Adult Acne at the Slow Apocalypse

Our lead winter '24 essay

Editor’s note: The following essay appears in our winter ‘23-’24 quarterly, which will be published in full later in January. Print copies are still available for pre-order here. Read this essay on the website here.

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Adult Acne at the Slow Apocalypse

By Elizabeth Bastian

“I am washing my face before bed while a country is on fire.
It feels dumb to wash my face, and dumb not to.
It has never been this way, and it has always been this way.”
–Mari Andrew, January 2020

Even before the pandemic, as I went through my twice-daily skincare routine, I often found myself wondering what would happen in the war-ravaged future I believed I would live to see. I stared at myself in the mirror, fearing the day I would no longer have ready access to face wash, deodorant, lotion, mascara, etc.; when my modern-consumer daily necessities would become unattainable, or simply cease to exist. So when COVID arrived, I felt somewhat prepared for resiliency and sacrifice.

I approached early lockdown with an ebullient sense of optimism, ready to cheer on my community through the month-ish of confinement. I was convinced this would be a blip, a brief nap in the year, and we would all be celebrating my May birthday with a roaring party.

Instead, as the pandemic dragged on, I slowly let go of the trappings of everyday life that showed the world who I was. I stopped picking out earrings to wear every morning. I stopped wearing make-up. I stopped wearing my wedding ring because I was washing my hands so much I didn’t want to damage it. Eventually, I stopped wearing anything but workout clothes and pajamas, as I went from bed to the desk to the couch and back again. I went 10 days without washing my hair, more than once. On days when I felt especially fearful of catching a deadly respiratory virus (or worse, inadvertently passing it on to my elderly neighbors), I didn’t even leave the apartment. ^¹

But somehow, I continued to wash my face. Once in the morning, once at night. That and brushing my teeth were the only pillars of maintenance that I managed to hold on to. It felt, as Mari said, dumb. Supremely dumb. But I still did it. It gave me something to lean on; my world may be crumbling, but at least I still had “nice skin.”

Until the protagonist of my skincare routine unexpectedly disappeared.

Clean & Clear Complete Acne Control with 10% benzoyl peroxide has been a steady constant in my life and is one of the few consumer products I willingly shill for because it works. But for nearly 3 years now, I cannot find this face wash in any local stores or national online retailers. In an age where I can get anything delivered to my front door whenever I want, it has been especially jarring to see only empty shelves or “out of stock” listings for something I have easily purchased for over a decade.² 

It’s here, I told myself as I stared at the empty pharmacy shelves. Our biggest fear came true. The world as we know it is ending, and I will be ugly soon.

The loss, and its accompanying apprehension, represented what Columbia sociologists Ryan Hagen & Denise Milstein call COVID’s “socio-material crisis: a breakdown in the predictability of the material world around you.” This breakdown was compounded by nearly everyone  experiencing their own “subtle identity crisis.”  Who were we when we were alone, unmoored, and nakedly vulnerable? 

The adult acne I feared never arrived; what I got instead was super-charged anxiety and unforeseen major depression. 

An overachieving perfectionist people-pleaser by nature, anxiety and I go way back. In its worst instances, my anxiety feels like I am tied to the front of a high-speed train, where all I can do is hold on for dear life and scream and pray to some higher power that I don’t die. Despite the horrors of that feeling, I have come to realize and accept that anxious thoughts come from a place of self-love and protection. A recovering Catholic, I am a seeker of signs, constantly observing my environment for omens from the universe on what my future holds³. I look for signs because I want to insulate myself from future imagined pain. I am trying to look out for myself.

There is no rational explanation for that instinct, either — there is nothing specific I can point to from my past and confidently brand as my anxiety origin story. I was raised in an established middle-class suburb of Detroit, Michigan, the eldest & only daughter of four kids by loving parents who are still together. I grew up believing sinners went to hell and good people went to heaven, America was the best country in the world, cops only arrested bad guys, racism was over thanks to Martin Luther King Jr., we could reduce/reuse/recycle our way out of pollution, and hard work would win me the life I dreamed of. I knew embarrassing little of society’s ills and global atrocities. 

Naive though I was, I loved reading. Books fueled my active imagination, showed me different worlds and ways of being; and when I found I had a soft spot for dystopian fiction, curiosity about what my life would be like in a post-apocalypse landscape bloomed. I would run mental worse-case-scenario drills, accruing as much knowledge as I could, because (my anxiety tells me) preparation will better my ability to survive. I saw my anxiety as a friend, a coach and a motivator, one whose unorthodox methods pushed me to be my best self.

Depression, however, is a newer beast in my mental menagerie. 

We first met in graduate school nearly a decade ago, when one Saturday I was cooking dinner on my tiny gas stove and suddenly found myself crumpling, crying on my kitchen floor for no discernible reason, and thought, “hmm, that’s strange.” It was Fall 2014 and I was 22, a few months after I moved out of my parent’s house to central Illinois to study urban planning in graduate school. I was convinced (and on my best days, remain so) that I could make the world a better place by designing transportation systems for people, not cars.  Then, I spent my orientation week that August sweating in a La Quinta lobby eating rubbery waffles and watching videos of Mike Brown get shot with his hands up.  I felt overwhelmed and underprepared for existential stressors I had never experienced, compounded by the inherently stressful experience of being in grad school.

