Our medicine cabinet contains more equipment than is needed to perform brain surgery, and enough sprays, lotions and potions to camouflage the city dump, even on the hottest day of the year. Sometimes I get the urge to fling the stuff across the room and scream, "Stop it! Can't you see there's something very beautiful here? It's me. ME!"
Now where does all this concern come from? Well, maybe it began at age two, when my Mother stopped clapping at my `accomplishments' because the next motherly project was to take this fully functioning person and socialize her.
As I grew older, I discovered that life offered me a variety of ways to be disgusting. My body had begun to create `supposed' odors which emanated from everywhere. However, to my rescue, factories were working night and day producing camouflaging sprays which, when applied from head to toe, made me as flammable as a dry Christmas tree. Ah, but a small price to pay for such a favor. So each day began with the ritualistic spraying, and a silent prayer that during the course of the day I wouldn't offend anyone with a tell-tale clue that under all this lovely fragrance lived a flesh and blood human being.
Acne was an extra challenge for me. As a teenager my family told me to wash my face three times a day, eat lots of fresh fruit, and `keep my hands off of them'. At thirty the treatment was far more sophisticated — a weekly visit to my dermatologist who burned my face with a sun lamp, prescribed expensive ointments I could only get from his brother the druggist next door, and sent me to his cousin, another doctor, who prescribed hormones and antibiotics.
After the first year I quit the sun lamp treatments because I felt awkward being the only one still `peeling' at Christmas, and besides, I was sure any day I was going to run out of face. Eventually I quit the medications out of fear one day I'd die of an overdose of acne cream. And, lo and behold, my skin broke out. Tired of all these drastic measures, I decided to try and accept it.
I'm horrified by the sight of myself shaving, tweezing, clipping, trimming, creaming, spraying, rinsing, powdering and painting this magnificently orchestrated body of mine. I do not, however, have the courage to stop — so I continue on, perhaps less frantically, making myself presentable — but all the time wondering, what's wrong with being human?