Proactiv-ism

This is what I feel like.

One thing that makes me wish I wore makeup is this horrendously frightful disease that attacks your face with red bumps and tiny little black spots. No, not the plague. I just mean acne. And people with acne have to come to the realization really fast that their self-worth can't be based on how clear their skin is or they will develop acne-induced agoraphobia. Every time I'm having a fight with my complexion those Proactiv ads are like angels of light calling to me, and finally I decided to order it. I found out that the ads are American and the great deal of $30 is actually $70 in Canada. Suddenly my complexion isn't looking so bad... I am lucky in that I've never had really bad acne. Ever since I can remember, however, I have been susceptible to what is known as "bathroom-possession." It's something that happens when you go into the bathroom between 10-12 pm to get ready for bed and you wash your face and everything is going okay until all of a sudden you notice an imperfection in your skin and then you black out and when you wake up you look like you have the measles or some other facial disease, because there wasn't just one imperfection was there??!! You found more and more and YOU HAD TO EXPEL THE EVIL FROM YOUR BODY!!!!!! And then your mother gets mad at you and says, "You're going to give yourself scars!" and you mumble something like, "Whatever woman," and then a week later when the blemish is gone but in its place is a scar on your face (and on your soul), you know the truth: your mother is always right. Always.

I have no idea if it's working. Pro-Activ that is. I think that's their trick. They confuse you so much until you don't know whether you were better off before or after. The first three weeks it made my acne way worse. Little red angry dots were eating my face. That whole "it gets worse before it gets better" was the only thing keeping me going, but it is very, very hard to keep going when you are paying $70 to have worse acne. Is that their scheme then? Because even right now I don't know if my complexion is better than it was before I used Pro-Activ or just better since Pro-Activ made it worse. I'm not surprised though. Nothing works for me. All the things wrong with me seem to be impervious to outside intervention. I have to change from the inside... Somehow I don't think I'll be able to will my acne away, but at least it has served to keep my bathroom-possession under control. I guess I don't feel the need to attack my face when the face wash I'm using is doing it for me.

For a while there I was feeling really good about myself. I was working out a lot and I was finally making war with my face, no matter that the first three weeks I seemed to be losing with a vengeance. Did it matter? No. I was doing something. I had this overall deluded feeling of getting control over the situation that is my life. Note to self: never, never think that. You will always be disappointed. All it took was my chiropractor's assistant saying something perfectly nice to make me fall off the whole entire health band wagon. I was complaining that I wasn't seeing any change in my back pain even though I was working out and stretching like crazy and told her everything I was doing (biking to work, running up the stairs and doing stretches at the top, and working out and stretching after work) and she said, "Well, I'm no doctor, but maybe you're working out too much." And all my brain could think was, "That's... not even a thing. No one's ever done that," because I am so naturally lazy that I could not comprehend the concept. In my mind, science doesn't actually know what would happen if someone so-called "worked out too much." Hypothetically speaking, that insane overacheiver's arms and legs might start falling off, but seeing as no one in the world even knows how to work out too much, science will never know. So when my chiropractor's assistant said that, I just laughed. And that's when I lost any small amount of motivation I was running on. Poof. Gone. Now I am a slug on a rug again and I wonder how I ever did any exercise in the first place.

Just in case you were still wondering why I would dare publish that last blog post about my brother, one day I had a few bad zits and he said, "I'm gonna get the raccoon that did that to your face."

That's why.