Chemical Burns On My Face
Whenever my girlfriend calls me things like "beautiful", I have a meltdown. Not because I think it's adorable when they say those sweet things to me, but because it triggers the shit out of me. It is so frustrating how my trauma prevents me from receiving genuine compliments, which leads to extremely embarrassing situations. Imagine telling your partner to stop calling you beautiful because it makes you suicidal. There's not a lot of things that I hate about myself more than that.
ugly.
The amount of trauma I have surrounding my appearance is kind of unknown to myself too. It seems like an endless pit of triggers, self-hatred, and disgust; one I can never get to the bottom of. It is hard for me to even talk about it, because the topic is so fragile to me that sometimes referring to it alone can cause an episode.
It would be an understatement to say that I've been made to feel ugly for the majority of my life. The word 'ugly' is a very special one, though, a word I feel a strong connection to. It has almost become synonymous with my face, a part of my identity. When you look at me, you can see that I am a Karelian-Finn based on the shape of my face and the size of my nose. You can also see that I am ugly as fuck. It is just a word used to describe me, my face. That is how often I've had to listen to people direct it to me.
When I say that I have been made to feel ugly for the majority of my life, I don't just mean people literally saying that specific word to me. I also mean all of those instances when my abusers singled me out of the group, pointing at every single thing wrong with my face, my body, my clothes, detailing the reasons why they would hate themselves enough to kill themselves if they ever looked the way I did. I mean all of those times when they sexually harassed me in the dressing rooms during P.E., pointing at my early developing body and ridiculing me for the underwear of my choices. I mean all of those times when they came 5 centimeters close to my face, pointing their fingers at every infected pimple while calling me disgusting, dirty, unhygienic, filthy. When they said to me that I should be ashamed of myself that I ever had the audacity to leave the protection of my own home and subject them and everyone else around me to the filthiness of my face.
disgusting.
I was diagnosed with juvenile acne when I was five years old. Since then, I have gone through every single acne treatment that you can think of, including the maximum amount of Accutane treatments. The form of acne that has plagued my skin for my whole life is called cystic acne, a genetic variation of acne that causes huge and extremely painful inflammations in the deep skin layers, resulting in under-surface cysts. My acne is the major cause for my trauma surrounding appearance. And a part of me understands it: acne is not pretty, it is disgusting. We all hate pus, it is one of the grossest things the human body is able to produce. You are allowed to be disgusted by it when you see it.
But how does this illustration make you feel?
I hope the answer is 'guilty'.
Breaking my mirrors,
ichigonya
