Synaptic

The personal essay is the quintessential liberal arts expression of the self connecting to the world. I admire Marin’s ability in this essay to place her own life in a cultural context. And it’s beautifully and smartly written to boot.

-Keith Ratzlaff

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I knew it was Katharine’s birthday the next day.

I had been celebrating it for years, as she was of my closest friends, and one of the few left from high school I still communicated with now that we were dispersed across the United States at different colleges. I had even already bought the gift I would give her when I finally saw her again in a few weeks over spring break: a handcrafted orange and yellow box featuring two elephants−animals she adored because of how emotionally attached they are to each other−touching foreheads. I admired how gracefully curved their ears were. This was why I immediately thought of her when I first saw it months earlier, although the paper made from elephant dung inside the box was certainly an added bonus. With that in mind, I expected to remember to tell her a happy birthday come the morning of February 22, 2018.

I awoke early for an 8:00 a.m. class, then I went to work for two hours. After that was lunch with my friends, followed by my daily trip to the library where I would spend the afternoon. I sat in a red armchair with a view of two separate sets of windows overlooking tree branches and the brick theater building in the distance, attempting to concentrate on my schoolwork. In a moment of distraction, I checked my phone messages, and witnessed my other high school friends sending her birthday wishes in our group chat. I neglected to say anything about her birthday, but had foolishly sent some other text earlier to her in the day, making my forgetfulness entirely transparent.

I texted her multiple frantic apologies, and she assured me it was okay, that we were all busy in our semi-adult college lives, that my friendship was not lost. I knew somewhere in my convoluted brain that it really was the most trivial of slip-ups, but to the me who could feel peace only when I knew I put complete effort into something, it was a shameful failure. I could no longer pride myself on being the thoughtful person so many parents and teachers had told my mom and dad I was. My throat clenched, forewarning me that I had approximately 60 to 90 seconds before my eyelids would flood with water, and I was forced to abandon my armchair and go cry in a bathroom stall. This happened sometimes.

That evening, I thought about forgetting Katharine’s birthday again, and unraveled even further than I had in the afternoon. The crying was so unlike any I had ever experienced. It wasn’t the amount of tears that felt alien, or even the force of them; I’m no stranger to the habit of ugly crying, as it comes with the territory of sensitivity. There was something primal about this, like I had always been this way without realizing it, destined to spend my nights sobbing out of pernicious self-loathing, like I was crying about everything at once–the harshness of winter, looming midterms, my anxiety that I was not a good friend, my inability to visualize a future where I was all right–and it took this one mishap to set it off. I considered calling Katharine on the phone, thinking that the sound of her voice and a chance for her to hear the despair in mine as I apologized again would make me feel better. But doing that would have made the conversation about me, and not her, like it should have been. I took my medicine, something which had been a part of my routine for the past month, and went to bed.

Accutane is a last resort medication. It’s the one doctors suggest only after years of less invasive acne treatments and topicals−Minocycline, Cephalexin, Differin gel, Clindamycin lotion−have lost their impact. It’s the one parents are afraid of their child consuming because it’s known to aggravate depressive episodes and crying spells, and requires monthly blood work to check for liver damage and pregnancy tests for those of the female sex. (My own boxes of the prescription always featured grotesque sketches of fetus’ brain deformities to remind me what I would be guilty of were I to get pregnant.) It’s the one patients choose, despite the onslaught of suffering to follow, because they hope the result will make them beautiful, then happy. For the approximate six months people take Accutane, they are pawns to a medicine more powerful than it has any right to be. Draining the face of all comfort in order to kill all natural oil-producing skin cells, Accutane essentially eradicates the possibility of acne. When the war is over, patients are supposed to never have another breakout in their lifetime.

As it is with all massacres, neither the victim nor assailant goes entirely unharmed. Accutane does ugly things to a person’s body, but these are supposed to be rewarding because wiping out zits deemed universally unattractive is for the greater good of one’s appearance. The medicine turns the body into a drought zone: eyes, nose, face, arms, legs. No matter how much I would moisturize them, my arms grew rife with spots of peeled skin, red and irritated. They were almost scaly, and I eventually grew numb to how abhorrent the phenomenon was, finding it impossible not to subconsciously touch them. My nose bled without warning, dripping scarlet muck down my face in the middle of class or meals, the way spit falls out of a baby’s mouth. More than once I had to run out of class mid-lecture because I didn’t have tissues to halt the bleeding. Summer, with its rabid mosquitoes, was hell; a few minutes of scratching bug bites on my legs would turn them raw with missing flesh. I hated the impact on my lips most of all. Like everything else, they dried out. While I could manage my canvas-like face with a twice-daily moisturizing regimen, and my arms’ rashed glory could be hidden with long sleeves, I could not fix my lips’ hideousness. Each day, as the hours progressed, they cracked open and blood seeped out of the fresh openings. When they weren’t bleeding, they would shed dead skin like the garter snakes I sometimes found in my dad’s garden as a child.

