Skin Deep (Again) in Current Events

Yesterday I had accidentally smacked the cystic pimple that I have on my face and it hurt so fucking bad that I teared up. I got so flustered as I suddenly remembered how physically painful it was to have cystic acne. I get phantom pains. Like actually, my face will randomly throb and to this day I hesitate to touch my face. So the cystic pimple, the ulcer in my mouth and with my current gut health it is clear that I had consumed some dairy in the last few days. I know the risks when I go out to eat, I’m not going to die. This just sucks. I experienced severe mood poisoning as I also remembered how mentally painful it was to have cystic ance and how mentally painful it is to be left with these acne scars. I won my battle with acne but it won the war.

The breakouts started in highschool just like most people. I grew my hair out like an emo so that I could cover my face. I was told that I would just grow out of it. I tried out a lot of products and never got any results. Pro-active was the one that I was so hyped about but it didn’t work so I bought concealer and foundation and wore it like war paint. In my mid-twenties I didn’t get a glow-up so I went and saw a dermatologist. A pill here and a cream there and nada. There were some laser treatments that I wanted to get for my acne scars and he could not approve them for me until my acne was gone. I looked up remedies online and the one that I tried that appeared to work was using lemon & honey as an overnight mask.

I started getting pixel and IPL laser treatments. I couldn’t really see a difference but I had to feel like I was doing something. My self-esteem cannot handle it. This is where my intimacy issues come from. I can’t even touch my own face, how am I suppose to just let somebody else? I just stare and study people’s faces and get mad at how they can just have smooth skin. It’s not fair lol.

I remembered something Mel Robin’s had said. “If you don’t know how to do something, somebody has already done the work for you! Read their books, go online.” So I looked up how other people won their fight with acne. Everybody quit dairy. I was like, how do you just quitt dairy? It seemed so damn impossible to me. I looked up how to quit dairy just out of curiosity. It boggled my mind for weeks and weeks. Coffee without cream? What will I eat my cereal with? Yogurt is healthy isn’t it? I love cheese! I guess because of that google search a special little video on YouTube kept popping up in my recommendations. I finally opened it and it completely changed my life. Seriously, there was my life before I watched it and now there is my life after I watched it.

This entry isn’t about my vegan journey but it is relevant to my story so I’ll make it quick. This video changed the way I looked at the food on my plate. All I could hear whenever there was meat on my plate was:
That’s 56 billion animals each year
That are sent to slaughter
That’s 56 billion animals
That you can feed and water
All of my friends from India are vegetarians and so are a million million others in their country who go their whole entire lives without consuming animals so I knew it was absolutely possible. I’m like,if my friends can go through their pregancies without any issues then is animal consumption actually necessary? My mind had so much to process. I was just not able to bring myself to eat meat. I was like… well call me Caitlyn I guess I better google how to quit meat too because clearly I don’t know how to eat anymore. I had a 48-hour anxiety attack when I finally brought myself to eat some beef. I did not transition properly into veganism and it was actually a pretty painful and rough ride as my gut was trying to calibrate. I realized that I only learned how to eat one way in my life. There were no alternative lifestyle lessons in school. Us vegans had to figure it all out ourselves through trial and error. The first thing I needed to learn was this: it’s not about the restrictions. It’s not about what you’re taking out of your diet it is about what you are putting in. In abundance. I am not shrinking my diet, I am growing it. The mentality was harder to change than my diet was.

I made that lifestyle change back in May of 2016. Guess who finally stopped getting breakouts? Turns out that dairy was the culprit this entire time. Turns out that my ethnic group does not have the enzymes to break down dairy because we did not evolve consuming dairy. That’s why asthma, cystic ance, diabetes and obesity is so present within my ethnic group. Ugh, why did it take me so long to learn this? I feel deceived. I feel lied to. I don’t see the world the same way that I used to. The veil is lifted, I see the lies. Maybe I always saw the lies? I miss being ignorant. Like Cypher in the Matrix. My lifestyle was so destructive and it was like the whole world was designed to make sure that I didn’t have to feel guilty about it. I had the privilege of looking the other way so that I could enjoy eating cheese. Now the smell of it turns my stomach. It doesn’t even smell like food anymore.

Butter. It was butter that I had come in contact with. I just remembered that my niece and I had a movie night the other night and my sister made us popcorn. She put butter in Madalyn’s bowl and left mine dairy-free but when I got to the bottom of it I noticed that it was wet and I failed to give it a second thought because I usually use my vegan butter when I make mine. I saw on the side of the bowl that my sister had spilled some and didn’t realize. My body overreacts pretty quickly to dairy now so I put the popcorn away and I knew this was going to happen but I forgot about it because I had been so busy the last few days.

I get a zit here or there but they’re never cystic unless I come in contact with dairy. I have a PMD and derma roller to help fight the acne scars. Veganism took ten years off of my looks. Inside and out really. I also found some products that work well and I have a good thing going. After that woman read me to filth when I went in for a consultation for subscision I stopped going to the spa where I was getting the Pixel and IPL from. “What we need to fix are your expectations. You will always have those scars, you will never not have those scars because a scar is a scar and that is what scars do. They are forever.” I don’t want to accept her diatribe so I frequently look up how other people are getting rid of their acne scars. I’ve reduced the appearance of mine quite a bit and I will need the a lot of help from a therapist if I am to just accept that I am disfigured like this.

Anyways, I failed to take a break from PB. I need to go get my life together now. I’m so devastated that we are getting snow this week. My car is not ready :(