The first breakout I had was in fourth grade, and I will never forget that day. I had a nice big whitehead right on my nose and had no idea what it was. Before school, I put my mom’s Clinique foundation on, but it didn’t do anything. I resorted to what I thought was fool proof: cut the sticky end off of a Band-Aid and put it over it. I thought no one would notice.

I was wrong.

Almost immediately I was apprehended by classmates making fun of me for a Band-Aid on my nose to cover something that was terrifying to me. I ran to the bathroom and cried in the mirror and popped it. It went away, my nose was red, my eyes were red and I went back to class.

Fast forward to seventh grade, where my skin was now so bad that I had been through three dermatologists. Creams, pills, scrubs, everything under the sun was given to me and nothing worked, but made my skin worse. My skin was so oily that a boy came up to me in the hallway and asked me if I put Vaseline on my face in the morning to get it that shiny. I remember that almost ten years later. Nothing was working. I was getting tormented in school for my skin because no one else had skin like that at age 11. I had gone on a face cream that essentially gave me chemical burns on my chin and I looked like a marionette puppet. I remember crying to my mom and being terrified to go to school. I couldn't practice with my basketball teams because the sweat made my skin feel like it was on fire. I skipped two days.

At this point, I had gone into full blown anxiety about school and depression over how I was being treated. I had panic attacks every day from sixth grade until my freshman year of college. That’s eight years. I hated going to school, I hated being bullied, I hated my skin and overwhelmingly hated myself.

The worst part of it was people considered me to be a ‘pretty person’ with bad skin, which is almost like an oxymoron. No famous people who are considered pretty had skin like I did, so I didn’t think I was pretty. I hated my face, my hair, my body. Everyone who had bullied me ingrained into my head that I wasn’t pretty and was nothing but acne and scars. Waking up every single day and hating what you see back at you in the mirror is one of the worst feelings in the world. I was stuck.

From seventh grade to my senior year, I was seeing no hope in my skin. Each year, I progressively looked worse when it came to school. I stopped caring what I looked like because nothing I did could cover my skin. I stopped wearing makeup, started dressing like a slob and became overly depressed. I would wake up, go to school, not eat all day, come home, sleep for four hours, eat dinner and go back to bed. Rinse and repeat. I dropped a lot of weight and was so withdrawn that I became emotionless. I became numb, and that is the most terrifying feeling in the world.

Senior year, my dermatologist gave me hope. A magical pill called Isotrentoin, commonly known as Accutane, was brought up. At first I didn’t go for it because it is labeled a “black-box drug”. The drug was originally used for chemotherapy, but then women were giving birth to babies with severe birth defects. A few years later, the FDA had to include an insert into the box that showed the birth defects of children born while their mothers were on Accutane. Think of the movie “Coneheads”, except in real life, and your baby. Another severe side effect was Crohn’s disease, so the drug basically destroys people’s intestines. And then there was the side effect that made me shy away at first: severe suicidal tendencies. Accutane fluctuates hormones in some people, and those hormones can make people become severely depressed and kill themselves. Why would I want a drug that would make me more susceptible to something I was so familiar with?

A few months went by and I was getting worse. My cheeks were essentially a purple blob. It hurt to sleep and makeup wasn’t covering anything. Sweat would make my face burn and the scars were horrible. I felt like a shell of the person I once was.

I had no other choice but to poison my body.

Before I started Accutane, I had to have two months of blood work done to make sure I wasn’t pregnant and sign a form that I would use two forms of contraceptive if I was being sexually active. I had to fill out a book of information and read everything to know every single side effect that the drug could have on me and basically sign that the company was not responsible for anything that happens to me on the pill. Every month for the next six months, I would need to have blood work done to check that I was still not pregnant and that my liver wasn’t failing, because that’s something Accutane does. I couldn’t donate blood for a month (not that I do that anyway) and had to use Vaseline for lip balm because my lips would be as dry as the Sahara. Did I mention that your bones can calcify and you can have extreme joint pain?

So, in January 2014 I started my six-month round of face chemo. The first morning after taking it, I woke up and felt like I had just been crushed by a gorilla. Every single bone in my body ached. It hurt to move. I was “playing” basketball for my high school - essentially a glorified bench rider - and couldn’t practice that day because it hurt to breathe. Was this something I really wanted to go through with?

I took 21 a week, 84 a month, 504 over six months. Each week, I could see my face get a little bit better and my confidence get a little higher. My skin was becoming clearer than it had been in almost ten years, and it was liberating. I started feeling pretty and enjoying my face without makeup. The bullying started to stop. When I stopped Accutane, I looked like two different people and felt like two different people. I felt that people stopped looking at my skin and started looking at me. I wasn’t embarrassed to walk out of the house or go to the store or go to school. After six months, as shown below, I looked like two different people without make up.

Everything felt so good.

However, the emotional toll of being bullied for something I had no control over for eight years has taken more of an effect on my life than any side effect of the medicine. I write this two years and two months after my first round of Accutane started. My skin is still clear, but I still struggle every day to accept that I am not the person before Accutane, because that is all I see sometimes. I still feel uncomfortable going to places without makeup, even if my skin is smooth, because I see all the problems that no one else can. I can post as many pictures on Instagram and Facebook as I want, but the likes don’t matter. It’s hard to see yourself as other people see you when you have another view for so long.

Teachers and parents need to teach their children to be more accepting to those who are different than them and how to appropriately respond to them, because it is learned behavior. I once had a camper ask me what the bumps all over my face were, but he told me I still was pretty even with them. He was five. Eleven year olds in middle school are not that nice. Something I think that parents should teach their kids is to not comment on something that someone can’t change within five minutes of being told. This teaches kids to not point out these flaws and teaches them that there are parts of everyone that can’t be changed.

I hope that anyone who suffers from the pit of bad skin realizes that there are options. Having acne is horrible and embarrassing and feels like the end of the world, but it shouldn’t cripple you. Find something that you enjoy: sports, drawing, music, anything that you can excel in and not worry about your skin. Having bad skin is a part of life, but understanding that you can't control it can help change your mindset about how you feel.

And anyway, everyone deserves to feel beautiful.