Coping with Acne - Self-Esteem

My parents showed me that being smart was something that I could be proud of. I may not have been the prettiest girl in the class but my mom showed me I could compete with any girl with my brains. So instead of resorting to retreating to deal with my acne, I became a part of the nerd crowd in high school. In the nerd crowd, there were people who too had acne, had no sense of fashion, was disproportionate, or was a loner, but was smarter than most.

What I learned was that my self-esteem didn't have to built on what I looked like, I could place my self-esteem and pride in knowing that I was smart. Wow, what a wonderful gift my parents gave me! My mom may not have bought me makeup to hide my acne, may not have understood all of my concerns about having acne, didn't know which products to buy for me, but she did give me the gift of knowing that I was a smart young lady! That gift has brought me to where I am today: a successful attorney, songwriter, entrepreneur, writer, singer, etc.

Thedy B

Coping with Acne - Movies

TV had a big impact on me as a teenager. I watched a lot of music videos! I loved music and loved to dance and love to watch my favorite actor or singer perform. Movies had a big impact on me. Some of the top movies that I remember loving as a teenager were:


1. My favorite movie growing up was Sixteen Candles. That movie made me cry over and over as I could relate. It made me happy: The odd girl getting the cool guy. The underdog winning. How great is that! It made me wanna be like the main character in the movie because I too wanted to say who cares that I'm different. (In fact, I think I may rent that movie just so I can see if I still have the same reactions to it).


2. Revenge of the Nerds - as I said in my prior post, I joined the nerd crowd in school. So this movie really had a good impact on me. It just reinforced in me that the underdog could win. It reinforced in me that there were cruel individuals who would pick on you just because you were different or had a medical condition. So the concept behind this movie: Taking revenge on those cruel individuals was just added validation that I wasn't alone.


3. The Breakfast Club - again this was added fuel to helping me cope with having acne. Who knew that watching a few films could help me cope when I retreated.


4. Fuerris Bueller's Day Off - Man, I can't believe how many times I watched that movie but it made me laugh. Again, I could relate to wanting a day off from school when my acne was particularly severe. Unfortunately, no doctor was going to give me a don't-go-to-school-til-your-acne-is-gone note so watching Fuerris Bueller fake his way out of school for a day was great!


5. Fame - oh my God! I don't know how many times I watched that movie. Since I wanted to dance and perform, I watched this movie over and over. I loved Debbie Allen's character. I wanted to move like those students in the movie. I wanted to be those students. I would dance in the mirror with my comb or brush in my hand and try to emulate those actors. I love that movie.


I know there are plenty more movies. Those are just my top five.

Coping with Acne - Scrubbing

As a teenager with acne, I couldn't wear make up until I was 16 according to my mom's rules. So, as I mentioned in my last blog, as a teenager, I coped with having acne by picking at my pimples, which made it worse.

So I think I next resorted to scrubbing my skin. As a teenager, I didn't know what was causing the acne. I thought perhaps my skin was dirty. My skin was oily in parts and dry in others. I didn't realize at the time that I had combination skin. I couldn't convince my mom to buy makeup for me. I wasn't successful either at convincing my mom to buy me special cleansers either for my face. She wouldn't buy cleansers for combination skin or cleansers designed for acne. She thought that the acne would eventually just go away, and thought there was really nothing that could be done for the acne. So she would just tell me to use regular old soap.


The only thing that I was able to convince her to buy me was fragrance free soap. So I remember as teenager with acne, that my first method of "treating" my skin was using fragrance free soap. Particularly, I used Dove that was fragrance free. I don't know what it was about using Dove, but I loved using it. Maybe in my mind, as a teenager, I thought Dove was my "cure" but I used that soap religiously. I really wanted it to work.

So I scrubbed my skin with it. Big mistake! Scrubbing my skin was again one of the worse things I could do for my acne. Dove did make my skin clean and fresh but scrubbing with it was not the right thing for my acne prone skin. So this too prove to be the wrong coping method for dealing with acne.

Acne as a teen

As a young girl, I was so looking forward to "growing up." I couldn't wait until I fully developed and looked like the other girls. Well I did grow up. But I didn't like what started happening to my body as I did grow. For one, I was typically one of the tallest girls in the classroom. So I was constantly teased for being tall. And because I was tall, I couldn't hide in the background so that people couldn't see me. Secondly, I didn't develop proportionately. And three: When the kids saw and noticed me, they, like everyone else, saw my skin.

I don't remember when I saw my first pimple. The color of my skin is light brown so pimples show up fairly prominently. In the winter when I don't tan as much, my skin is even lighter. So the acne was even more visible. As the acne grew from one bump to multiple bumps, from just one spot on my face to covering my face, I began to have self-esteem, self-image, and self-loathing issues. As you'll see in my upcoming blogs, I tried all kinds of things as a teenager to help me cope with having acne. A few non-conventional methods of coping with acne actually helped. Some typical ways did not help me cope with having acne. Keep reading for more details.

Thedy B

Coping with Acne - Retreating

My last resort of coping with acne was to retreat. I just simply decided that I didn't want to be around people. Kids made fun of me. I was convinced that until my skin cleared up, no boy was going to like me. And I really wanted to be liked. I wanted the attention that the other girls without acne seemed to get. I wanted to feel and look pretty. I wanted to fit in and be accepted.

Instead, I felt like a misfit. I felt like I didn't belong. So I retreated. Every now and then, I'd meet a friend along the way who would accept me just as I was. Most of those kids were labelled misfits too. So like essentially every high school in the world, you had your cool crowd, your nerd crowd, your athletic crowd, your rebellious crowd, and your loners.



At first, I was a loner. I retreated. I became an introvert. I stayed in my room a lot. I did things like write which helped me retreat and stay introverted. But like I said earlier, I was simply too tall to "hide." So retreating as a way to cope with acne didn't work either.

But retreating ain't so bad. I decided to write. I wrote in my journal a lot. I wrote poetry and songs to would-be boy friends. I read a lot! Guess retreating and reading paid off, I'm a songwriter and an attorney now. So retreating ain't so bad after all.

Advice for parents of teenagers with acne

If you have a teenager that is suffering from acne, I'd suggest helping them cope with this problem by:

1. First, if your teenager starts worrying about a pimple, acknowledge that having a pimple is a problem. Don't make the situation larger than it is but also don't minimize it and make them feel as if it's nothing. As a teenager, their looks are major on the priority list. You want to help them? Help them find self-esteem by finding additional sources of where they can place their self-esteem besides their looks. Yet acknowledge that their looks are important.

2. Help them find better ways to cope with having acne than the ways that I've been mentioning in previous posts.