They say that the best way to deal with acne is to leave it alone. Picking is viable to irritate your skin and leave permanent damage. The best practice is to let it heal naturally, so that scars don’t form.
Safe to say, there has never been a point in my life where I’ve noticed acne and haven’t immediately picked at it. It’s like clockwork. In the mornings, I check with my hands, because I can’t see well in dim light without glasses. I scratch absentmindedly along my cheek as I walk to and from work and school. In class I run my fingertips along my brows. I’m feeling for the same thing every time— an unnatural lump that stings to the touch, and usually leaves a heavy throb for a few seconds after.
There’s a technique to it. Press your fingernails to the outmost ridge. Sometimes it helps to adjust the angle to favor where the clogged pore is exposed to the air. Bear down hard. It might take a second but the pressure will force out whatever’s clogging the follicle eventually. You’ll feel it give. If it’s quiet, you’ll also hear it. It can be very quick or very slow. The texture makes it vary— if it’s hard and waxy, it may take ages. It’ll hurt the whole way, but not too much. If it’s mostly pus, it’ll come out in one go as a blast of discharge. It’ll probably get on your mirror, if you’re using one. It happens very quickly— blink and you’ll miss it. Sometimes it’s watery. Sometimes there’s blood. It’s painless at first, but the ache afterward is killer.
Skin is the largest organ of the human body. Laid out flat, the skin of a single human would cover close to 1.7 square meters of ground. It’s alive and constantly growing. Skin is porous and full of holes, selectively permeable. Given enough time and pressure, it’ll integrate just about anything into itself.
They told me in health class and kid-friendly books about puberty that acne would start popping up in adolescence. It was natural, they said. “Natural”, right. No amount of reading ahead prepares you for the changes. At one point I had untouched, smooth, unscarred skin. It was unremarkable because it had never been different before. Then a switch was flipped one day and it began mutating upon itself. You don’t know to appreciate the base state of your body until it changes. I don’t mean temporarily, like when you get sick. I mean permanent changes that you don’t notice until you absentmindedly run your fingers over a crevice in your body and realize there’s hair that wasn’t there before. You’re shocked, disgusted. And then you move on. Because what can you do about it now? Your body changes irreversably every day, 330 billion cells, and it will keep changing up until and after you die.
The acne never stops, long after the health pamphlets and classes assured they would, for probably a variety of reasons. Because I don’t moisturize enough. Because I don’t use facial scrubs. Because I eat snacks with high grease and fat content after 7:00 PM. Because my sleep schedule is perennially fucked no matter how many times I reset it. My body is always leaking blood from somewhere— from the bug bites on my legs that healed ten shades darker than the surrounding flesh, the mystery scabs across my scapula that stain red flecks on the back of every t-shirt, the abscesses left after I’ve squeezed pockets of pus out of my epidermis. Whenever I brush my teeth, no matter how gently, my gums leak red into my saliva. My bedsheets are bloodstained at both ends.
I don’t feel any particular rush from reopening these wounds, largely because it’s accidental. Acne is different for some reason, maybe because it’s self-evidently the body’s response to filth. It’s our version of nacre. Instead of pearls, all we can produce is soft pockets of sebum and dead skin. Part of me always wondered how bivalves are able to create something so beautiful while the rest of us can’t. Of course, pearls are only beautiful to us. Clams and oysters create them to rid the body of grains of sand, nothing more.
Ambergris is produced in the digestive systems of sperm whales, formed to prevent indigestible parts of cephapods from puncturing the whale’s intestinal walls. It’s a gray, waxy substance that looks like a chunk ripped out of a pebbled gravel path. When it’s fresh, apparently it smells “marine and fecal”, rather, like brine and shit; over time, it oxidizes and aqcuires a sweet, earthy scent. Over history, it’s been burned as incense, flavored beverages, carried to protect from the plague, and— most famously— used as a fixative in perfumes.
