I looked at the Slack message in confusion. Opened the camera on my phone and stared at myself, up and down. It was not an aspect of myself I lingered on much these days. I used to dye my eyebrows, and now I didn’t, because I couldn’t be bothered. The story of my eyebrows ended there. And here I was, opening a chapter again, because she’d commented on it.

My fingers hovered above the keyboard, caught in the hesitation that comes with messaging people you don’t know well. I typed one sentence, reworded it, deleted it. I wondered if she could see the nervous typing on Slack. I stopped typing. The familiar Slack alert startled me. She had sent another message: “hope this wasn’t inappropriate to say.” I wasn’t the only one cursed with the afterthought of saying the wrong thing. I started typing again and didn’t know what else to respond except “haha I just couldn’t be bothered to put on makeup anymore.” I checked for grammar, spelling mistakes and smiled to myself. Maybe my eyebrows were striking. I frowened. I wondered whether she’d said it because she felt sorry for my acne. Urgh. I chased the thought away, hitting my head as if an imaginary fly had landed on it. I went back to working and left my self-consciousness and superficiality lost in hundreds of Slack threads.

That only lasted a few days. One morning, I sat at the foldable desk precariously installed in my living room, opened my laptop, pinched an English ivy leaf that hung off the shelf between my fingers. I clicked on the calendar and opened the Google Meet invite for the usual standup. I sighed and averted my eyes as I spotted my face in the waiting room. That tiny space of time before going into a meeting where you can see if anyone is already on it, what your hair looks like, if you seem exhausted, not bothered — and where you decide whether it’s a camera on or off day. Are you still here? The notification popped up after a good while of staring back at myself. I was one minute late. I clicked join and saw the reduced versions of my colleagues appear, busts all neatly ordered in squares. Oh here she is.

Stripey shirt. Are you on a boat? My manager asked with a laugh. I shrugged and didn’t answer. The meeting went on. I opened the reduced self-view on the side of the meeting, zoning out of what’d been said, trying to catch a glimpse of what was offensive about the t-shirt. The call went on. I gave an update on something. On mute. Back to staring at myself. The call ended. I didn’t change, but I wondered if there was anything wrong with the t-shirt. Was it too stripey? Were stripey shirts not in fashion anymore? Should I ask Google or ChatGPT what it thought?

I got up from the chair, let go of the leaf, and went to the kitchen to grab the moka pot. The smell of coffee grounds hit my nostrils as I opened a fresh pack, scooping the grounds into the funnel, licking my fingers to catch the dark spots that had fallen on the counter. It was only as I screwed the pot shut and heard it whistle, coffee rising to the top, that I realised: I’d just taken her words as my truth.

I’ve turned this over and over in my head for a while, and there’s a big chance that most people would be able to brush off these comments. That this story, being told to one person or another, would elicit different reactions.

Just ignore it. She was being nice. Why would you let her tell you that at work?

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. Me, her, us. It doesn’t change what happened in the space. And that’s what I’m curious about. This space where someone commented on my appearance, how I took it in and made it mine, even for a little while. The comments were not meant with malice, but they got there. And sometimes that’s how it works. Sometimes it’s out of our control and it sucks, because that forces us to look outward and take everything in, even the bad shit.

Let’s take the recent example of Ariana Grande. I’m not going to link anything because too much has been written already, but I feel for her. Her body, whatever opinion we have of it, put under scrutiny, requiring a justification, a permit to exist. She might be an extreme example of what exposure to any kind of public light does, but to a smaller degree, it’s not that different from an unwanted comment from your uncle about the bags under your eyes, the weight you’ve put on since last Christmas or that skirt being a bit too short.

You were there, free, exposed, vulnerable and they took a shot. Was it really necessary?

Remember, it’s never about you

I’ve grown up around people who would always comment on my acne. You’ve got a new spot. Oh my god, why do you have so many spots now? Have you tried rosehip oil? Maybe you should see a dermatologist. You need to wash your face towels. Your blood is dirty (yes, really).

Comments like that stick to your skin like cheap honey that hardens at the smallest change of temperature. This honey doesn’t soothe burns like it’s intended to in the old wives’ tales, it stings and stuffs the wound with shards that are impossible to pry off the flesh.

With time, I’ve learnt to step away from the comments. To tell myself, oh child, it was never about you. It was about your aunt who had acne when she was sixteen and couldn’t stand looking at a smaller version of herself. It was about the guy at school whose mum shamed the red marks on his torso, compelling him to shame you too.

This realisation doesn’t doesn’t diminish the pain, but it makes it easier to see that these comments were never intended for you. They were just too painful to direct at the self.

But let’s not get evangelical about this stuff. It’s ok to be hurt, but it’s good to acknowledge that sometimes we too do the hurting, by sharing what we think.

Isn’t it better to always share what we really think?

In not so many words, no. That doesn’t mean you need to be a saint. A running commentary in your head is normal. Everyone judges. Hell, even therapists do. Judging is part of human nature. What matters is not the judging, but what happens once the thought has crossed your mind. What do you do with it?

Before you decide to comment on someone’s appearance, think about it this way: what sounds ok to you might be horrible to someone else. So maybe it’s not about sharing “what you really think”, but about understanding where the need to share comes from.

Why the sudden urge to stop and stare at the hairs on someone’s legs in disgust, or cringe at the sight of a horrible dress? What does it mean?

These visceral reactions can often be picked up from the little shelves inside of us, where all the pain and shame we carry shines, where judgment acts as the pan and duster. It’s what we try to hide behind the respectable books. Behind the Freud and Jung can often lie a Twilight series. What’s it doing there? What purpose does it serve? Ask yourself. See what you come back with.

Are unsolicited comments about someone’s looks good or bad?

I don’t like categorising good or bad. I’m not neutral, I have opinions, but it’s not for me to make a moral pass. I like to think of good and bad as the ability to step into someone’s shoes and ask: what would it be like for them?

• Is what I’m about to say kind?

• Can they change it?

• Would it actually help them?

• Would I like someone to say this to me?

• Will they smile when I say it?

• When in doubt, say nothing at all.

Staying sane when you’re sensitive to comments on your looks

It’s hard stuff, this staying sane. It’s not for the faint-hearted. It requires resilience, time, strength. Things not all of us are lucky enough to grow into.Although it’d be great to be able to step away from “public life” as Ariana Grande did, there’s no beating around the bush that we can’t all do this.

But to keep sane, remember it’s not just up to you as an adult. It’s also the little you, tucked in a corner, listening to a parent, a relative, a grandparent, a sibling, absorbing before they can even form a sentence, before they developed the fine motor skills to hold a pen and wear their heart on a page, like I’m doing now.

Remember that narratives can be deeply painful and engrained. You’re lazy. You’re noisy. You’re the big sister. You’re the ugly one. They become the wallpaper of your internal bedroom, the one that slowly peels at the edges, that sometimes gets repainted or papered over, but that never really comes off.

To stay sane, try and remember all of that. Know who are. Build your own parent in time, if you can. Try and steer clear of people who always comment. Tell them. It’s not always possible, but kind individuals will listen to what you have to say, to what hurts you, to what moves you. That’s the main rule of staying sane, surrounding yourself with others who get it, get you.

Oh, and maybe don’t linger on socials too much. That too.

That’s it, folks. And here’s my playlist and read list for this month:

• Time in a tree by Raleigh Ritchie

• Beautiful poems shared by Maya C.Popa

• The Impatient by Djaili Amadou Amal

  Until next time. Thanks for reading.

Angèle

These days, I look at myself in the mirror less and less, but there was a time when every morning I had to put my face and body under a high level of scrutiny. Before my first interaction with another human being, the mask came on: layers of Clinique foundation (beige), some Maybelline matte powder on top, a thick black eyeliner line, lipstick that matched each outfit. I then left the house with a pack of Marlboro Lights in my pocket, what I called an “attitude cigarette” lit on the way, something to do wherever I went – waiting for the train, the bus, walking down the street. I needed a cover for all the layers I wasn’t ready to shed. People have said it, even to my face: you give off cool. Great, that’s the intended effect.

This woman – me – however, was anything but cool. She caught her hair sticking to her lipstick, her lighter failing as she tried to light a cigarette, a pit in her stomach as she didn’t even dare step foot in a restaurant or a bar if she arrived there first. Her looks paralysed her. What would be the ultimate faux pas? She wasn’t cool, she was just weighed down by bottomless fears, catastrophic anxieties, and the impending knowledge that she was not, in fact, who she pretended to be.

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The problem with mirrors

Like everyone else, I am often guilty of looking in the mirror a bit too closely. And, oh dear, if mirrors were the only problem these days, but I also live in a world where social media, phones and cameras have turned into everything into mirrors. Whether it’s me, or you, we constantly watch ourselves, and the more we watch, the harder it becomes to know who we truly are — a selfie or a shop window might look like they can give us a good indication, but they still fail to capture our true essence.

Instead of looking at ourselves, we start seeing what needs to be fixed, and what needs to stay hidden, but what if there was another way to hold up the glass?

Trying to look past the mirror

In Alice Through the Looking Glass, Alice is not interested in looking at herself in the mirror. She’s obsessed with what lies beyond the superficial: what’s on the other side that the eye cannot see?

One of the wonderful joys of therapy is similar to what Alice is trying to do. It’s to try and see something else. In my/your case, something other than the reflection you sometimes hate. It’s to try and embrace parts of yourself. It doesn’t happen without pain, and certainly not as a quick fix, but it’s the therapist’s job to hold up the mirror, and like Alice, to take people through the looking glass.

But you’ll tell me, in practice, how do you start liking that version of yourself that you think should have less acne, be skinnier, be better, do better?

Perhaps it’s not so much about changing or fixing what’s happening in the mirror, but how you look at it. Maybe it’s about finding what you like about yourself. It sounds so simple and complicated at the same time. But whatever beauty you can find, whether a cute mole or the shape of a nose, it’ll be a beginning. Maybe you start seeing yourself through the eyes of others, through the photos your friends keep of you, your family. Maybe you look through your camera roll and notice, hey I had cute hair; maybe I didn’t look that bad then, maybe I was just experiencing that then, and I’m experiencing it again now. Maybe you look beyond all of that.

Finally, I’d encourage you and me to be more like Alice: to go on an adventure, to stop reaching for what’s in front of you, to be childlike, childish, to try and read words backwards in the mirror, to take on a different perspective, one that’s as far away as possible from yourself.

I often think of that when I hold a baby in front of a mirror: what do they see? Pure delight. How have we lost that along the way?

A mix and match of things I read/watched/listened to:

• London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe – I got caught up in the mystery surrounding the unravelling story of Zac Brettler’s death, a teenager posing as the son of an oligarch. What started initially as an article online has now been transposed to a full book, and I couldn’t stop listening, having found it on my Spotify suggestions. What I found the most fascinating were the web of lies Zac got caught in, what it says about who we want to be, what we aspire to be, why people lie. As sensational as the story was, I was really moved hearing from Zac’s parents, and it made the story more humane, far away from the headline catch it looked like it could have been. I was impressed by the extent to which Patrick Radden Keefe tried to get under the skin of each character, not just on the surface, but their background, trying to (without ever saying so) understand each protagonist, where they came from, why they might have acted in a certain way, whilst trying to get to the bottom of Zac’s terrible destiny.

