#2 Clear Skin

After battling bad acne since I was 14 I can finally say I am more confident in my skin. I will admit it is still not perfect, but my skin will have bad days and I shouldn’t be too hard on myself because compared to the old days my face is worlds different. 

I remember the first time I ever broke out and got cystic acne and I remember all the ways I tried to get rid of it. In my teens I had tried all the skin creams, the medications, the cleansers, the serums, the exfoliaters, everything; well everything except for accutane. Accutane later would become my savior, but back when I was a teen all I had ever heard were horror stories of accutane and it’s side effects and I didn’t want to go through that. I genuinely believed I would grow out of my acne once I got older and just focused on washing my face.

Obviously, I was wrong. I couldn’t grow out of my bad acne and no matter what regime I did, it didn’t matter. My bad acne wasn’t a product of a dirty face, it was a product of something going on inside my body and genetics. When I saw a dermatologist in July 2018, they told me accutane would be the only way to clear up my acne. I expressed my concerns and the dermatologist alleviated a lot of my anxiety and after all the years I spent hating my acne and what it did to my self esteem I finally rationalized that the side effects are worth it in the end.

Looking at it now I am upset with myself for how long I went with bad skin. I didn’t realize how bad my self esteem really was back then. I had a lot of people say things about my face and I had a lot of people “give me advice” and it really effected who I was as a person. I spent a lot of time believing I was ugly and that there was no hope for me or my face. Even back then when I thought my face was clearing up, it still was what people considered bad acne, but for me it was clear and I thought it was better. It took actually being on accutane and looking at my old pictures to really see the amount of progress I’ve had and the amount of dedication I’ve had to clearing up my skin.

I also want to mention that even after I finished accutane my skin was not perfectly clear. It took another year until my skin actually started behaving again. It had cleared up exponentially, but I really had to focus on skin care to get to where it is now. It’s not like I did accutane and never have to worry about acne again. It’s that I did accutane and now I can actually manage my skin with a regime and actually see progress, where as before my skin didn’t respond to anything. So I still get acne, but it’s not as much of a battle and having a solid skin care regime is really the reason why my skin is so much better now.

I am nervous to do this, but it’s not a success if I don’t show the proof. I had to dig through a lot of photos and a lot of these are really bad pictures of me and honestly I don’t even care because I really would like to show the process and how long it took to get to where I am now.

Pictures are from the last 5 years and they start with when my acne was at it’s worst, to before accutane, during accutane, after accutane, and now.

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