In childhood, on the bedroom floor, I would sit cross-legged and watch yellow, clear fluid ooze out of my forelegs. I didn’t know that was what it was called, or why it would only sometimes emerge after the initial flow of blood stopped. But it would ooze, then slowly crystalize, and I would work the hardened lump out and leave a unbleeding, puckered gap. Then wait for it to ooze again. I laid them atop the dark, flat surface of my desk (to not lose them among the carpet, as they were rarely more than a millimeter in length) and admired them. The fruits of my labor. I felt strangely proud to have produced them, even though it was completely automatic. Tiny gems, glistening. Of course, they were worthless. I still imagined what it would be like to gather enough to create a marble-sized lump, then a fist, perhaps mold it into a pleasing shape, and presenting it to a buyer— maybe I’d tell them it was some exotic amber, a previously undiscovered stone of unknown origin. I’d see how far the fabrication could go, up until someone thought to identify it and discover that it’s congealed oil squeezed out of the body of a liar. Or maybe I’d just say the truth, just to see how they’d react. It came from me. I made this with my body. It’s mine.
Ambergris is not the only substance we extract from sperm whales— their foreheads contain a massive organ, up to 40% of their entire length, filled with a semiliquid waxy oil called spermaceti. Spermaceti, up until the decline of whaling as a practice due to the rise of petroleum, was highly valued for candles and textlies. Whalers would drag them on board, cut a hole in their heads as they still lived, and bail the stuff out by the bucket.
My head is always bleeding because my scalp continually peels, covered in neverending scabs that are absently picked away or rubbed off in my sleep; it used to be worse because it itched, constantly. I would wake up scratching. I probably scratched in my sleep. I would scratch while sitting in class, embarrassed of myself, and have to covertly sweep away the dandruff. It was automatic; I couldn’t help it. I’m scratching as I write, not even because it itches, but because of the absurd hope that this time will be when it’s all finally scraped away. A full scalp of pink new flesh instead of dead, white, grotesque flaps of skin. This time I’ll have picked all of it away and it’ll be like brand new. It never works like that, I have never truly hoped for it. I still pick.
Whiteheads, blackheads, sebaceous filaments. Everything must go. Papules, pustules, nodules. The scientific classifications convey their unpleasantness but not their vulgarity. Hair follicles. I pinch and pull at my eyebrows for loose hairs. I don’t care about making them uneven when wrenching the things out wholesale will sometimes dislodge lumps of sebum with them— two birds with one stone. I know I’ve won when there’s a glistening yellow bead quivering at the end of the strand. That’s the root itself, the seed of infection. Hair is just dead skin, too. Our bodies push it out continually because it’s dead, it doesn’t belong. 5 million follicles across the body, plucked one at a time.
A spermaceti organ contains as much as 1,900 liters of sperm oil. The whaling industries of the 17th and 18th century were developed to harvest this substance. Hundreds of men setting out into the sea, risking death, to scoop oil out of the head of a dying animal.
It starts with a hangnail. I keep my nails long mostly because I’m too lazy to trim them, but the added bonus is that it makes it easier to pop things. There are side effects— getting gunk trapped underneath them easily, accidentally puncturing skin when pressing down too hard— but it’s easier to forget about them for a while. The nails aren’t the problem, it’s the bits of skin next to them. They’re annoying. They catch on everything. They’re impossible to tear or chew off in one go. If you rip them at the wrong angle, they tear down the length of the nail and leave it raw and bleeding for hours. Many such cases.
The hangnail is on my ring finger. It sits next to the callus that formed steadily over the course of years of pencil work. I try to ignore it and succeed for at least a couple hours before giving in— it keeps catching on my shirt sleeve, sending tiny licks of irritation through the nail bed. Eventually I can’t stand it anymore and start to pick. It’s never a good idea to pick a hangnail but that has and will never stop me.
I get it halfway down the nail until it’s sticking up like a flagpole. I lick the back of my teeth in irritation. I just want the thing to be off me. It’s like a shirt tag that scratches the back of your neck, even after you’ve cut as far as you can go. Always there, just irritating you.
Delicately as I can muster, I pinch the extended flap of skin between my nails. This has the greatest chance of working if I have a tough grip on it. If not, I’m in for a quite a bit of pain.
I clench my teeth and brace for impact— then rip backwards as hard as I can.
Mistake. The skin frays gruesomely all the way down to my first knuckle. It starts bleeding immediately. It stings in the open air.
I curse under my breath. Red is already starting to bead along the tear; it’s going to bleed for fucking ever because it’s always the small, unserious wounds that ooze the most life out of you. This is going to be such a pain to bandage up. That is, if I even have any left. I’ve been making myself bleed so much by unthinkingly picking at scabs that they’ve been steadily used up. I reluctantly get up and shuffle to the bathroom.
The mirror is a site of sin and I defile it with my pus and blood. It has been christened with countless splatters and will continue to see more. I wipe away the evidence with towel cloths, and it never fully goes away.