• Adults – TV show – Propelled into the world of flatmates, a remix of Friends, à la “more controversial”. This TV show felt refreshing, funny at times, irreverent. Throughout it, I did wonder if the writers were of this “20-something” generation, or whether they had a more “faraway” lens from their 30s. I wondered whether the show resonated with people younger than me, and I was surprised at how different the writing was, how each character, as flawed as they were and as annoying as they could be, became ultimately likeable.

• Tracey Emin exhibition – I didn’t know much about Tracey Emin, apart from afar, when I stepped into this exhibition. I was taken aback by the amount of blood, sheer raw emotion, womanhood splattered across the walls. But perhaps the most striking of the exhibition are the confessional videos in which she talks about shame, sex, abortion, the complexities of being a woman, wanting to be an artist and wanting to be a mother, the traumas of doctors. I admired people trailing children across the exhibition, exposing them to raw materials, and wondered what that brought up in me, whether I would do the same. There was so much emotional maturity across all of it.

For your journalling/thinking

• What do you see when you look at yourself in the mirror? Write up the five words that come up. Reflect. Where does that come from? When did you first hear that? Is it really true? You’ll surprise yourself.

Take care, and remember, don’t take people’s words to close to heart. Including mine.

Angèle

I do it without thinking. Sensory memory kicks in, like putting keys in the ignition, turning off the hob, saying bye as you exit the shop. I scan for a potential new growth. I mentally add up the pieces of the mistake I must have made on my detective board. The milk. The sugar. The coffee. The not-exercising. The forgetting. A list of all the ways I can blame myself. Then, as I finally discover a bump ready to transform into a mountain later on, a sigh escapes my mouth and I flip the covers off to carry on my investigation in the bathroom mirror. Under the lights, my face morphs into a clearer picture. I frown at my reflection. I take myself back. Twenty years earlier, in another country, there was a teenager who stood in front of a similar mirror. She lived in the dark, died in daylight, dyed blue strands of hair with cheap off-the-shelf DIY packs and clipped punk band badges on her Eastpak. She didn’t like herself. She hated herself even.

It turns out she’s still me, in many ways. She wants to love herself. I want to love myself.

Some say a therapist should know best, but I preach it to clients and here I am, right back where I started. It took me thirty-odd years to learn how to like myself, so it sometimes slips under the radar, unattended, unexpected, still a warm and open hideaway to crawl back in. It’s an odd combination. To wake up and realise that you spend a lot of time stacking up the hours in a day into layers of dread.

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Since I stepped back into the reality of fluctuating hormones post-pill, the most unexpected thing of all is how much I’ve cared about therapy clients judging me for the acne that goes with it. I didn’t fear my friends’ judgment, my partner’s, my family’s, but I started believing that if clients saw me with acne they would think I was a bad therapist — that because I couldn’t take care of my skin, I couldn’t possibly be good at “this”.

Was I wrong? Maybe, but I know self-disclosure starts way before the therapy room. From the moment someone browses a directory in search of a therapist, they’re already passing conscious or unconscious snap judgments, so was I wrong for expecting the inevitable?

By showing up with acne, uncovered, no make up, for all eyes to see, I felt perhaps I was revealing something deeper about myself clients could see: I didn’t really like myself, and therefore I was not well suited to help them. It felt like Sharpie on my forehead: Full of insecurities. Run. NOW.

In my grandiose gallivanting about being a therapist, I still believed and dreamt of the myth of the flawless therapist. It was hard to let go of the image I pictured at the beginning of the training: smooth-skinned, tattooed, fashionably large-framed-glasses me sending the right message: I’ve got you because I’ve got my shit together.

Who was I kidding?

As I read Carl Rogers* again for some sense of direction, I can see he talks about incongruence as the discrepancy between what is actually happening in the moment and how we add our own self perception onto that experience. The good thing about this is I only do it outside the therapy room. I forget about my skin the minute I’m in the chair. The relentless questioning as to whether clients are going to care about inflamed comedones and flaky layers of skin shed by Tretinoin disappears. I take a breath in. My shoulders drop. I’m not a flawless therapist then. I’m just a person who meets people where they’re at.

Isn’t that what therapy is all about? If that’s the case, maybe my acne becomes a conduit of vulnerability rather than a problem. I hear you have to fake it until you make it, but I don’t believe you ever make it. You slowly and surely start to tear down the walls, until you spot a part of yourself to like. And yet, on some level, I can still hear myself thinking a good therapist doesn’t have acne.

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Susie Orbach* talks about how being fat isolates and invalidates a woman, because she then falls out of step with what’s expected of her in society. Worse than that, she starts believing it’s her own fault.

I bring up this book because fat women and women with acne share similarities in the scrutiny imposed on them. Scrolling through Instagram and getting re-targeted by the algorithm once you’ve looked at acne content will only make you feel one way, therapist or not: a failure for not having been able to use salicylic acid properly, or not having bought a LED mask for $600. It’s the same logic that will make some people pursue weight loss injection or drastic diets: a desire to fit in.

After all, acne seeps into my most deeply held insecurities, as I’m sure it does for most women — it pushes on the button and belief that if we’re not “nice to look at” then we’re worth nothing. This is part of why I felt my clients would see me as a failure for not having fixed my “most important asset”: my appearance. Because the good little soldier of femininity, somewhere in my head, keeps telling me that a professional and respected woman cannot have acne on her website’s pictures. She needs to look flawless to sell mental health.

Isn’t that fucked up? Yes, but as I step back into my adult shoes and leave my teenage self at the door, I can see clearly that people around me don’t care about what I look like. I know it from my beautiful friend who tells me “what acne? I only see you” or my friend’s baby who reaches for my eyes before he looks at my chin – there is a way out. Throwing money at the problem will help to some extent, but only my mind can get me where I need to be.

Although, in an era of optimisation, where looking “good” is not even out of reach anymore, I have to ground myself in the belief that maybe my skin will never heal or look the way I want it to, but I take comfort in a small revolution: to just try and live with it.

At the end of the day, I made a choice. I could have stayed on the pill. I could have been “the perfect me”, whoever she is, in whatever made-up world of mine she exists. Perhaps, maybe perhaps, there was a tiny, tiny part of me that wanted clients to see the whole of me: to stop hiding behind the mask of having it all together. Maybe their therapist not bothering too much about looking impeccable tells them it’s ok if they don’t.

That’s why one morning, not so long ago, I decided to stop mapping out my skin like a less-conquistador version of Christopher Columbus. I opened my laptop and logged back in here. It’s no wonder I’m writing an essay twelve months after my last. I thought I closed a chapter, but I don’t think I’ll ever be done with skin issues. Like life, they come and go. Until then, we can’t forget to live a little.

*Rogers, C.R. (1957) ‘The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change’, Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2), pp. 95-103.

*Orbach, S. (1978) Fat Is a Feminist Issue. London: Paddington Press.

When I started this newsletter, I was thirsty for a space that would welcome me, embrace me, mourn with me. Since I couldn’t find it anywhere else, I thought it would be a good idea to try and create it with words, like I’d always done.

I knew skin issues might seem like small, self-indulgent problems, but I also knew how much they took over my sense of self. There was so much anger in the gap between what my skin used to be and what it had become. And I wanted to do something with it.

In June 2024, I started typing furiously, without a plan, without excuses. I divulged all the little details and frustration of what life looked like with skin issues – dermatologist, people’s comments, treatments, sunshine, holidays, stress, anxiety. The wrath had no clear target, except nothing and everything (but mostly myself). Still, I hope some of my words landed. I believe at times they did. I heard people around me ask me questions, said they felt seen, they wanted more, when was the next issue going to be?

So, to everyone who read my words in the last year, even if it was five minutes out of your day and you forgot all about it after, thank you. It’s the only thing a writer wishes for: to be read and understood.

Over the past year, I’ve shared many details about my life, trying to connect my personal experience to the bigger picture. Why? Because writing has always been about finding connection, and it’s even more important in a world where we’re becoming increasingly isolated. Writing helps us find that someone who gets it, who gets you, and me. And as the feminist saying goes, “the personal is political.” Whatever form that takes, I see this mantra as the core of my writing, because it’s allowed me to claim a voice, even when I felt like I wasn’t entitled to one. Especially when I worried that writing about skin issues might be too silly or superficial. It let me say fuck it. Just fucking say it. It’s always worth another voice adding to the experience of being a woman: what it’s like to adhere to beauty standards, how we present ourselves to the world to be accepted, not too much, not too ugly, just right. Despite what everyone might tell you, there’s never enough. No story is your story, so it must be worth telling.

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I remember during my MA in Creative Writing, one of my tutors asking: but what is it you really want to write about? I think I was too ashamed to say me. I often turned around the topic without getting to it, because I felt too self-conscious to do it. Most probably, that’s why writing acted as the antechamber to what would become therapy for me. In hindsight, maybe it was always what it was about — never really about writing, but more about reflecting on the why, the bigger picture, the inner layers.

As I have mentioned (only if you remember), I started training as a counsellor last year, and my path and relationship to writing has slightly changed. First, I can’t self-disclose as much as I used to, nor do I want to, and second, the well of skin issues seems to have dried up, and it’s time to think about giving it up. Just writing these words feels like a burden. Not one that’s been lifted off of me, but one that’s been dropped, like a pile of dirt all over me, like those American movies where the geeky girl gets ridiculed. Giving up is not a pretty word. It’s one you never want to have to pronounce, because in the world I have grown up in, and in the world we live in, it’s common sense to want to push for more.

I would like to say I am one of those pushers, one of those people that can survive everything, that would rather push through the shit than lie in it, but I don’t know if I am. I don’t know what I am. And it changes from day to day, a dweller, a questioner, a resilient. Someone who tries their best. And since this newsletter was born out of a suffering I didn’t want to part with, maybe it’s okay to let go of it.

But what about my skin, you’ll say?

Over the last few months, my skin has been doing weird things. The acne has not really reappeared, except for a few bumps here and there on my nose from the sebum accumulated in the sun. No funny rash between my thighs. No crevices at the corner of my lips. But my hands have suddenly popped with tons of bubbles. I can’t really see them, but I can feel a slight pinching, like a needle pressed into my fingertip as I slice a tomato on the chopping board, press the doorbell to get into my friend’s flat, or type my days away on a keyboard. The small tapioca pearls have joined up alongside all of my ten fingers, bubbling up until they explode. If I look at the palms of my hands in dull light, it looks like water in a pot, trapped underneath my skin – simmering, bubbling up to the surface until the skin breaks and sheds. It doesn’t really hurt; it’s just uncomfortable. I always want to rub my hand on my jeans, lotion my fingers with thick shea butter moisturiser, stop the shrivelling sensation, like I’ve stayed too long soaking in a bath, thinking of those days where I used to marvel at my palms as a child, thinking that’s what being old would look like.

