There is a particular irony in being a surgeon who spent her teenage years — and, if we’re honest, plenty of her adult ones — staring at her own reflection wondering why her skin wouldn’t cooperate.
I have worked in operating rooms surrounded by instruments designed to repair, reconstruct and restore.
And for the longest time, I couldn’t seem to figure out my own face.
I want to write about that honestly.
Because I think the polished version of a doctor’s life — the version where we always seem to have everything figured out — does a disservice to the people who trust us with their own skin, their insecurities and their own on-and-off battles.
The Beginning
Mine started the way it does for so many people.
Quietly at first.
Then, somewhere in the middle of adolescence, not quietly at all.
And like many teenagers, I heard some version of:
“Don’t worry. It’ll go away when you’re older.”
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
For me, acne became cyclical.
My skin could be clear for months and then, seemingly without warning, flare again.
And somehow a few millimetres of inflammation on my face could take an astonishing amount of confidence with it.
Acne Is Rarely Just About Skin
I remember specific days — important ones — when I chose what to wear, how to angle my face in a photograph, or whether I felt like going out at all based entirely on what my skin was doing that week.
Looking back, that is a strange amount of power to give something so small.
But when you are living through it, it does not feel small.
Acne has a way of quietly attaching itself to your sense of self.
You begin asking:
Why is this happening again?
What did I do wrong?
Why does everyone else seem to have clear skin?
Eventually I understood something that no textbook had really taught me:
My skin was not a reflection of my discipline, cleanliness or worth.
It was skin.
Complicated, hormonal, genetic, inflammatory and occasionally unpredictable skin.
The Turning Point Wasn’t a Miracle Product
There wasn’t one dramatic treatment that suddenly made everything perfect.
For me, the change was much less exciting.
Consistency.
I stopped treating every flare as an emergency.
I stopped expecting one new product to fix everything in a week.
And I stopped punishing my skin every time it misbehaved.
Instead, I learnt to approach it the way I would want a patient to approach theirs: patiently, systematically and with realistic expectations.
That meant sticking with professional advice instead of constantly product-hopping.
It meant paying attention to patterns in my own life.
For me, periods of greater stress and poor sleep often seemed to coincide with worse flares.
And perhaps most importantly, it meant accepting something that took me years to understand:
“On and off” might simply be part of my skin’s story.
That did not mean I had failed.
What Helped, Eventually
There was no single answer, but a few things made a real difference for me:
- Staying with professional care instead of changing products every time patience ran thin
- Learning how my own skin behaved over time
- Paying attention to the patterns that seemed to accompany my flares
- Accepting that recurrence did not mean I was doing everything wrong
- Letting go of the idea that perfectly clear skin was a prerequisite for confidence
That last one may have mattered more than I realised.
The Lesson That Had Nothing to Do With Acne
At some point, I stopped waiting for perfectly clear skin before allowing myself to feel confident.
Because there will always be photographs.
Important meetings.
Weddings.
Holidays.
Ordinary Tuesdays.
And if we postpone confidence until every imperfection disappears, we can spend an extraordinary amount of life waiting.
I still care for my skin.
I still treat it.
I still have days when it humbles me.
“I’ve just stopped letting it decide what kind of day I’m allowed to have.”
Why I’m Telling You This
Because I think there is real value in a surgeon admitting:
I didn’t always have clear skin.
I don’t always have perfectly clear skin now.
And I understand what it feels like when something visible begins affecting something much deeper.
So if you’re reading this during a flare, examining your face much more closely than anyone else ever will and wondering what you did wrong, remember this:
You may not have done anything wrong.
Acne can persist.
It can recur.
It can change through different stages of life.
It deserves proper assessment and appropriate treatment.
But it does not deserve ownership of your confidence.
My skin still has its seasons.
I’ve simply learnt not to let every season define me.