Word Vomit
I'm sitting on my parents' unwanted furniture, in a room I'm sure they don’t want me in, binge watching Gossip Girl. Two hours ago I was purging Pad Thai, thus breaking my one year "no bulimia" streak. The longest run I've had since I lived on the streets.
One hour ago, I was hating myself for literally flushing a year’s worth of progress down the toilet while I set to work repairing the damage done, starting with my teeth. After spitting blood into the bathroom sink (following a particularly rough encounter with my Frankensteined waterpick) and a good scrubbing that may have actually cut close to the dentist recommended time, I moved onto my skin.
I pulled the medical tape off of my eyebrow piercing to check its progress. I thought it was rejecting, but after a haphazard excavation with a pimple popping tool I discovered it was just an ingrown eyebrow hair caught at the wrong place, at the wrong time.
I washed my skin with my soap based cleanser and cursed myself for forgetting to do the oil based cleanser first. I promised myself that I wouldn't forget again the last time I forgot again, dammit! I decided a gentle exfoliant would make up for it and ploughed away at any dead outer layer of skin that might be lingering about. After patting dry, dunked my fingers into the aluminum cup containing the DIY saline solution I made this morning and drenched my healing piercing. It stung a little which either means it's working or I fucked up the measurements.
After taping it up, I covered my teeth with whitening paste and grabbed one of the Korean sheet masks I bought for cheap at Bezo's Emporium of Corruption. This one claimed to be green tea flavoured and boasted "firming" "moisturizering" and "health" as the qualities I would thus inherit from it in 15 minutes' time. I looked in the mirror, met my bloodshot eyes and decided that.. it was my lips.
Yes, my lips are the problem. It wasn't like last week when the redness of my chin was the problem, or a month ago when the bags under my eyes were the problem. It's also not the bipolar-borderline personality disorder-autism-ADHD combo shot that every mental health professional I’ve met claims is the problem either.
No, this time it was different. If I fixed my lips, perpetually dry and discoloured (likely due to a nicotine addiction that has spanned nearly two decades), things would really start changing for me. So I got to researching, as I always do. I had to do a sugar scrub with a little oil, stat. I scrubbed thoroughly but lightly until my lips felt smooth and light reflected off of them. I patted them dry and smothered them with hyaluronic acid. I let that set in and then sealed the deal with petrolatum jelly. I built a fantasy cart of every lip care product a Reddit user has ever vouched for until I was priced out from clicking "buy", and set to work writing this.
I've been kicking this idea around for a while, a skincare blog built by someone who is a self-destructive agent of chaos. Something that was real, decidedly Naturally Unintelligent, something that is full of flaws and philosophy and contradiction and poetry. Something authentic and kind of helpful and completely against the world of disconnectivity that we've come to expect. So, here it is, Skincare for Scumbags. Let's see if this isn't just another thing to add to my roster of things that I start and never finish.
Xoxo, A