Marshmellow Fluff

If there is one thing that is embarrassing beyond embarrassing it is to get an annual skin cancer check.  On the good side, you’re proactive with ensuring you don’t have any alarming freckles or moles that will grow roots deep into your bones and kill you.  On the flip side, it means someone becomes all too familiar with what you look like naked and under fluorescent lighting, not to mention while also being under a microscope..literally! I like to compare it to swimsuit shopping after eating a big bag of salt and vinegar chips on the day you started your period while all your ex boyfriends watch.  And did I mention all your exes have cardboard number signs so they can rate your appearance?  And did I also mention they have their hotter new girlfriend sitting next to them with a marker writing the numbers on the cards for them?  So clearly you understand why I put my annual skin cancer check on the bottom of my to-do list and have often contemplated just dying from theoretical skin cancer because death seemed better than the humiliation.

But, I went to the dermatologist because my skin is confused and I am vain.  The deep set wrinkle on my forehead thinks I am 50, while the sudden pimple breakouts mean my pores think I’m 12.  I’m told the red golfball sized breakouts, well, I say they are golfball sized and Paul says he sees nothing.  Which means he is either far-sighted or refining his lying skills before we marry.  Anyhow, I am told the reason I look like the Proactive “before” photos, is because my hormones are out of whack because I decided to stop taking birth control pills.  I will pause here while my mom gets over her disapproval of me relaying such personal information on a blog.  So, I stopped birth control not because I am “trying” to get pregnant, but because I always had issues with taking the pill.  But I have terrible fatigue, mood swings and am insatiably hungry around “the time”.  So ten years ago, when I saw the birth control pill commercials with a girl running through a field with vigor and in skinny jeans, I thought to myself, “I want to be that girl!”  What they don’t show you is the part where that twenty something year old girl gets married and goes off the pill and turns into a greasy, pimpled bloated mess from her whacked out hormones.  So today, this thirty something year old has clinically diagnosed acne, but on the good side, I don’t have skin cancer.  So while I am not dying, my self esteem is doing so slowly and painfully.