I open the cabinet to fish out a bandage, or in lieu of that, a wad of toilet paper to staunch the flow. As I do, though, I catch myself in the mirror. Something’s wrong with my eye.
I lean closer to my reflection. Up here, you can see every terrible detail, every gaping pore, the darkened head of every larval filament not yet emerged. A wise woman once compared the string of a pimple emerging to a wriggling white worm. It’s always horrifying and viscerally satisfying to see. Get out of my body, get out, get out, get out.
My finger is still stinging. I could bandage it, but then I’d lose dexterity. I focus instead on my face, what I saw. One of the lashes on my right eye is crooked. Usually that means that it’s loose. I don’t pluck my lashes as much as my brows out of paranoia, but if one’s already on the way out, then who am I to stop it? There’s something glistening at the root, where it’s embedded into the skin.
I lean forward. Carefully, I take the blunt edge of my index fingernail and prod at it. I see it wiggle in place, like a loose tooth, but it doesn’t fully budge. It hurts a little to touch, but not as much as I think it will. A technique I am adept at by now is using the ends of my nails to grip the ends of particularly stubborn hairs and yank them directly out. Not always useful, but in here it comes in handy. I tweeze my nails around the eyelash and slowly pull taut. You’d think that you needed to rip it out quick, like a bandaid, but the trick is actually to go slow. Keep mounting the pressure up. Don’t give your imprecise, sensationless nails the opportunity to slip off of their target. Like a claw machine, you control where they go, but not if they can hold on. Unlike a claw machine, your body is not rigged against the win. All it knows is how to grow. It’s not meant to hold everything within itself. Some things are meant to be expelled, the more stubborn aberrations extracted. Go ahead. Keep pulling. Eventually, it’ll give.
One millimeter, then two, then four, then ten. It keeps going beyond the point of believability. The tangle of secretion stretches in a long, waxy rope. It begins as that dull amber color but slowly transitions to something lighter— a thin worm of detritus and ingrown hair— it loops in on itself after a while, sturdy enough that the filament doesn’t break even when my grip relaxes, and then it begins to tug further on the hollow beneath the eyelid, and I let it go where it wants. I’m still bleeding a little. It doesn’t matter. I see something beneath the distended thread that excites me more. There is more beneath the skin which awaits me.
For the longest time, we didn’t know that all the things that were happening to my body were connected. It was just unrelated phenomena. First my legs erupted into all gruesome manner of bug bites, initially from mosquitos, then my cats’ fleas. The acne started and never stopped. My scalp became a permanent scab. Patches of skin broke out into allergic hives in response to being touched by the wrong fabric, “healed” slowly in hyperpigmented patches. The worst thing, other than the itching, are the scars. They never go away. Dark ugly marks all over my back, all over my legs. It was humiliating to realize the extent of their reach. It had never bothered me when I couldn’t see them, and now whenever I remembered, it would bother me. There is no reset button to the epidermis. You get the skin you’re in when you’re born, and it’s yours until you die.
The doctors diagnosed me with dermatitis. They gave me a couple bottles of medical cream, then moved on.
By the time the end is nearly emergent, the string has continued to go for nearly half a foot. I can feel it tug on something under my eyelid— it must be attached to some internal mass.
I pull. I pull. It tugs. It tugs.
Pop.
It’s lumpen, vaguely spherical. A strange, deep color. The size of a pearl.
I dangle the lump in front of my eyes to examine it in the light. It’s slightly yielding to the touch. The long, fragile rope used to extract it detaches surprisingly easily— once it’s unfurled and free, I can lay out each component on the bathroom counter. It left an abscess in my eyelid, a circular hole that burrows deep, deep down. A pinhole white worm. How long had it sat inside me, forming? Had I ever unknowingly felt it shift against my bones?
I look at the jagged line carved down from the corner of my nailbed. Everything underneath is exposed, a raw red slice of dermis winking out from the open wound. At some point, it did stop bleeding. It no longer hurts, but even if it did, it wouldn’t matter. I tab my thumb against the dangling hangnail. I wonder how many worms I would be able to find underneath here.
Well, there are nine nails to go.