Surprisingly, these past few weeks, I haven’t really looked at the palm of my hands. I just leave them be and hope it passes. The less I look at it, the less it exists, really. For some, that would look like a lack of self-care, but for me, it’s self-preservation. I give up on trying to solve the problem as it presents itself. Of course, it’s not necessarily what I’d recommend in every situation. Therapy is about letting everything out after all, deepening your understanding of yourself, and filling in the gaps of your story. Me saying to ignore the problem would probably make me a “bad” therapist, as doing that tend to bring most things to the surface when you least expect it.

Perhaps that’s what the bubbles have been trying to tell me. Give it up. And that’s what I’m doing. Not in shame, not in regret. I’m following my gut feeling for once, and it feels staggering, but oh so satisyfing. And if you let me, I’ll be sharing more details on what’s coming next for me in writing a newsletter as a therapist.

In the meantime, put on some sunscreen, go outside if you can, and forget about what’s happening here. That’s probably the best advice I’ve given myself in a long time.

PS: As always, this comes for free, but not without effort – I would be very grateful and humbled if you could stay on my list for what’s next, and like this post. Thank you for reading it until the end.

It might not be big news for most, but I had been wondering how to soften the blow of the dreaded spots that had burgeoned on my chin, landing in the same sweet crater they had made for themselves years ago. A few days could go by without anything to fill it, but it would always explode somehow.

That same week, my lip had developed a cold sore. I barely raised an eyebrow. This last month, I’d run like a headless chicken between assignments to refine for my counselling course, glasses of red shared with friends, parched lips biting on wooden forks at lunch, a sign from my brother who was about to visit, checking my phone in-between making fried rice for dinner, bathing it in amber soya sauce, dropping the bottle on the floor, staining the lino and cursing myself.

Stress had come with a bang and like the spots on my face, it was here to stay. Maybe that’s why I needed to send my friend a disclaimer about the acne.

I read the WhatsApp a few times, waited for the blue tick, tapped my chocolate painted nail on the back of my phone. What would she reply? But hey, what could you even say to that? Why had I felt the urge to tell her this? She would only offer kindness in return, yet I acted like I’d confessed a crime. She was welcome to say I couldn’t stay anymore. Welcome to report me to the skin police. I’m kidding, but only to a certain extent. Sometimes I feel there’s a law prohibiting women from ever seeking to be anything less than perfect. That was it. I’d put my finger on it: I wasn't the perfect woman anymore and that hurt.

To me, the perfect woman didn’t get spots. In fact, she was not even a woman. She was a girl. She was forever without wrinkles, wore perfectly-cut trousers with no cat hair, didn’t say like or obviously or literally. She was cool and smart. Never one word too much, never not enough. Just right. She just didn’t worry about anything because she had flawless, glowy skin. I’ve never been that girl, but I’ve pretended so hard to be that some people had bought it. And somehow, the pillar I had put myself on was sinking, down and down and down. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t think of myself as super hot or particularly beautiful, but there were some ground rules of cool, and acne was not cool. Acne was for the girl who hid behind her fringe, wore chipped black nail polish, refused to open her blinds without foundation on. That girl was supposed to buried. Was I digging her up?

Three months prior, I’d swapped one contraceptive pill for another. The original one had been very high in estrogen, playing with my skin further, developing eczema on my fingertips. I’d been on it for years. I stared at the new pack, turned it around in my palm and after a few days simply popped the pill in my mouth. I downed it with a glass of orange juice I never usually drank, coughed on the bitter bits stuck in my trachea. What was the worst that could happen? Sure, I saw myself back at fifteen, catching glances in every reflection to see how big the spots were, how I could hide them, hide me. But I decided to throw that out the window and settle for my comfort. So three months passed and right on the clock, after December and the days filled with slumber and chocolate had passed, a little red dot grew and grew on my chin. More came along. They often arrived in threes: a duo of small ones and a massive one that took weeks to heal. At least I didn’t scar, I told myself. Maybe I had learned the lesson not to pick.

It was after those three months, having somehow welcomed acne back into my life, that I arrived in Stockholm. Although I knew my friend wouldn’t judge or make any comments, especially since I’d already told her, I still caught myself pulling my scarf up over my chin. In a country where everyone (or almost everyone) looked blonde, fit, sporty, I found it difficult to part with images of perfection I had crafted for myself. I stood out in a sea of beige and black clothing, wearing my green and pink tartan scarf, struggling to walk on icy pavements. The spots were just another item on the list.

I arrived in Stockholm, wanting to justify myself. Was I looking for absolution? Confirmation that, yes, it wasn’t my fault. I wanted to justify it to myself, for having thought I’d finally beaten acne, that it was gone forever, that I’d never have to worry about it again. For years, I’d had no spots, perfect clear skin. Damn, I’d cracked the code. I didn’t shy away from photos, didn’t hide behind my hair. My jawline was an angle to be admired for its cutting edge. The best profile. And now, it was all back to the beginning, where I didn’t like anything about it. Although I still didn’t wear foundation. That was limit. Somehow, a little part of me that I found hard to pay attention to whispered, louder and louder fuck it, fuck you. But still, I felt like I’d betrayed something, someone. I wasn’t the same as I had always been.

Perhaps it’s just some good old woman’s conditioning: an instinct to apologise for gaining weight, for getting spots, for growing hairs. A trigger warning, almost. We go through life expected to hide what’s not meant to be seen, and if it is, then we have to warn people, just in case they run away, disgusted by the fact that we showed our true selves. Is it the truth or is it the fear? Was it what I was doing? Apologising for showing my true self to someone I’d known for years? It’s funny how something that covers barely 10% of my body can take over my mind, can make me say sorry; like when I apologise for no reason, just as some sort of interjection. Sorry for taking this spot. Sorry for standing in front of you. Sorry for not understanding.

I’ve vowed not to say sorry as much, but it’s hard in the UK. It’s hard as a woman. And yet, I think I take back my almost-apology to my friend, because yes, these spots are part of me now. Not new me. Just me. Just with a few additions.

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And then I came back from Stockholm,. And I heard myself mentioning the spots again, here and there, to different people. No one said anything to me, but I dived in first. Some sort of preemptive measure. Was I apologising, or was I choosing to attack first?

Just twelve days later, I heard Charli XCX and Sabrina Carpenter receiving complaints about their outfits and performances at the Brit Awards. Charli XCX responded a few days later, cheekily reminding everyone that it was the “era of freeing the nipple.” She didn’t apologise. She looked like she didn’t care, she was a brat, after all, but some kind of response was still necessary. She still needed people to know that she’d heard, that she’d cared, in one way or another. Of course, I have no idea what Charli XCX actually thinks. But just as I worry about my spots, I imagine she worried about the dress comments, even if only slightly. As a woman in the public eye, how could she not? You probably expect it all the time. Actually, you don’t even need to be in the public eye. You just need to be a woman. And just as Charli knew whatever she wore could be picked apart, I thought it was better to make my spots obvious to the daring eye. I thought about the WhatsApp again, about how I had almost dared my friend to say something. Better to wear a see-through dress that’s completely opaque than something just a bit daring. Better to flaunt my spots than to try to pack them away under makeup.

Sometimes, I wonder if, no matter what we do as women, the game is rigged. Wait, I know the answer. It is. There’s no winning here, no best play. Any response, no matter how careless it seems, like me laughing about the spots that have come back again or Charli XCX making fun of the complaints, is a defense. Because all you do is wait for the attack. For every time I’ve been commented on, told to try argan oil, omega-3 supplements, La Mer creams, and everything in between — for a problem that was never my fault. One that has always been hormonal. One I have some control over, but only to an extent. One that would take most of my savings to fix on Harley Street. For all of that, I know the attack is inevitable, but the apology isn’t necessary.

And I think about us, women. How we wear clothes, amours, anything that makes us stand out, puts a barrier, because we’ll face backlash one way or another. Maybe behind our backs, maybe thrown in our faces. Actually not giving a single fuck is the conclusion I need to reach, but one I struggle to wrap a bow around. To simply be proud of the fact that my chin sometimes looks like I’m fifteen again. But hey, I should be happy about it, right? Isn’t that what we’re all supposed to want, to look that age again? So aim for the moon. Aim for not giving a fuck. Like everything else in this newsletter, it’s a work in progress for me.

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"I need to see your face and your torso," he kept instructing. I didn’t even listen to his robotic instructions. I couldn’t even get the camera angle right, and I had to juggle between two vials while drenching my hand under hot water. An upward motion toward the middle finger so the blood would come out. I rubbed the skin so hard it started to peel.

And whilst he delivered the rest of his speech, I pressed as hard as I could against my middle finger. The little droplets wouldn’t come fast enough. I looked at the kitchen towel dampened with scarlet stains, carelessly thrown next to my laptop. I thought about how this didn’t seem very sterile, like he’d asked.

When it was over, a bruise had formed on the three fingers I had to prick to get the blood over the vial line. I can still feel the sharp tingle, as if I’ve hit a nerve. The day left me with a slight headache. I wasn’t sure I’d do it again.

I got the results a few days later. As I clicked on the link, I didn’t manage to connect straight away. I lost thirty minutes out of my day figuring out how to reset the password. I wanted to know. It didn’t matter much, but I wanted to know. I needed a confirmation that I was alright. So I got on an email address I barely use. Had to reset the password for that too. Started losing my patience, almost gave up, but didn’t.

When I scrolled down the dashboard, all I could see were green and yellow bars. Then the verdict was delivered. Your cholesterol levels are slightly up. Guilty as charged. Maybe I shouldn’t have done the test right after Christmas: a month filled with Lindt advent calendar truffles, foie gras orgies in the middle of the French countryside, Comté and Morbier at lunchtime, Malbec every day, and only short walks to get out. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea in the world, but that wasn’t the most surprising part.

What surprised me the most, after the fact, was that my first thought wasn’t worry. It was something else, something that snuck up on me when I didn’t expect it. What would people think? A 32-year-old with high cholesterol? Did I need to lose weight? What was wrong with me? Why was there always something wrong?

Unexpectedly, or maybe it was inevitable, shame had caught me off guard.

And it stayed there, its bright head rearing at the opportunity to put me under the spotlight. I was there, in my head, back in the middle of the schoolyard, trying to hide my body as much as I could from others. Running and splitting hair wondering what others saw from behind. Except now, I held a little sign that said BMI is high. Cholesterol is through the roof.

I didn’t want to sit in that feeling, so I went back to the spreadsheet I’d been staring at, full of traffic numbers and everything work-related, something concrete, something that gave me confidence. I didn’t need to worry about the rest. But the light was bright. Shame didn’t direct its attention at anyone else. I was the star of the show that day, and it had to go on.

