WHY 22 IS THE END: ZITS ARE FOREVER

I have been fortunate enough in my lifetime to have clear skin. I've never had to use acne washes or go see a dermatologist or even have to pop a zit or follow in the footsteps of Jennifer Love Hewitt and Jessica Simpson. I've always had clear skin and have always been followed by the envious eyes of pizza faces everywhere. My frequently pimple free face has helped me pass as a high schooler even at 22. It's pretty cool to get carded every time you try to buy cigarettes, alcohol, lighters, or even spray paint. It's never inconvenient. Never.

Kristen, like me, has also enjoyed the blessing of zitless skin and clear complexion. However, like me, she has suffered the same affliction: when you do get pimples, you get them bad. This was always the problem in high school: the occasional crater you didn't know how to deal with. A zit would come, attack for a week, and leave us on our merry way. We never had time to learn how to understand them or even befriend them enough to make it work for us (if that's even possible).

At 22, pimples are becoming more and more problematic because you aren't in high school and everyone notices and feels the need to make clever euphemisms about it ("Oh, looks like something bit you on your lip!"; "Where'd you get that fancy new beauty mark?"; "What? Run out of Pro-Active?"). And, every time I get a pimple, I'm like "EMERGENCY EMERGENCY HOW DO YOU FIX THIS WTF MATE" It makes me wish I had had terrible acne in my youth because then I would know how to deal with pimples. Now, when I get the occasional, unsightly face (well, eye)sore, I just scratch it and try to pop it, aggravating it to an extreme point where people look at you and only have "LOOK AT THAT ZIT" on their mind.

Maybe, at some point in the future, zits will stop trying to conquer my face once a month, a prospect that seems impossible. Until that point, I need to figure out how I'm going to deal with this when I am 32. Or, I'll just preoccupy my thoughts with trying to learn how to accept other things I don't like about my body, so zits will seem inconsequential.