So, I made a plan. I called my mom and went to the campus health clinic and talked to a psychiatrist who put me on a low-dose SSRI. After I graduated, I decided that the sources of my depression were surely behind me, and I stopped taking my meds without consulting anyone. Months later, Trump was elected. As the darkness of winter crept in at the end of 2016, I encountered sources of existential depression I could not previously fathom.

All that to say — even before COVID, I often wondered how one could be cognizant of current events and not be depressed.

2020, then, was a different kind of depressive episode. Tried and true coping mechanisms that had gotten me through previous bouts — time with loved ones, travel, concerts, even going into work (bleh) — were not only unavailable but unsafe. I couldn’t imagine a future where I would ever feel comfortable doing things I once loved. “In depression,” says Andrew Solomon in The Noonday Demon, “all that is happening in the present is the anticipation of pain in the future, and the present qua present no longer exists at all.” 

I barely remember January and February 2021; perhaps because they looked much the same as the previous 10 months before them: sharing a 700 square feet, one-bedroom apartment with my partner & two cats. There were some notable events. We rang in my 28th birthday that May with a Zoom talent show. In September, wildfire smoke sent the air quality into extremely hazardous territory, the sky a sickly chartreuse, and we huddled around our one box fan with a HEPA filter duct-taped to the back because that was better than nothing. In November, I drank too much red wine during election night and cried so hard from stress I made myself sick. Nearly a week later, my neighbor and I banged pots and pans on her balcony and screamed BIDEN WON, and I felt a sliver of hope that maybe things would start getting better. In December, I spent almost two grand on Christmas presents, plus countless hours crafting party boxes and paper garlands and ornaments, not knowing what else to do with myself. But then the holidays passed, and there was a coup(ish?), and vaccines still weren’t readily available, and I had nothing left to distract myself. So I gave up entirely. I wouldn’t have eaten food if my partner hadn’t cooked and put plates in front of me because I was never hungry and everything tasted like sand. I remember booking a rental home on the Hood Canal because, as I told my partner, “I needed new walls to stare at.” I took a self-portrait in the mirror of that cabin on the river. Looking at it now, all I see is a ghost.

I believed how I felt in that moment would go on, forever, because everything did keep getting worse. I did not want to keep living that painful existence and believed it impossible that I would ever feel better. I lost all hope for the future.

The reason I hadn’t washed my clothes or my hair was because it seemed so silly.
I saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright, white boxes, and separating one box from another was sleep, like a black shade. Only for me, the long perspective of shades that set off one box from the next had suddenly snapped up, and I could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white, broad, infinitely desolate avenue.
It seemed silly to wash one day when I would only have to wash again the next.
It made me tired just to think of it.
I wanted to do everything once and for all and be through with it.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Depression and anxiety were (are) what I considered rational reactions to an irrational and chaotic world. Like Solomon, I believed my depression was “both a rational state and an incurable state.” I knew I was “crazy,” but I felt serenely sane — how could one look at the world around them and not want to stand in traffic and scream about injustice instead of sending work emails? 

I was left with a Hobson’s choice: take medication to be able to function in a culture and society I did not want to belong to, or else feel like half a person for the rest of my life — with a third, unspoken, ideated choice hiding in the back of my mind.

I chose medication, and I do not regret that choice. I am grateful I had the resources to make that choice — not everyone is so lucky. But I hate that my hand was forced. 

“Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.
They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car.
They live by symbols. They read meaning into the barrage of spam on the unused computer, the delete key that stops working, the imagined abandonment in the decision to replace it. The voice on my answering machine was still John’s. The fact that it was his in the first place was arbitrary, having to do with who was around on the day the answering machine last needed programming, but if I needed to retape it now I would do so with a sense of betrayal. One day when I was talking on the telephone in his office I mindlessly turned the pages of the dictionary that he had always left open on the table by the desk. When I realized what I had done I was stricken: what word had he last looked up, what had he been thinking? By turning the pages had I lost the message? Or had the message been lost before I touched the dictionary? Had I refused to hear the message?
I tell you that I shall not live two days, Gawain said.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

As I consider the version of myself that existed before March 2020, I cannot help but wonder — were there signs? Were there messages I missed that life as I knew it was about to change forever, that a paradigm-shifting disease and incomprehensible levels of death were around the corner?

This line of thinking is fruitless. 

Some days, I still feel as though I am one school shooting away from breaking into a million jagged pieces. I am tired of adjusting. I am tired of compromising. I am tired of carrying the weight of the burning anger that I feel over the world my and younger generations have been handed. I am tired of feeling powerless, of anxiously scanning headlines on Google News Top Stories last thing before I go to bed and first thing when I wake up. 

Because I was right to look for signs. I was right to be vigilant. My anxiety was right to prepare me. 

But in the end, it didn’t help me.