My fingertips rested on the keyboard, typing painfully, moment by moment, as the little dots on my skin merged into a deep blue bruise, staining my fingerprint. I rubbed my hands against my jeans, hoping to calm the sweat pooling along my lifeline.

It was so tempting to click on Google and search, like I’d done so many times before. To look for answers to questions I already knew. Some reassurance from so-called experts on Reddit.

How to lower cholesterol. Is it serious? What is wrong with me?

I wasn’t sure who could answer that last one.

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Maybe, just maybe, I could give myself a break this time. But hey, I’m not exactly known for that.

There have been attempts, but it’s almost like waves crashing against the coast. You hold them back for a while, but eventually, they find a way in, tearing through everything in their path.

Shame has always had strange way of making its way into my life, and guiding me through it. It’s always shame that hits me first when I have a problem with my skin, so is it really surprising that it’s the same with cholesterol? They probably go together, like old friends reminding me of what I should be and how I should act.

Receiving constant feedback from the external world on how you’re doing it wrong, how you should be a certain way, how you should be eating better, is a tough one. Once again, you’ve failed the test you didn’t know you had to pass.

And it’s not like you don’t follow all the recommendations. You exercise. You take omega-3s. You do all the tickbox list. Yes, sometimes you have treats. It makes you happy, because food makes you happy. So maybe that’s the problem. Hey, maybe you were wrong all along. Maybe you should try harder, make your life even more miserable, why don’t you try?

Shame is a weird cloak, like one you’d throw away or sell back on eBay if someone gifted it to you. Definitely, you know you should, but you somehow can’t bring yourself to do it. You carry shame for the hairs on your legs. You carry shame for not shaving your armpits. You carry shame for being a bit sweaty. As a woman, you carry shame for any type of bodily function you’ve been told you should not even be able to perform. And the clock gets heavier and heavier. It wears you down.

I really want to shrug off this ugly fucking cloak. Even just to have it hang off one shoulder. That would be a miracle.

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I’m pretty sure I received these signals — these outside pointers — that I wasn’t living life the right way early on. Almost as if someone had told me straight away that I wouldn’t make it past the finish line.

It was the BMI that I first remember my doctor, as a child, pointing out, drawing red dots alongside a growth curve. He told my mum, without looking at me, that I was way above that curve, that things had gone wrong at some point. It was fine, and then I veered off track, and I needed to get back on the right path.

I still see that little child, whatever age I was, dropping her head and staring at the circles on her leggings, blue jeans colour, patterned with daisies. She might have touched one of them, tracing the circle on the thigh that suddenly felt too large. She didn’t really get the gist of it, but she could feel her mum’s burning shame, filling up the room, dropping onto her chair, so she grabbed it, curled up around it, trying hard not to make it grow.

Shame has been force-fed to me, you see. It wasn’t my mum’s fault; it was all of our family’s shame. It had a hold on me and imprinted itself onto my body. It was the shame that held my grandparents to their poles, not wanting to do anything others wouldn’t do, wearing the right clothes, not standing out, not making too much noise, following the rules. And for what, I wonder? What did shame give them? It certainly didn’t make them happy.

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Sometimes, I do wonder what shame gives me, like these old pyjama bottoms I can’t bring myself to throw away. They’re too large, stained in places, with Snoopy embroidered on my right bum cheek. I wouldn’t wear them anywhere else, but they hold me, comfort me. And better than that, I’ve had them since I was fourteen years old. They’ve grown on me. It’s rare, almost impossible, to be close to an object that has carried you for so long. So I look at them fondly.

And perhaps shame has that aspect too. It doesn’t serve me, but it’s also a way of looking back at who I used to be.

When I changed pills a few months ago and some acne came back on my chin, I remembered the shame of it. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be, but it’s there, bubbling up on my chin, little mountains of ignominy I’d prefer to keep to myself. But I try to carry them with pride these days. I stick a little bright star on them. I don’t try to feel new ones on my skin as soon as my eyes open in the dark of the morning.

Well done, you. Well done for carrying on.

Because there’s still the shame that people won’t let you part with, the kind they see themselves in when they ask you about it. It’s not many people these days, but it’s still there. It’s the shame that used to sting when a boy at school told me not to wear foundation, that it would make my spots worse. And it’s the shame that puts me now in a place where I feel like people who have known me without spots can wonder, notice, and ask themselves: Why now? Why is she different now? What has she done wrong?

For me, whether it’s cholesterol or a spot, it’s the shame of my class that I can see within it. Most people won’t think this makes any sense, but it’s the years of my grandpa breaking his back, digging up potatoes under a scorching sun that I find again and again in the sebum of my skin. It’s my gran waking up at dawn, at fourteen years old, being told never to go back to school to milk the cows instead, It’s that inflammation no one can find an explanation for. Not the doctors, not the gurus. Nothing. Call me crazy, but it’s that shame I’m talking about. The one that’s been buried deep but still surfaces, because despite the fancy clothes and the alright job I can carry, it doesn’t matter much when my insides remember poor. They tell the stories of not being able to make things disappear. Not having enough money to fit the mould. If you’ve heard about the Mar-a-Lago face talks, and how it helps people get places by getting them to look the same, you’ll know what I mean.

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So it’s little by little that I break free. Free from the chains of those before me. The ones who hid, the ones who fed on cabbage and felt the hollow of their bellies throughout the Second World War. The shame of my single mum surrounded by married couples. The shame of not looking like other people at school.

But how do I break free, you see? I stop wondering whether makeup is appropriate. I just go out. I choose to live. I don’t hide it; I flaunt it. And what about the rest? Well, I’m working on it. But you have to fake it till you make it, and I haven’t made it out of shame yet, but I’m working on it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about skin issues, about what this newsletter is for me, how I present it, what’s the plan behind it.

Maybe there’s no plan. Maybe it’s a place where I relax, and do whatever I want. How does that sound? Freeing to say the least.

Freedom arrived for me the other day. Not as a revelation, but as an eruption of acne. After three months on a new pill, my chin became the battleground. Each day brought a fresh bump, a defiant pustule, and with them, despair. I had gambled on this switch, trading one little pill for another, rolling the dice on how I might present myself to the world.

Apparently, I care about this more than I like to admit, something you might have gathered from my last personal essay on the subject.

But the self-hatred didn’t come, and I felt like I’d lost a limb. I waited, patiently, for the self-blame to arrive. For the frantic search for an explanation. For the impulse to buy expensive creams or rush out for an emergency foundation purchase at Boots. But the urge never came. It had stopped in its tracks.

It was strange, this fundamental absence. It made me reflect on what I had lost, but it didn’t feel like grief. It felt like shedding skin, welcoming a new part of myself. The part that accepted, finally, that I could never, and would never, be perfect. And more importantly, that I shouldn’t strive to be.

So, yes, now I have a few bumps healing on my chin. I waited, just waited. My new approach: wait and see. Don’t do anything irrational (which, let’s be honest, is often my default). And now, two weeks later, it’s better. What caused it? I’m not sure, and maybe that’s okay. The Lindt chocolate I devoured? The lasagna my partner made over the weekend? The dehydration from hours in front of the computer? The hormones? Who knows.

I decided to let it be and shift my focus to the newsletter instead. I won’t be giving recommendations or advice. I’ll stick to what I do best: sharing what I feel, the sense I make of it, and how I connect the outside with the inside. And, of course, I’ll include some links to things I’ve read, watched, and loved.

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On my reading list

With the counselling course, my reading achievements lately have been terrible—but hey, what can you do?

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan – If you haven’t yet discovered the prose of Claire Keegan, I urge you to. Her short stories always leave such a deep impression on me. There are books that stay with you forever, and Keegan’s work is full of life lessons, of kindness, heartbreak, and cruelty. Of wanting to take action, in a world where we often stay still and let things pass by. This one, in particular, has been adapted for the screen, with Cillian Murphy bringing it to life. I loved the adaptation as much as the book.

Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors – This is one of the big bestsellers of the past few years, and I devoured Blue Sisters, her second book. I really resonated with the story. While I’m not 100% sold on some of the recurring themes around relationships, love, women, and suffering. which can sometimes verge on cliché, Coco Mellors is a smart writer who manages to rise above those pitfalls. Regardless of how I feel about the themes, her storytelling gift is undeniable. You’ll read it in one go, eager to find out what happens next.

Watched lately

I don’t watch many films or series, unfortunately. Mainly because I lack the time, and often what happens is I end up watching some trash TV to get my brain to switch off from all the theory reading I do in my counselling training. Nevertheless, I watched BlacKkKlansman by Spike Lee two weeks ago, and I found the story riveting. I wasn’t sure about how some aspects of the films were presented, with interesting choice of visuals throughout the film which were at odds, but I think I understood the choice. It was a great film, full of learnings and reflections, as his films usually are.

Browsed, maybe skimmed

• Elizabeth Lovatt’s upcoming book - very excited about this, as I believe we did the same MA, which gives me belief that yes, it can be done. Super impressed with this, and excited to read it. Well done!!

Listened to

Well, the truth is I only listen to podcasts in French, so if anyone is interested (and understands French), Arte’s one “Un podcast à soi” is so worth it, full of feminist insights, reflection and emotion.

I hope you take care of yourself in this gloom and doom that can be January, and I’ll be back mid-Feb, I hope, with my last personal thoughts.

Thanks for reading.

A.

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I often envy people who never crave clothes. I have a friend like this — completely removed from the fashion consumerism that drives so many of us women to work more, spend more, and believe our lives will somehow improve with a piece of clothing sewn by underpaid workers in Bangladesh. It keeps us trapped, spinning endlessly, smashing ourselves against the expectations placed on us by society.

It’s the game: spend your money to look the best. To look pretty.

Yes, I know all of that (logically), but what an entrance I could make with this piece of clothing. I crave the £155 jumper for the effect it will have on people I’ve never met. For the woman who once stopped me on the street to compliment my dress. For everyone else who saw me in a sea of sameness. I don’t believe it’s just about men, it’s more complex than that.

I can’t even count the number of COS sweaters that I have wanted. Satchel bags, choker necklaces, vests, cami tops, and ankle bracelets. But after all, clothes were the first choice I was given. I still remember stepping into Jennyfer (a shop my mum called super tacky, it’s been rebranded since) as a ten-year-old, having longed for the tops my friend could wear, far before I was even allowed to venture inside. Before that Jennyfer trip, I had spent the whole school year, fascinated by a girl in my class called Pauline who wore a crop top. I tried hard to stop staring at the crease of her belly button, half filled by a soft fleshy part that poked out of her stomach, the shape of a half-moon. I knew I’d get called something, I wasn’t sure what, for staring, but she reminded me of the Britney mix my uncle had burned for me. She had what I didn’t: fashion.

The clothes I wore back then were about pride. Getting something new that could finally say, I belong, even though I only owned one pair of jeans and another pair of trousers that my mum washed every other day because we couldn’t afford more than shopping at Super U.

And yet, I wanted more. I wasn’t sure if my desires were driven by what others saw or by what I truly liked, but I understood that clothes showed people who you were — even when it was a lie.

