zits

[breakingnews]

Anyone here suffer (or has suffered) from adult acne?

I know zits are a fact of life, but being in my mid-20s, I find it downright embarassing. I've grown really self-conscious about my appearance, to the point where some days I don't like leaving the house.

My skin was pretty normal through my teens - just the occasional pimple here and there, the usual growing pains. It became slightly worse after college, not so much in volume, but in frequency. Still, it was manageable and I didn't let it bother me. Then, when I landed in Taiwan last summer, my face just exploded. The areas along my jawbones are horrendous, my neck (the area between my chin and adam's apple) looks like a mogul run on a ski slope, and I can't remember a day without at least one fat bump on my eyebrow. The centers of my cheeks now have some moderate scarring from the whole affair.

Truthfully my personality is such that I don't let my acne bother me too much. I get on with my life, working, dating and drinking, and fortunately I haven't had any bad encounters over my zit situation. What troubles me, however, is how sudden the outbreak was. Even more frustrating is how helpless I feel when I take every precaution possible, yet still wake up with a fresh batch of gleaming whiteheads across my face.

Finally I got my hands on some medication that has helped tremendously. I went through several months of different cleansers and zit creams before a doctor prescribed liquid benzoyl-peroxide, which has cut back the severity and duration of infections. Nightly use of Differin has kept those little red warning bumps from erupting into full-blown catastrophes. Yesterday was the first day in about seven months - no exaggeration - that I didn't have at least one new zit upon waking up.

Still, I've got a ways to go. My skin isn't nearly as bad as some that I have seen, but it's still splotchy and wretched-looking. There's still hope yet.