditional roommate situation, we didn’t know each other at all, we were just put in the same place. Technically I was renting my own place, on my own “lease”, for the first time. The rent came out of my paycheck. It was the most jarring thing in the world. Since then I've moved in with my boyfriend of two years, who I'll talk about at another time, but my first independent living situation was the first time I felt like a real person.

And it’s the reason everything happened. It’s why I’m in such a healed place.

I still pick my face once every couple of weeks, but it’s better than once every couple of hours. And I think the triggers are different now too, like I’ve learned how to alternatively process some types of things that make me upset, and I don’t always pick because of them. 

Two weeks ago my boyfriend and I went on vacation with his mom’s side of the family for a week in North Carolina. It was really wonderful and I barely picked at all and I brought my foundation with me just in case - but on the drive home I didn’t have any on and I started to pick really hard. One of the hardest I ever have, I think. No mirror, so I was just feeling around and digging in my fingernails.

You know what the worst part of all this is? After I get everything out of my face and it’s red and bleeding and hot and swollen, I feel so much better. Obviously the part of me that’s sane is disgusted, but the part of my brain that feels the need to do this feels amazing. It feels clean and happy and beautiful and absolutely euphoric. 

And it’s terrifying because they’re so at odds with each other, like in my heart I know it’s bad for me, it’s hurting my skin, it’s causing me all these problems, but after I’ve done it until I can’t do it anymore I feel so relieved. 

Today it’s been about a week and a half since I picked at my skin significantly, and I look beautiful. My makeup turned out great and I feel good about myself. But my boyfriend and I have been fighting a lot recently and I know that if I wasn’t wearing makeup I’d be going at my face hard.

It kinda feels like I act like a dam, constantly holding back this tidal wave of negative habits, and then something leaks or I forget to wear makeup and it all just washes back over me and I lose control.

It’s a lot, but if you had seen me years and years ago, you’d understand why for me, all of this is such a huge accomplishment. The fact that I put my moisturizer on last night and didn’t get in bed and start peeling things off my face is just such a miracle. It’s something I worked on that I got better at. That I’ve watched my own progress with. That’s incredible. That's beautiful.