But what stories did I want to tell? I wasn’t sure yet, but I needed the confidence that was, oh, so lacking. I cloaked myself in different personalities over a short period of time, leading to a lot of conflict with my mum. There were frequent “nos” and “whys”— concerns about how revealing my choices might be for a body that had suddenly spilled out of nowhere, expanding beyond what I had known. A body people either stared at or wanted me to hide.

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And as the clothes became darker, my body grew larger. My mum and I went to the shop regularly to buy new trousers, her resentment palpable on the other side of the fitting room as I cried. She urged me to keep quiet, unable to understand why I made such a fuss over trousers that wouldn’t go past my calves, even though I had been that size just two months before.

I can close my eyes and still feel the tightness around my ankles, already knowing it’s a lost battle. The fabric refuses to go past my thighs, crumpling in defeat as I wrestle to pull it up, the tubed cotton legs piling up on the floor. My skin feels sticky, and hot under the harsh lights of a cramped fitting room. I don’t even look at the reflection in the mirror. I avoid it and blink back the tears, staring at the discarded pile of trousers, ghosts of legs past on the floor.

My mum and I tried to find other options, going through the racks. We finally gave up, head bowed, whispering goodbyes, as the sales people looked at us with a contrite smile.

Eventually, in high school, some clothes started to fit as I had to upgrade to the adults sections. Every day, I wrapped a white and red keffiyeh around my neck, put a large khaki vest on, shapeless trousers, Converse at my feet. Men didn’t look at me (and it was fine by me) — except the old creepy ones. Boys my age? Invisible to them. A fringe in front of my eyebrows, thick eyeliner and kohl framed my blue eyes. I hid my chin acne and jaw cysts behind the keffiyeh and thought, This is who I am.

I went through teenagehood like this, carrying a bit of awkwardness and self-hatred, pretending I didn’t care. But still loving clothes, despite the fact they seeemed to hate me. Graduation day arrived with the best cotton t-shirt I could find at the thrift shop, while my friends wore XS revealing 70s tops. I looked odd in the group photo, like I didn’t get the theme memo. I stood by, trying to make myself smaller among the rows. Always different.

Later on, at uni, I got long wool skirts and synthetic fabrics that scratched my skin during the winter, tights that compressed my stomach, and Richelieu shoes to disguise the fact that I couldn’t fit into my trousers anymore. Make myself taller. I completed the look with two mascara-drawn dots at the corner of my eyes. I bought tons of L’Oreal foundation, never entirely sure if it blended perfectly with my skin.

Why did I want to both hide and be seen at the same time? Part of me recoiled at any kind of unsolicited attention (read: men catcalling), but another part didn’t want to be made invisible. I didn’t want to be noticed; I just wanted people to know, right away, that I knew what I was doing. That, through what I didn’t want to express in words, I could show instead. It was easier to hide behind that: to impress people, to get the clothes in front of their eyes, rather than reveal who I was. And that’s what I did for most of my life.

From the time I arrived in London in 2014 and started working in the cafe I mentioned in another essay, the same year psoriasis kicked off and started dotting my body all over, I can recall the clothes I bought better than anything else. A Whistles jumper I got from a charity shop, the one I accidentally put in the washing machine, shrinking it down to a child’s size. A small black backpack that I only got rid of recently, ripped through the side. Dr Martens brogues I still own to this day. The uniform the cafe forced us to wear, a washed up powder pink with “Salut!” in an old fashioned font, a maroon apron completed with all in black. Topshop sprees when it still existed on Oxford Street. A little shirt with flowers and a cowboy cut that I wore on my second date with my current partner. Moments and flashes of being drenched on a rainy day, wearing a cotton dress that could be wrung out. I could make you a list right up to the day the pandemic hit.

Throughout the first few weeks, I was bored. As my partner lost himself in work, a slow shift began within me. It wasn’t conscious. But I found myself trapped, with no need to be seen by anyone except him. Panic. I was left with what was inside — no lipstick, no hats, no dresses, no sparkles. And I wasn’t alone. In 2022, a Kantar survey revealed that women have worn less makeup since 2020. But what about our clothes — our second skin? Had we given up on them?

All this time, I had thought of clothes as saviors. Style was everything, and the theories I had built up in my mind seemed to crumble around me. What was left of my personality if I had nothing to show for it? Was I just a prisoner to revenge dresses, camel toes, and whatever happened to be in fashion at the time? Suddenly, as clothes lost their power to convey meaning, I began to reconsider the purpose they served for me.

Often, I think about me on Easter weekend 2020: I had put on a full face of makeup and a skirt that was too tight. Clutching my hot water bottle tightly as period pain became unbearable, I only made it worse by refusing to wear something else. Taking the skirt off felt like giving up. So much effort put into one look.

Almost five years since the pandemic, and I’m still learning that clothes don’t need to be the enemy. They can be a welcoming embrace, shaped by what you want them to be: the comfort of working from home, letting others see you in pants you’d never have imagined wearing before. Cosying up. Dressing down. Relaxing around the rolls of your belly, the curves of your thighs. Choosing freedom instead of subjecting yourself to the invisible yet so present male gaze, to the pressures of performing, even if it’s just for yourself. Is not caring as much what freedom really looks like? I’ve been watching this video again and again lately, and every time, I’m hearing some of my own thoughts.

I haven’t bought the COS sweater yet, but the doubt creeps in. The guilt has settled — will this be another one of those purchases that slides off my skin, worn only occasionally, like so many clothes already hanging in my wardrobe? Or will it be another item I don’t return, eventually sold for less than 50% of its original price on Vinted? Maybe something that brings misery, that no longer fits my hips, that my boobs spill out of. What a relief it is to get rid of clothes that don’t fit anymore, but what a torment it is to constantly want what’s in the shop.

I still care about clothes, and I think I always will, but I’m trying to hear what the want is telling me. Anxiety brings on the need to shop, to rid myself out of a problem, to escape by bringing flickering happiness, immediately gone and instant renewal. I try to think more about what I want, but it’s hard to know for sure. Is this really me? Or am I still imagining and comparing — trying to be better than others, outdo this woman, overshadow that one? Playing the exhausting game of wanting to be seen and admired. It’s not so unlike writing. Do you write for yourself or for others?

But hey, nobody’s perfect. Clothes are my second skin. And you know how hard it’s been to show my original one. So I try to make my wardrobe a safe place, and nowadays, I conjure up the girl who set foot into the Jennyfer shop, the one I look at from time to time in the attic where my mum stores the school picture. The one who is beaming, wearing the 3/4 black top with a red-haired manga character on it. She didn’t think about these things back then — she just liked the clothes she wore.

Did you miss me? I thought I’d check in to let you know I’m still here, writing away. With therapy training keeping me busy, I haven’t been as consistent as I once was, but I’m still at it! I am currently working on my next personal essay which I will publish soon here. In the meantime, why not read the last one if you’ve missed it?

This newsletter has been going strong for six months now, and I’ve hit more than 100 subscribers! Thank you to everyone for your kind words, your reads, and for hitting subscribe. I pour so much effort into this, and I truly love it, though sometimes it feels like a lot of pressure to keep going, so getting subscribers always warms my heart.

I’ve removed Substack from my phone to keep distractions and obsessions away (especially with socials), so I’m only checking it on my computer, which feels super old school, Tumblr-vibe and I love it. It’s probably better for my mental health and comparison tendencies to stay away from Notes too.

Anyway, I’m currently on holiday in France, looking forward to the festive break. I hope it’s shaping up to be a good one for you too!

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Today’s mood and skin situation 💭

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but my eczema is finally giving me a break after two relentless years. Is it the therapy work? A new cream? Honestly, I’ve stopped trying to figure it out. For now, I’m just grateful for it — and trying not to rely on it too much either. You never know.

A skin product I use for eczema 💡

I think I talked about Balmonds before, and although I like their products, I’m not sure about some of them. However, I’ve found using their balm for my lips during the winter is super useful. They get cracked, and reddish with some blistering at the vermillion border, which can be painful and itchy, but is not a cold sore. Really recommend for people who struggle getting their lips hydrated in the winter, I simply put it on in the morning and evening.

Mental health reflection 😶‍🌫️

Taking a step back. I tend to be a very reactive person. I like to tackle things straight away. If someone initiates a tough conversation by text, I tend to respond immediately, letting my emotions guide the wording, often regretting. But I’m learning there’s value in pausing. Especially as a trainee therapist. It’s so easy to get caught up in what’s happening inside when you don’t shy away from conflict. But the truth is, you don’t owe anyone an immediate response. Sometimes, leaving your phone at a distance allows for better conversations later. It’s a lesson I’m trying to embrace. Not an easy one.

What I’m reading 📖

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

I’ve been thinking about reading this book for a long time, even though I’ve never seen the film. A friend of mine loves the film and the book, so it was on my mind every time I saw it in the amazing Libreria bookshop in London.

I stepped in just before I left for Christmas, and asked for it as I couldn’t find anything else. And damn, why have I put up reading this for so long? I’m amazed by the spontaneity of the language, how beautiful you can create characters through blends of letters, point of views, and sorrows. I got so attached to the characters that I found it hard to put the book away, always wishing for more time to read it during the day.

This has been one of my favorite reads of the year. The heartbreak, the healing, and the lessons from perspectives completely different from my own will stay with me. If you haven’t read it yet, please do. It’s a tale of love and resilience in the face of cruelty. But so much more than that too.

Thanks for reading. New essay to come in the next two weeks, before Christmas I’m hoping!

Love,

Angèle

The more my counselling training advances, the more I ask myself about the digital footprint I leave behind — how much should I erase to avoid becoming too exposed, ensuring that future clients don’t see the excavated mess I’ve laid bare for others to comment on, love, repost, like, judge, hate?

And can I even remove everything? Over the years, my online presence has been inconsistent — something I’ve tried, little by little, to dismantle and drown. Only to change my mind at the last minute, dragging my digital self back by the hair, coughing up the content I’d buried, unsure whether I could survive without it.

Writing is a form of editing — but not like glass-skin filters or trompe-l’oeil poses from Insta. It’s about shaping suffering into something worthwhile, not trying to hide it, but digging deeper until you hit its meaning.

Of course, social media isn’t (entirely) fake anymore. People put so much thought, effort and work into creating communities and shining light on their struggles, shapeshifting shame into belonging. It’s beautiful, so I can see the parallels with non-fiction writing, but although there was a time I did consider sharing photos of my skin online, something stopped me from doing it — I just knew writing was the way. It had always been.

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It’s funny to think that my skin issues started around the same time I signed up to Facebook around 2008.

Tried to tame my acne, now my digital footprint. See the irony? But do I really want either of these to go away? To start fresh, clean slate, and private feels like removing parts of myself. Shamelessly, I prefer to lay my skin bare with my words.

