Part 1 -

My war with ACNE

In this first series I am going to share my knowledge on one of the toughest challenges I have overcome in my life:

ACNE!

In total, it took me 12 years of constant struggle to overcome acne, and as any other acne sufferer knows acne is not a minor problem, it is a serious, debilitating and frustrating disease.

The type of acne I suffered was quite severe, it wasn’t just a bunch of little dots on my face, they were large, swollen, bumps covering almost every part of my face and neck. This kind of acne is often referred to as ‘cystic acne’ or ’severe acne’ and just one ‘bump’ would often take months to completely clear. At it’s most severe I would have had close to 30 of these cysts on my face and neck, so yeah, as you can imagine life wasn’t much fun.

During those 12 years, acne was literally the first thing on my mind when I woke up and the last thing when I went to bed. Every morning the first thing I would do is wake up and check for new spots, and I would monitor their progress throughout the day, constantly surveying my face from all angles in the mirror.

When I went out (which was extremely rare), I felt like everyone I met was looking at my acne and not me, I would hate doing anything that would involve people getting close to me, getting a haircut was especially uncomfortable as I just knew my hairdresser would have to get real close to my face and would be disgusted at the sight of my horrible skin.

Cystic acne was truly a cruel and debilitating disease, it crushed my self-esteem, made me feel hopeless and it frustrated the crap out of me! It affected every aspect of my life, my social life, family life, study… basically whatever I was doing, acne was in the back of my mind, no actually it was at the front of my mind!

To make it worse, everyone claimed to know the reason and the cure, everyone from my sister to my friend’s friend’s Mum’s hairdresser.

For a long time I was led to believe that the reason that I had severe acne was because of the ‘germs’ living on my face, people would tell me things like ‘oh you can’t touch your face or you will spread the germs and your skin will get worse’, ‘put wet teabags on your face, the anti-oxidants will kill the germs that are giving you pimples’, ‘don’t sleep face down, the germs from your pillow will get onto your face and your skin will get worse’ etc. etc. Of course by this time I had also already tried nearly every cream, peel and scrub I could find in the supermarket and drug store.

When none of these things worked I decided to see a dermatologist ( I ended up seeing 3 different derms ), but unfortunately they also didn’t have a clue as to what caused severe acne either (or they made too much money selling me drugs to tell me what actually caused it), so I ended up just as mis-informed and miserable as before.

After seeing the ‘professionals’ I believed that the reason I had cystic acne was because my skin produced too much oil but I had small pores! So the oil would get ’stuck’ trying to squeeze out of my under-sized pores causing acne. ‘Wow! That’s a big problem, how do you fix that doctor?’, ‘Well we have to give you drugs that will make your face stop producing oil of course!’ At the time that made absolute sense, ‘Yeah of course! No oil, no acne! What a simple solution!’ But of course that wasn’t the problem, so the solution wasn’t a solution at all.

Looking back, some of the things I tried to get rid of my cystic acne are quite ridiculous, but at the time I remember being full of hope and excitement that the next ‘cure’ was finally going to release me from my hell. Luckily I can laugh at it a little now =)

Some of the things which I tried to cure cystic acne which DID NOT work were:

1. Minomycin (AKA Tetracycline – I did several courses of this drug)

2. Roaccutane (This cleared me up for a couple of years but then the acne came back even worse)

3. Sticking potter’s clay on my face

4. Massaging castor oil on my face every night

5. Leaving my face covered in tea bags for 1 hour every day

6. Plastering my face in toothpaste

7. Caking my face in Benzoyl Peroxide

8. Various Antibiotics

9. Basically every commercial skin product on the market.

I’m sure alot of you fellow cystic acne sufferers have had some experience with these methods. It may be possible that some people have had success with these techniques but I personally didn’t and I know many other people who didn’t either. I believe that for most people suffering from severe acne, trying to get clear in these ways will only keep you going round in circles.

Anyway, enough negative talk I’m here to enlighten you not bring you down with all these sad stories =) From my next post onwards everything will be positive as I share with you the steps I took to finally achieving permanent, clear skin!

Peace,

The Anonymous Guru.

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