Since childhood I have fantasized about emerging from myself like a chrysalis. It would be nice to leave this deficient body behind. Always malfunctioning in little ways, not enough to fully break down, not enough to cause too much concern. When snakes and tarantulas shed, it’s not only physically relieving, it’s needed for survival— they’re strangled by their own skin if trapped inside too long. That’s how it feels. I wanted to scratch and scratch and scratch all those dead skin cells away until they came off in a great grey mass and from underneath my new skin would emerge, smooth and raw and beautiful. I should have realized the journey wouldn’t be so clean-cut.
There is never a time where your body ceases recreating itself. Each cell has instructions, genetic code, to keep dividing and cloning. It’ll keep going even when it’s actively detrimental. I wish a lot of the time that my body would simply stop, but I know my organ systems are taken for granted. I can’t mechanically digest my own food, can’t control the beating of my heart or the filtering of oxygen through it.
What I can control is the outside, and how much I prune away.
Parallel rows of eyelashes lie side by side like little soldiers. A wad of hair plucked from the scalp sits in the sink. Old scabs clinging to the ends. There are red and brown spatters all over the bathroom ceramic. Nothing alarming, just small little dots. Not all evidence can be wiped away. Part of me wishes that the evidence on my face wouldn’t go away. There are so many holes now. My skin is a lotus root. One step closer to Nirvana. Or Hell, whichever comes first.
At the center of it all, the lump grows. Human nacre, almost the size of a fist. I’ve never been more proud. I feel invigorated. I want to keep making it bigger.
The bounty makes me greedy, so I keep scouring. There is yet more to plunder. This time I search the surface above my lips, the philtrum, where so many stubborn dots of sebum reside. It hurts a lot more in this area, actually. Let it not be said prolonged exposure ever dulls the pain. It doesn’t. The body can’t accept that into its homeostasis, even if it gets easier. Oh well. Sacrifices have to be made.
I pluck and pluck away, careful not to strip away the layer of peach fuzz labeled “hirsute” by all the medical sites because honestly that’s the one part of my face that I enjoy— natural fur I don’t have to DIY into existence with hormones. That’s one of the considerations of HRT, actually, that makes me both hesitant and intrigued. The possibility of more acne. More grease. More changes. More growing. More shifting. All the dead skin on my lips is chewed off. Would a little injection cause my efforts to be for naught? Would it be worth it then? Could this be considered a gender-affirming project? Maybe. In the end, I don’t necessarily want to look like a man. I want to look like nothing.
But eventually there are no follicles to be plucked, no more pockets of sebum to be squeezed, no more sebaceous glands to be picked out. There’s only so much output the body can give in a day. That’s the frustrating bit— it never stops. I’ll go to sleep tonight and my skin will do its best to repair itself, and the sebacous glands will overproduce, and the pores will get clogged, and no matter how many times I scour the flesh clean away it’ll happen over and over and over again. While the routine itself has become a strange comfort, it all underlies a prevailing fury. Can’t the body just listen for once? Can’t I have what I want for once? Can’t I perform an action and have it leave a permanent mark?
Pop.
I look down and realize my fingernail has hyperextended out of its bed.
It’s hardly hanging on. Blood oozes from the broken cuticles. I stare in dazed fascination. I’ve broken nails before, nearly knocked the ones on my toes clean off— but this is new. I flex the muscles in my pointer finger, gritting through the pain, and watch as the skin begins to slough, raw pink muscle emerging as if from a chrysalis, pushing farther and farther until the new digit extends far longer than any of the accompanying ones. After a while, it stops hurting. It glistens under the bathroom light like brand new.
I understand what I need to do now. I start pushing. Squeezing. I always thought it would be a process of cutting from outside in— there is some assistance I have to lend myself in the form of nail-trimming scissors— but it’s really the other way around. My new flesh was inside the entire time, I realize, growing slowly, and I had never known. Too big to be contained by my current skin, bleeding and oozing from the pores that trapped it. I know better now. I’m not going to be trapped any longer. Ulna and radius, tibia and fibula. They all emerge with wet, viscous sounds. Teeth sliding out with ease to reveal new, longer ones underneath. My heart and lungs scream. They know primally what is to come. Closer and closer to freedom with every inch.
1.7 square meters of skin covers the bathroom floor as my new flesh finally emerged, a sagging mass of rotting skin and fat. But it's all nacre now. Now, it’ll do something useful. Be something beautiful.
I look in the mirror. Every vestige of my epidermis has been picked clean. I can see every muscle fiber and connective tissue lacing my bones together, the organic thread that keeps my jaw attached to my skull. My bulging eyes. My gleaming teeth.
No more skin in sight.
I smile.