Circling back to my counselling training, I can, for sure, see the friction between listening to others as a therapist and observing the world as a writer. Both are about connecting and belonging — helping others feel understood. But therapists are tasked with safeguarding their inner worlds, while writers inevitably disclose pieces of themselves, whether they want it to or not. Readers grab the words, interpret whatever is lacking, filling the gaps, making it theirs. And in a way, I wonder if that’s not also what people do with therapists — whoever you are, you might become someone your clients used to know, love, hate, prefer. You don’t get to pick.

Over the years, I’ve heard many people say that writing heals, but if it did, wouldn’t we all be writing books? Writing is often just more suffering. You understand, but you don’t really move on, you simply transcript all of it on a page, and you make beauty out of it, or you try at least, to transform your pain into something that is worth it.

Just looking back at my skin issues writing since June of this year, I already cringe and refuse to click on the links. Writing is a constant shift. You become someone else for the space of an essay, and it’s still there. Writing didn’t heal me; therapy did.

That’s why I don’t think therapists hold the same privilege as writers: you don’t do your job to gain much from it personally, it’s all about offering them space and being comfortable in the knowledge that you were there for them. Damn, you don’t even get recognition from it. Is therapy the natural growth from writing? After all, they’re not completely alien to each other. Isn’t that what I’ve always done? Observing, listening, making sense of chaos.

So who am I really? A therapist? A writer? Someone who wants to talk about her skin on internet or someone who make space for others?

All of these considerations take me back to when I first began writing about myself. The first therapy path, let’s call it. It started during my MA in Creative Writing in 2018, where the feedback was rough. I still remember sitting there, staring into space as my classmates tore into my words. And it was fair. I wrote stories that went nowhere — fragments with no plot, no anchor, just pretty words strung together. To this day, part of me wonders how I even got into the MA.

It took months of hopeless progress. Then came the assignment that changed everything. For once, I decided to write about my dad — all the little things that annoyed me about him. A Simple Man, it was called. I poured out the words, describing how he inspects receipts with forensic precision, slurps his coffee, refuses to part with a sponge until it’s barely a sliver, carefully folds and saves every plastic bag “just in case,” and hides cash in drawers and wardrobes.

For the first time, people liked what I had written. And fuck, it clicked: I could speak about myself, connect the dots, and do it well.

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So I’m waiting for this ha-ha moment again. Last week, when our tutors told us to type our names on various search engines, the question about self-disclosure popped up again. I’ve always written under a pseudonym, but how much protection did it give? Should I remove my first name from Substack too? I’ve already become faceless, deleting bits and bits.

Self-disclosure is not a complete no for therapists. Like many other things in therapy, it’s up to the therapist as long as they remain ethical when doing it. Some choose to do it. Some choose to never say anything.

Sometimes it makes sense not to withhold information, for example, if you’re going on holidays and your client asks where. What’s the harm? In my case, I think a lot about it when it comes to helping people with skin conditions, which is a topic I have a particular interest in. So what if I become a therapist who specialises in it? I know about the impact skin conditions can have on self-esteem, mental health, and body image. I know how it’s still not covered holistically. I know how much it can lead to anxiety, depression and despair, having experienced it first hand. That’s why I like writing about it — but what if my future clients see this?

It could give some people immense relief at finding someone who understands. Some could even be comforted, given a sense of belonging. But it could also go the opposite way — they could doubt my skills for not having the skin condition under control. They could judge and project onto me their own self-hatred. They could see anything I write as judgment towards them. So yes, there is a risk, but the other aspect of it is that skin conditions are difficult to hide, so when it comes to self-disclosure, my body might just do the work for me. Of course I can hide the psoriasis on my elbows, and the rashes on my hands are only visible from up close, but what about the little flick of psoriasis that suddenly blossomed on my eyebrow? If they see it, writing about it doesn’t seem too much of a stretch from there.

So yes, I self-disclose, but as a writer, I don’t see it that way. Writing creates a distance — turning trauma into a project, outside myself. It’s a way of offering what I’ve been through, hoping it resonates with others and gives meaning to my pain. It’s selfish, and selfless, all at the same time. It’s my skin, and I can do whatever I want with it. It doesn’t mean it will resonate with everyone.

And perhaps that’s how I can be a real therapist, someone who can embody different experiences, not assuming that I have the answer to everything. Keeping the curiosity going. I feel like that’s what I do here: weaving sentences together in the hope that others feel less alone, but also sharing what’s mine and mine alone. I’ve been living with this for more than fifteen years. I can’t leave such a big part of myself behind.

I find the question of fitting into a box, and the inability to embody different experiences a hard one for me. Much like when I wrote the description of my skin issues, I felt like I had to pick one and undermine the others. Yes, my acne wasn’t active anymore, but did that erase all of what I’d been through for more than ten years? Of course it didn’t. Its ghost lingered in my memories: the teenage years spent popping whiteheads in the mirror, wishing I could disappear, crawl beneath someone else’s skin. So, in the end, I didn’t niche for marketing purposes. I stayed with my truth. And it was probably the right thing to do.

So why do I feel the need to choose? Writer or therapist. Does it even matter? The thought of abandoning writing sends me spiraling, crumbling like loose rocks on the edge of a cliff. But then there’s a whisper: It’s ok. A little inflammation, some crevices, flaky skin — all of it is necessary, and it will pass. Just don’t hurt yourself in the process.

Writer, therapist, or both — maybe I don’t need to pick.

Perhaps you’ve noticed I’ve been quieter on here, or perhaps you haven’t and now I’m bringing it to your attention, which makes it look suspicious.

But yes, I’ve had to scale back my writing aspirations, yet they’re stronger than ever. That’s the irony of being a writer: the more you want to write, the less time you have. And the less you’re doing, the harder it is to sit down in front of a screen or a piece of paper to put words down.

I’ve been busy training to become a therapist. The second part of my course started at the end of September, and I go to classes every Tuesday and Thursday evening after work. Adjusting my energy levels has been challenging as I go to bed a bit later, with my head buzzing of new concepts and interesting discussions.

The hard truth is that becoming a therapist isn’t just about learning theories; it’s about being willing to look deeply at yourself. It’s almost like stepping outside yourself, examining why you react the way you do to everyday situations. Why did you respond so strongly when the doctor changed your prescription this morning? Why did you instantly dislike a new friend’s friend with no apparent reason why? It’s constant reflection, and it takes a lot of energy, but I absolutely love it.

Not to boast or sound cheesy, but I think I’ve finally found my calling. I’ve always thought my calling was to be a published writer, but I’ve realised that the “published” part isn’t as important as the writing itself. Writing and psychotherapy have a lot in common: listening, observing, seeing the bigger picture.

Do you have your own revelations like that? It’s been my little epiphany lately, keeping me engaged as we dive into winter and the days grow shorter. Now, I can finally cosy up in my new armchair with my cat and a cinnamon candle. It’s a bit of a cliche, but hey, I’m living it. The only thing missing is Gilmore Girls in the background. Instead, I write and think about patterns, relationships, and dive deeply into the details to become a good enough therapist who helps people find meaning in an often-meaningless world. So, let’s keep going, right? And let’s watch Agatha All Along as well instead of Lorelai and Rory (highly recommend if you haven’t yet)

Mental health reflection 😶‍🌫️

Slowing down. I really relish the idea of it. I was discussing this with my mum the other morning on the way to St. Pancras, as she was about to catch the Eurostar. It bothers me how people rush past as if their lives are more important than those who can’t walk faster — children, older people, people with walking difficulties, or my mum with her painful hip. I used to live like that too, rushing to catch the train and worrying about getting home on time. Now, I make it a habit to slow down when I can (though I still rush when I’m late – we all have things to do). I don’t try to push past people; I walk alongside or wait for a large enough gap. No stress needed — you’ll get there in the end.

What I’m reading 📖

• Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, by Lori Gottilieb

I’ve been toying with the idea of buying this book, trying to convince myself that I need to read all of Freud’s and all of the “intellectual” books before I settle down for some fiction, but this was the best choice to read alongside all the readings we have to do for the course.

In a funny memoir, Lori Gottilieb reflects on a difficult moment in her life, whilst integrating her practice as a therapist, talking about what we learn as therapists in a room with patients, navigating difficult situations and emotions. It is a great read to demystify therapists, and simply realise that they are human beings like us, they don’t hold all the answers, and they can still be very good at their job. As one of my teachers put it, we are an odd bunch. I loved it and recommend it to anyone, therapist or not.

Thanks for reading.

Love,

Angèle

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It hit me a couple of weeks ago as I crossed out 'Yoga 7:45am,' letting the tip of my purple pen, topped with a little fluffy lama figurine, hover on the page, lingering as if I could fit another timeline to come up with the hour that was missing on there — to fill in the failure on my part.

• Blue Lamp.

• Meditation.

• Duolingo.

• Writing.

• Journaling.

• What else could I add to it?

The lamp — I'd failed to do it on multiple occasions, and my psoriasis remained raw on my arms. The blue device took four minutes for each section of my skin, little dots scattered all over my body, forcing me to close all the doors and to wear protection glasses, forbidding my partner and my cat to enter the room to avoid exposing them to the light. I hadn’t done it enough. Hadn’t ticked it off the list. Where would I find the time to make the psoriasis disappear?

It hit me as the thoughts unfurled from a well-known, dusty and uncomfortable place, made of drawers and little compartments that somehow never closed properly, somewhere all over my brain. A rhythm of never being enough, never doing enough, you’ll not do it, you’ll fail anyway so there’s no point. Really. There’s no point.

The next day, I was going to get on the plane to fly to Tokyo, and I felt like the list would never end, that I’d not accomplished anything, ticked all the boxes to make sure everything would stay perfect in my absence. My cat in good health. My life to a standstill. My psoriasis under control. My eczema flattened.

I left and nothing happened, so when I came back two weeks after, I tore down the weekly planner that had been left abandoned on the desk. Bought on eBay for £2, surely made out of a Canva template. It sat at the bottom of my bin. I hesitated to retrieve it, tape it back. What would I do without it? I grabbed the vacuum, looked at the balls of hair and dust sat in the compartment and emptied it on top of the rest.

The planner had taken over my mind much like the eczema had spread across my skin two years ago. As my skin condition worsened, I felt myself losing control, watching helplessly as tiny bubbles formed one by one. I spent money on creams, hoping for a miracle cure, moisturising constantly in search of relief. I just wanted it to disappear. And, like so many things in my life, I believed the answer was simple: all it took was a concrete, solid plan—starting with more planning, so I bought the planner. I just needed to kick it off, really.

I’ve always been a contingency plan type of person. As far as I can remember, I sat anxiously before each new term, wondering how it was going to go, establishing numerous scenarios to ensure my friends would stay by my side, that I would not lose them. Wanting to make them interested in me. Eight years old and coming up with little lies about the toys I owned, and the things I did with my family. Already aware of the money gap between us, the one that made me different. I planned to make sure I stayed in the race. Sort of survival of the species.