“Putting coconut oil on your lips would help,” a coworker said to me one day, her voice friendly. (This was how she started the conversation.) I had finished my first year of college and was working for my fourth consecutive summer at my hometown’s zoo. Fed up with the dysfunction of the place, I preferred to keep to myself while doing my job. She was probably 16, three years younger than myself, which most likely explained her inclination to socialize so brazenly. She had braces and split hair ends. The lanyard holding her name tag, which violated uniform code, indicated her Hogwarts house placement of Gryffindor.

I had worked with her only once before, but had seen her around and overheard her conversations in the breakroom. Based on these limited interactions, I understood that she functioned the way so many teenage girls trapped in the holocaust of “finding themselves” did: by being a flippant smart ass or saying whatever comes to mind as a way to prove how different they are. These sorts of behaviors are often underlain by insecurity, and I do not know if people ever truly overcome them, but simply trade them for more complicated vulnerabilities. It made me feel sad for her, even as she backhandedly insulted my face. I wanted to show gratitude for her seemingly innocuous concern, but my appearance was so visibly ragged that I didn’t need someone else to remind me. I also knew that my emotional volatility was sharp and she did not need to test it.

My lame response simply was, “My medication dries them out,” which was my nice way of saying, “You don’t know my life, you nosy child.” Usually any mention of a nameless medication is bound to shut someone who’s crossing personal boundaries up. It’s an indicator that a person is defunct in some way, and that makes others uncomfortable. She clearly did not comprehend this, as she shot back, “That’s why you need the coconut oil.” I said nothing in reply, tersely ending the discussion. I never bought any coconut oil, either, since I knew that I had less than a month left on the Accutane anyways. My incompetent tube of vaseline could surely see me through. My hair stopped getting oily as well, which was the one side effect I appreciated. But even that felt unhuman.

I spent my Sundays during that summer reading outside for most of the day. My parents have a chaise lounge that sits on our concrete porch above the garage, overlooking the street. When my mom pulled it out of winter storage during the spring, she sent me a photo of it to remind me that it was almost time for me to come home. I loved sitting out there for hours on end, but my Accutane prescription disrupted the hobby because it made my already-pale complexion monstrously sensitive to sunlight. My cheeks would get rosy pink during the 20-minute drive to work if they were unprotected. It definitely would have been easier to stay inside to read, but I refused to be dictated by the cruel territory I was responsible for entering when I chose to take Accutane. Instead, I took fierce precautions: lathering my entire body, including my eyelids, with 50 SPF sunblock at least every 90 minutes if I didn’t want to fry. It smelled pungent. Since my legs were so dry, I could only sit with them crossed for a few minutes before they would stick together and be horribly painful to separate, like slowly ripping wax off an eyebrow−a sensation I became familiar with when I was only 12 years old. I could only hope that my book was absorbing enough to distract me from how uncomfortable I felt in my own body.

My stubbornness often felt too risky to be worthwhile, but I always looked for ways to (often unsuccessfully) convince myself that Accutane had not uprooted my life completely. When the dermatologist asked me at every monthly check-up how I felt, I lied and said fine, didn’t mention the crying meltdowns and violent mood swings, because if I did, she would take me off the medicine, which meant a return to zits and objective ugliness. I believed that when this was over, things would be good again. Better, even. I took comfort in certain facial imperfections that Accutane would never erase, using them as proof that I didn’t sell out entirely to the desire for physical approval. The small scar on the upper half of my right cheek that becomes more prominent when I smile. Red acne marks littering my face, relics from previous breakouts; I was never invincible, never will be. They’re miniscule details, and maybe only I notice them because I live with them. Very rarely do the things which matter most to me matter equally or more so to anyone else.

I remember seeing television ads when I was young about acne treatments. They always featured testimonials from attractive people whose faces were now smooth and lively-looking, speaking about how confident they felt now that their pimples were gone. Then, as a guise to collect desperate people’s money, the ads would show pre-treatment photos of the patients. Their breakouts terrified me; their faces were so discolored, so bumpy, like creatures from a science fiction story. My own skin never reached a point similar to those I saw on TV, so I know I am lucky, but I still felt constantly preoccupied by my face. Afraid of it. Now that my acne is gone, I am forgetting what it is like to panic about zits, but when I see old photos or videos of myself, I am disgusted with, not empathetic towards, the girl I was. Instead of feeling confident about my clear face, there is only apathy, maybe guilt. How could I have permission to take pride in something I am not responsible for?

When I remember how I used to flood with jealousy every time I met a person my age with perfect skin, I wonder if those feeling the same acne-induced suffering I once did envy my current face. Not because it is necessarily pretty or interesting to look at, but because the first thing a person notices about it is my wide eyes or spare upper lip, not patches of zits. How do I tell them? That I often feel like I am still on Accutane−exasperated, closed off, overly sensitive−that some incapacitations are never destroyed, just change shape, that silently bracing misery is believing you deserve it. If I told them that I do not know if it was worth it, would they try to answer for me?