Perhaps, I realize as I write this, it was never signs of apocalypse and global destruction I searched for; it was signs of my own destruction. I did my best to guard my mental health and ability to adapt, to cope, to care. 

It was not enough once. 

Will it be enough again?

As I write this on March 27, 2023, 1,114,970 Americans have died from COVID-19. That’s nearly equivalent to the entire population of Dallas, Texas – the ninth largest city in the US – gone. 2,060 Americans died last week from COVID-19. The pandemic is not over; and yet, no one wants to talk about it. I get it — remembering feels like touching a hot stove with bare fingers. It’s too painful. It feels like too much. I don’t want to revisit it. But conversely, it feels insane that we as a society are cool with pretending the last three years didn’t happen. I can never go back to “normal,” and am perplexed by how many people are actively pursuing ignorance.

“We are a society of anecdotes without a narrative,” says Jon Mooallem in his recent New York Times retrospective on 2020. “The only way to understand what happened, and what’s still happening, is to acknowledge that it depends on whom you ask.”

I have found much solace in the practice of radical imagination, a concept I came across in engaging with climate justice and prison abolition movements. In the words of the Center for Story-Based Strategy: 

“Radical imagination is our antidote. It is finding joy in creative connection and playing a game whose rules we wrote ourselves. We practice radical imagination when we reclaim our childhood capacity to disentangle our imaginations from the status quo, and re-entangle them with our friends, loved ones, and communities— a rewiring of ourselves to each other.”

Radical imagination does not ask for preparation or control. It does not require amassing an internal library of knowledge to draw on. Instead, it asks for play. It reaches for my childhood tendency towards hyperactive imagination and pushes it into a place of joy and creativity rather than its default nihilistic gloom. 

I love thinking of a metaphorical rewiring of my life, forging stronger connections with the people around me, weaving a safety net that will catch us all. As I weave, I am doing my best to let joy and curiosity be my guides, the twin beasts pulling the chariot.

I read A Psalm for The Wild Built. I Venmo $10 to friends just because. I try to make a habit of Mutual Aid Monday donations. I am making an effort to learn my neighbor’s names, say hello when I see them outside, and pass on my number in case they ever need anything. I am forming intentional communities, in the physical world and the online world and all the worlds in-between. I am looking to black women and other women of color for guidance, who have been doing this work for ages.

I am trying to find the positives in living through these last few years. I would never have been able to prioritize the things above, to even name them, before. I worried how the impacts of my actions were too small to make a difference. I know now it is the acting itself that counts.

I am practicing forgiveness and acceptance. I am focusing on what I can control. I am trying to be the change I wish to see in the world, and accepting there is only so much I can change.

I am looking at the person I was before, and the person I am now, and deciding what to take with me forward and what I should leave behind. It’s a slow process, and there is real grief for the lives not lived. 

I move slower now, but I move with intention, supported by loved ones who have helped me get here.

Because the alternative means a half-life, a life led by guilt and fear and self-loathing. I cannot fight for a future burdened by these feelings. I tried. I tried. Washing my face, brushing my teeth — the dumb things I do every day — are an investment in my future self. Self-care is my shield against that future anticipated pain. It is an act of hope, that I will be here tomorrow to build a better world.

As a former therapist reminded me over and over again, I am no good to anyone when I am hurting. In other words, if I really want to help other people, I need to take care of myself. Secure my own oxygen mask first. I can’t keep combing through the past, trying to make meaning out of a nonsense existence. I must choose to focus on a future I can only dream of, so that I can be, as bestselling author & anti-racism educator Layla Saad teaches, a good ancestor.

It’s hard. Some days feel heavy and hopeless. But most days are okay. 

Some are breathtakingly beautiful. And it’s those that I live for.

Mari Andrews agrees: “I choose to do the things that I may think are too insignificant to matter, because sometimes protesting is an act of grieving and small choices towards energy keep me from despair.”

It took me almost three years of grieving to get here. I stand firm that love – for ourselves, for others, for our community and our planet – is the best, the only way we can continue to survive.

Acne and all.

Elizabeth Bastian is a writer, editor, & artist based in the Pacific Northwest. She compulsively touches every natural body of water she encounters, and writes a bi-weekly newsletter called Paraphrasing.

1.  These things may seem insignificant, ridiculous – who cares that I stopped wearing jewelry? But remember who you were before 2020; and remember how it felt for them to experience that horrible spring. 

2. Ever a problem solver, I went on Sephora’s website and bought a 4-ounce bottle of face wash with 10% benzoyl peroxide for 5x what my usual face wash cost, partly because I was in a panic and partly because that seems like something someone who is 30 and has a somewhat-disposable income does. You know, the kind of income where you live a comfortable life in a major metropolitan area that you can miraculously still afford to live in, but it’s definitely not perfect, and you can’t really spend more than $400 on something without wanting to throw up; so, you fill the void of despair over your lack of financial freedom with mid-priced cosmetic concoctions under the guise of “treating yourself.” Anyways, despite a questionable transition period, it worked, and I still use it

3. I am too much of a skeptic to fully believe in fate or predetermination; but I foster a hope that I will someday be proven wrong. God, if you are real and are reading this – DMs are open.