Then came the time when the new school term started, and we went shopping for planners. These planners would hold our homework for the year, along with little notes, hearts, and artwork from friends. The more you had, the more value you held. Popular wasn’t so much of a word back then, but the idea was there. I wanted the best, the shiniest planner. The Barbie one for a year, and the Hello Kitty one the next. And while I waited for the little notes that never came, I planned. I carefully filled in each line, following the dates and months, year after year. I diligently wrote down every lesson to study, every chapter to read, every math problem to solve. 'Make sure you do it all. Tick it off the list,' I reminded myself. I took my fanciest pen —the neon pink rollerball— and crossed things off one by one until everything was done. Only then could I go and reach for the TV remote, or build the Playmobil farm. But I could never leave a task half-finished; I had to make sure every item was crossed off, even to the point where the ink blurred and I couldn’t read what I'd written anymore.

Back then, my mum didn’t help my brother and I with lessons. We simply opened our books on the kitchen table whilst she chopped new potatoes, browned onions in the pan until they stuck and got the radio in the background. Could you help? I’m busy, I can’t do it. You have to do it on your own. From early on, I took pride in it. I even corrected my brother’s grammar and spelling whenever he asked. The little adult and her little tasks, carrying her little planner around.

I never missed a deadline at school. Even during the height of my adolescent rebellion, deadlines were always at the back of my mind — a sense of duty lingering behind the cigarettes bought with lunch money, the layers of Dove spray to cover it up, and the cocktails we mixed in bottles of Fanta. We partied late into the night by the Normandy seaside, waking up with our faces stuck on beach towels, drooling over the ghosts of the D-Day soldiers that had died there decades earlier, sand in-between our toes, forever stuck in our Dr Martens’ soles. We went back home and pretended to be tired because we watched The Exorcist late at night, and even though we reeked of seaweed, sweat and cheap vodka. Even then, I stayed up to finish my dissertations and write shitty responses. I handed in my copy for a mediocre grade, but I was there. Not in spirit, but in body. I did the work without being involved, almost entirely separate to myself.

Sometimes I feel like my skin is also a tickbox exercise to complete. I’m there, but I’m not there. I follow the plan without fully understanding what it’s about, truly believing that if I do all the right things at the right time and follow all the steps, it will work itself out. I do the research. Just hand me the instruction manual.

It took me a long time to realise that even experts don’t fully understand skin conditions. Dermatologists will tell you they don’t have all the answers because, well, it depends. There's so much advice out there: Eat this. Do that. Exercise. Drink plenty of water. No fragrance. Don’t use this on your skin. Take baths, but not too hot or too cold. Protect your skin. Wear soft layers. You can even call in an exorcist, a coach, or a naturopath who’ll sell you a plan and earn a commission on the supplements they prescribe. I've swallowed countless capsules of whatever I thought might help. Don’t talk to me about it—I’ve been there. Some treatments worked, some didn’t. I was never sure. And yet, I write a newsletter about skin, giving recommendations. But honestly, feel free to ask — who am I to recommend anything close to the truth? Because I’m certainly no expert.

Truth be told, all the programs that promise clear skin, and all the supplements, are dangerous for people like me — people who play by the rules. Good girls who want to do everything right and look like everyone else. After reading Pixel Skin by Ellen Atlanta, I started thinking about this a lot. Of course, skin conditions are about relief too — they can hurt, be uncomfortable, even debilitating at times. But at the end of the day, a lot of the skincare we’re being sold is also about fitting in and removing the redness, because no one wants to see it and we’re not meant to want to keep it. Spend money, more money, and then more again. I’ve definitely fallen for it. I’ve believed, at least a little, that money can solve everything. In many cases, it’s true — but when it comes to skin, who can truly afford a cure? Because there isn’t one. It just comes and goes. Luck of the draw.

Lately, I’ve been looking at the patches of psoriasis on my arm and, in a way, I’ve given up. I don’t flinch anymore. They don’t sting, and they’ve just become a part of me — a reminder that things don’t stay the same, and that like everything else, “normal” skin can cease existing. Maybe that’s why I stopped ticking the blue light off my list: I stopped caring for a while. I didn’t want to add more to my plate just to fit in. After all, what is red skin but its own anger, pain, and itchiness? It can also be a bold 'fuck you' to anyone who thinks I should hide it. I’m not saying I’ll always want it there, but maybe it’s okay to stop making plans for a while.

I invested so much time and money in wanting to look like everyone else in the past two years, and beyond, that I think I’m a bit tired now. Around the time I got rid of my planner, I also stopped taking my expensive supplements, instead reaching out to the GP to ask for vitamin and mineral deficiency test. I stopped tracking how much gluten I ate. I drank some red wine and delighted in the stains on my lips. I lived a little bit more fully, even with the itch and the flares. Coming and going. Damn, did it take me two years to get there? Maybe it’s when you stop planning that life really begins. Of course, there’s an inch or two of me that wants to scratch under the surface and reach for the plan, and at times, I probably will. But it’s what it’s about right? The coming and the going. The always changing.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know my newsletter always has two parts — the creative writing/essay and the recommendations. I’ve decided to split them up because I feel they don’t go together so well. This newsletter probably won’t have the same regularity as the other one though (it’s still to be determined). Just let it be known that writing creatively is still my main focus, but feel free to share your thoughts on the change!

Quick re-introduction: I’m Angèle and I live in London. I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember (I used to rewrite stories from my notebooks and copy them onto my old Windows 98 — no audience to share it with, just for fun). While working on my book, I realised I needed something more immediate and thought I’d share some of my writing online — so here’s how skin issue(s) came about. I also have acne, psoriasis, and eczema, and I like to think of them (or at least, my relationship to them) as big old metaphors for life. Although living with skin conditions is very uncool, I try to find meaning in it and share what it’s like to live with it. In reality, my. skin conditions have become a great creative tool, so it’s not all bad.

I’m also training to be a therapist, so I’m fascinated by how mental health impacts skin conditions, and helping people to find ways to embrace and love themselves despite how difficult visible skin conditions can be.

That’s it for me! 💌

Today’s mood and skin situation 💭

If you’ve not been with me since the last time I talked about it, I’ve been experiencing eczema behind my thighs for the past eight months. It’s been frustrating, challenging and uncomfortable, and has gone through various stages of being very very oozy to very very very dry and parched. It’s really impacted my mental health, but I feel like it’s getting better.

I can see how much this has impacted me, and how my mood is improving as I don’t have to constantly think about it, but I also believe the fact that I kept and kept on looking at it was probably not the best idea to help its healing.

It looks like the reason why this happened is a combination of sweating and applying heavy emollients (which I was told to do by the way) — it turns out it doesn’t work as well for me, and I need a lighter emollient or no emollient at all on some days. I will need to see how it evolves, but I’m trying to stay positive and trust the treatment instead of falling into my old habits of finding solutions on Reddit rather than following doctor’s advice.

Mental health reflection 😶‍🌫️

Over-planning is a bad idea. Sounds simple enough, but it’s a realisation I’ve come to recently. I love planning, but I find that too much planning actually gives me a lot of stress, and even though I look forward to what’s going to happen, I also spend too much time thinking about what could go wrong, and how it’s too much and how I won’t be able to cope.

It really impacts my ability to focus on anything in the present moment, so I’m trying to get better at this. I’ve been practising meditation for a long time, but I always find that with these things, you constantly have to reflect and relearn, so I’m trying not to be cocky about what I’ve learnt so far and I try to unpick old habits. I just have to trust my ability to organise my life a bit more spontaneously, and still manage to get it all done.

What I’m reading 📖

• Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women by Ellen Atlanta

I didn’t expect to learn so much from this book on beauty culture. While I care about skincare, my focus has always been on healing acne, psoriasis, and eczema, which impact quality of life, especially with the itch.

The book dives deep into the obsession with botox, fillers, and plastic surgery, making me reflect on my own relationship with beauty and how it’s evolved. The constant pursuit of perfection is fascinating — and exhausting. The beauty industry impacts all women, whether financially, physically or mentally, with shifting standards that are impossible to meet.

It’s a very reflective read, although some passages seemed very obvious to me so I got a bit fed up, but I highly recommend it for anyone questioning what beauty means, how we can fight the standards set for ourselves and instead strive for sorority. It’s always needed.

That’s it for me this time. Hope you enjoyed this more casual tone!

Angèle 🏄🏼‍♀️

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Can’t you just sleep already?

I think this may be one of my earliest memories: my mum telling me to sleep, so she could. Of course, that never worked, and I simply did what I was best at: avoid sleeping.

You’re such a bad sleeper. You never let me sleep. You woke up at 4am to play with your Polly Pockets.

Even today, it’s part of the family legend that I was the child who didn’t let her mum sleep – like I actively did it on purpose. My uncle always tells everyone how, when he used to look after me, I insisted for him to stay in the room until I had fallen asleep (if he didn't, I usually didn't go to sleep at all). But then, when it looked like I’d drifted off to sleep and he made the least possible noise to close the door behind him, my eyes popped back open. I’m awake now. Rince and repeat. Read a story. Wait for eyes to flutter. Wait and wait and wait. We’d go in circles.

Sleep is disgusting – was my mantra, according to my mum. I have vague recollections of sitting down on the carpeted floor, my knees hurting from the friction, picking up the Polly pockets, whispering, holding them very close so they could talk to each other through their almost inexistant mouth. I was comfortable in the darkness, although I worried about the shadows of potential monsters. But the dim light comforted me. I soothed myself at four in the morning until my mum heard and got me back into bed. What happened then? I probably closed my eyes and finished the night.

I don’t ever remember being tired as a child, but it was probably only when I grew up that I truly understood the full weight of what my mum went through. The torture of what was likely to happen to her every night when she had to go to work the next day, check back into her routine, chop veg for dinner, replace bags full of bin juice, put her hands into pink rubber gloves and rub crusted dishes. All of that until the time to rest came, except it didn’t.

As I grew up – ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fifteen, and more, I still didn’t care about sleeping. I obsessed over getting as much time awake as possible, eyes carving the books I read under covers, switching the bedside lamp back on after my mum had gone to bed to write some notes in my journal, carefully clicking the switch so it didn’t make any noise. Sometimes she stirred. Sometimes she asked “Are you reading?” – I lied straight through my teeth, but she never came to inspect. She probably wanted her sleep well-earned.

I think it all carried on well into uni, where I didn’t get much sleep either. Fell asleep with the light on. The night soothed me. No one to talk to. Probably too much social anxiety indued this recluse lifestyle. I nodded off during classes, trying to follow through but never managing, but yes it wasn’t a problem, simply a symptom that I shrugged aside.

Perhaps it was because I chose to be an insomniac and romanticise my life under warm lights. I took pride in it. It became part of my identity. I felt superior to other people, telling them I could function on not much sleep. Weirdly enough, I still do. I don’t feel very proud of myself for saying this, but I tend to judge the ones who can’t do anything if they’ve not slept. What’s wrong with them?

I didn’t understand sleep until the choice was taken away from me. Until the days and nights started blending and bleeding, of me going back and forth from the couch that gave me no relief, to the mattress that burnt through my damaged skin. It was 2022 when it started, and we’d just gone into the summer months when my body fully blew out into an allergic reaction. The plaques invaded my forearms, shoulders, neck, legs. An invasion, yes, that’s what it felt like. I scratched until the feeling morphed into pain. I couldn’t recognise myself. I couldn’t even rest. Just sitting down or lying down was torture. Taking days off work provided no relief, because the days became just about staring at the TV, watching reruns of Friends to obliterate the rest, to try to take the attention away from my flesh. I tried to get up the courage to go outside in clothes that I hated, the only ones that would halt the scratching, not irritate it more.

The silent nights I had loved so much became pity parties where I wanted to scream outside the windows to wake up everyone else, to not feel so alone. Close your eyes and drift off. It seemed so simple. But no, instead, as soon as I got out of bed with warm feet touching cold floors, I went into the kitchen to prepare some recipe for relief. Ice cubes wrapped in kitchen towels my mum had gotten me when I first moved in with my partner. An aloe vera gel I bought from Holland & Barrett some weeks ago. A cold shower that gave no joy. A wet towel to fall asleep under.

Silver linings of insomnia

On top of not sleeping, which is something I still suffer from, especially as my skin heats up like a hot pan in the summer months, I still struggle to be okay with it, because let’s face it, who wants to face an adult day with barely any sleep? No one, really. So yes, maybe I do understand why my mum took it so personally back then. Lack of sleep makes me hate everyone and everything.

Sleeping and skin conditions are laced with many contradictions. On one side, you’re told you need a full night sleep to avoid raising your cortisol levels, but on the other side, what’s causing the lack of sleep is the actual condition itself, so you can’t win.

But there are silver linings that I try to hold onto, little flickers of hope to grab onto. The time when I woke up and laid down on the cold tiles, my cat by my side, stroking its head, drifting off to her guttural purring sounds. That nap I took in the middle of the afternoon, and where I woke up hungry to find a moist leftover brownie from the weekend, snatched in the cupboard, wrapped up in tinfoil. The Sicilian beach I fell asleep on, hidden by a massive umbrella, with lullabies of children playing in the sand and waves coming near my feet.

Like everything else, bad sleep passes. It passes and it doesn’t stay the same, but always I’m scared of becoming a proper insomniac, although my longest bouts has been probably three months of sleeping three to four hours every night. I did survive. I was okay in the end. Who knows what the long term effects will be? Should I even care?

This lack of sleep did make me cherish sleep in ways I hadn’t before. It made me pay attention to it, make me want to invest in a comfy mattress (one that I didn’t get at a previous shitty job where I worked for a mattress company - that’s a story for another day), and get this stupid bed routine right, because in truth, the world seems like a much better place when you sleep in it well.

So what’s the recipe for good sleep?

Even though sleep gurus swear by routine, warm baths, crafty apps, meditation, sleep is not the same for everyone. It’s a mountain you have to climb all by yourself. Stress will make it higher, the top further to reach and the simple act of human unconsciousness to drift off into the land of sleep almost impossible.

The more you try you sleep, the less you will be able to. It’s perhaps the same way with skin. The more you think about it, the less you’ll heal. It can feel stupid to think you can conjure up your own healing, after all, it’s dependent on many other things, not just your sheer will, otherwise we wouldn’t be here, but there is an element to it.

Mental health tip for the day

• If you can’t sleep, like me, can you focus on what you have control over instead? Maybe that’s just lying in bed and doing nothing, just resting. Maybe it’s listening to a song. And when the light comes in the morning, choose what you want to do instead of going on autopilot. Do you want to stay in bed a bit? You don’t have to feel like you have to wake up (unless you have to work, of course), but maybe catch an extra five minutes. Try to focus on what’s possible and what’s adequate for your levels of energy. Maybe you won’t go for a run, but you can go for a nice walk. Don’t overdo it.

A thought on useful/not useful

• Useful — sometimes it’s better to take a step back instead of obsessing over what’s wrong. Seems obvious, doesn’t it? I’m currently trying to find a new therapist, and I need to see the bigger picture instead of obsessing over finding the perfect one.

• Not useful — keeping yourself from doing stuff. In the depths of my skin anxiety, I didn’t want to go out at all or see people, or more like have people look at me and my skin. I’ve learnt that, sometimes, if you’re not too ill, you can work through the discomfort and even forget it when you’re having fun.

What I’m reading/watching/scrolling/listening to:

• The book you wish your parents had read by Philippa Perry — it’s an interesting book, and a smart one from Philippa Perry with a lot of simple advice on how to listen to your child’s emotions and parent in a more intuitive way. I don’t have children, but I thought it was interesting, even if there was stuff I already new about. General guidelines about what not to do if you want to avoid traumatising your child.

How I used to look at my skin

What did I do when my acne was at its worst as a teenager? Where did I look? Surely somewhere, even though back then my cellphone didn’t have a high-definition camera. I don’t even think it had selfie mode, or at least my old Blackberry didn’t. My friends and I had to turn it around, get the right angle; people were out of frame three times out of five. Back then, my acne didn’t even seem too apparent in photos. Sometimes, you could barely see it. Did it mean I liked myself more? Of course not. That’s why I found other ways to scrutinise my face. I dug deep into it and became an archaeologist in search of relics: the mistakes I’d made to get there; the Digestive biscuits for breakfast, the hot chocolate at Christmas, the carelessness of a pistachio ice cream cone licked as the sand stuck to my feet.

I can still picture myself—fifteen years old, hair dyed red, David Bowie T-shirt, black Converse, baggy jeans, heavily drawn eyeliner and mascara—sitting in the youth centre where my friends and I sometimes got lunch, as we deemed ourselves too cool for the school cafeteria. We spent the hour queuing up in front of the microwave, carrying ready meals that stank up the whole room, piercing holes through the plastic wrap with a fork. The three minutes it took to warm up my mushy lasagna was a good occasion for self-reflection. I used the microwave as my mirror. Against the backdrop of the orangey light that cooked my lunch until the cheese became bubbly on top, I could see my face as well as the spots. I don’t think I ever looked beyond them, to be honest. I touched them with hands that had not yet been washed, discreetly pulled at them, massaging the flesh. In the hope of what? I wasn’t sure. Making them disappear, perhaps. I didn’t listen to my friends’ conversation behind me. I was hidden, in my shameless skin world. I sometimes picked up my Blackberry to get a better angle, double chin and awkward face. I couldn’t see much, but I knew the cysts were still there. Beep beep. Then the microwave went off, I picked up the plastic tray that was now too hot, wiped scarlet splashes of marinara sauce with a napkin, and sat down, digging into the soupy pasta dish that my mum had bought on offer at the local Carrefour.

Sometimes, my friend Orianne asked, “Are you okay?” She must have seen a withdrawal that others didn’t notice. I smiled. Everything was fine, but it was not. I had jumped on the skin obsession wagon for the rest of the afternoon.

At home, that’s where the real inspection began. From the morning, I dreaded pressing the bathroom light switch and walking up to the mirror. So, sometimes, I didn’t look up, but the inspection started way before that anyway. My alarm rang, and my fingers went straight for my face, tracing it in the dark. I tried to look for a bump, an indication that something was growing, about to explode on my face. I checked and rechecked. If I felt anything through the grease that had accumulated on my chin during the night, I trembled. Then I walked to the bathroom. I was a bit too small for the mirror that had been poorly fitted, so I got on my tiptoes, and if I had felt a bump, I squeezed it. It wasn’t even visible yet, but I knew it was there. I poked, stretched, pierced, scratched, and covered it with creams until my skin was raw and red. Finally, desperate, I applied a thick layer of foundation (badly) that ended up pooling around the spot. There was no hope, so I brushed my hair, trying to put it in front of my chin, lowered my eyes, and hoped that no one noticed.

So yeah, I didn’t have selfies back then, but it was all the same. If I didn’t look at myself through my own eyes, I spent the time thinking of what I looked like through the eyes of others. Perhaps that’s how I became a good writer. I spent my life observing people’s skin, looking for flaws, apparent pores, spots on their chins, reactions to meeting my skin. I waited for them to flinch. I looked for what I couldn’t find in myself, highlighting our differences, making me feel more alone, but never really voicing it. I thought about my skin all day long.

How I look at my skin now

I don’t know when it happened, or how, but I can now go back in time and find bad skin days in my iCloud storage. I scroll up and discover hundreds of photos of myself. I’ve deleted some of it, to try and not relieve painful memories, but it sometimes makes me think of that episode of Black Mirror where the guy keeps on trying to understand what went wrong in his relationship by rewatching memories. The photos make me forever look back on what was, forging theories of why it went wrong, how, what I can do to stop it from coming back. A false sense of control.

Have you been engrossed in a task, and then suddenly got the urge to look at how your skin has been doing? That’s skin anxiety for me. Checking if the spots or rashes have changed in the hour when I last looked at it from all angles. What would other people think? Is it that bad? It is that obvious?

How I try to stop looking at my skin

Lately, I’ve been wishing my phone didn’t have a camera. The constant self-surveillance has me on edge. Does it serve a purpose? Of course not, apart from heightening my anxiety, feeling stupid for caring so much when I advocate for skin positivity, or try to anyway. But I did fall into the trap of comparing at all times. Bereating myself for doing the wrong thing, and finding the trigger. The irony is I don’t often have pictures of what my skin looked like at its best, so my bias is to always think my skin looks bad, because I don’t have proof that it’s sometimes been completely fine.

My phone does not become mine in these moments, but it belongs to others, to what I think they can see and judge through me. I use it as a device to try and accelerate time, to convince myself that the rash is not worse than it was ten minutes ago, and that it’s not better either – if only I could do a good before/after campaign.

Some people will say it’s good to look. To make sure it’s not getting worse, but when it turns into an obsession, it’s not really about yourself anymore. For me, the selfies often reflect a darker headspace, where I think the lowest of myself and struggle to pull back. I try to read the meaning behind the pixels that focus on one area of my body, but I miss the most important part: the whole of me.

So, I try not to care. I try not to take selfies, not to even touch the rashes, to make sure I don’t become super self-aware at all times. Patience, they said. It’s getting there, but it’s still a work in progress, you see. Thank you for reading.

Mental health tip for the day

• In relation to what I’m talking about in this issue, maybe it’s time for you to take a step back from your skin. Stop touching and picking at it. Stop even looking at it or feeling it with your fingers. Just let it be. Can you do this for twenty-four hours and see what that feels like?

A thought on useful/not useful

• Clearly, taking pictures of my skin and myself all the time is not useful, so I will try to refrain from doing that. To put the phone away, but also to be conscious of when I’m about to do it.

• Noticing more instead of being on autopilot, which is what leads to me looking at the skin without even thinking about it. If I step back, even just once, maybe it will change a little bit.

What I’m reading/watching/scrolling/listening to:

• Inside out 2 — I loved it and cried, as I usually do. I think it’s such a smart movie, and I can always relate to it on so many levels. Pixar studios — amazing job as usual.

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