why do I suddenly have great skin
I know nothing and everything about this
I finally have the quality of skin I’ve always wanted, and if you ask me what I did to clear my acne to this degree, I have no idea. Funnily, I am now a person who isn’t a pain in the ass about sugar at all. I will enjoy the pleasure of an ice cream or a cake every few days. I put cheese in my sandwich. I’ll drink coffee. I drink some wine almost every night in some seasons of life. In the monsoon, I need whiskey. And my skin has become the clearest and calmest it has ever been in years, even during my period.
I couldn’t pinpoint the end of my perpetual acne to just one thing. It’s a hundred things I know I do and also I don’t know what it really is at all. I’ve gently oriented towards so many shifts that honour the feminine body, and as a consequence, also happen to make the skin radiant. These range from cyclical living to foods I feed my lips to mystical practices for my pleasure, womb, heart and lymphatic system.
I enjoy meat every single day now, and we were told that’s ‘heaty’ and will aggravate us. Back when I had the most distressed skin of my life, I was a vegetarian.
I’ve eaten alphonso mangoes this summer without ever, ever counting. I was too occupied in orgasmic presence with them. Mangoes are once in a year gifts of the divine. Glasses of wine, lovers and mangoes, we don’t count that. I didn’t have a single moment of guilt or fear that I will now be ridden with pimples for eating a mango - and I wasn’t. Back when I was taught to constantly think about and fear this story, mangoes instantaneously erupted all over my body in inflammation.
I remember the energy of my life when I had the most distressed, painful, acne ridden skin as well as the most distressing, painful periods. Top of the class, always working side by side with studying, taught to glorify never ‘needing’ more than five hours of sleep because design school students aren’t supposed to have normal, human needs.
Taught to exist in perpetual burnout, shaming oneself for wanting to read a book for pleasure or desiring moments of a normal young college life of hanging out with one’s friends.
My entire sense of self worth was based upon how hard I could work and prove myself, how I could ‘justify’ the price of my education. Despite having the privilege of a loving family that never once even asked that of me, and actively tried to prevent me from descending into overachiever mania.
I based my value, as a mere little maiden of 18-23, on how many times I could obtain positive academic validation from the faculty, at any cost. To maintain the reputation that ‘Oorja’s work is always a notch above everyone else’s’ - something that was said about me in a very important jury that I am grateful for, it gave me a shoo-in lateral entry to an advanced level of my degree without having to do first year with the others. And yet, it wasn’t worth bleeding out my qi over, nor the burnout that was coming for me. Never sleeping, even being taught to be ashamed to want to linger at a meal or care about what I am eating. There’s no time for that. One is only supposed to work, work, work, produce, produce, produce.
Then, there was that brief corporate stint with the most toxic mentor of all time, God bless her. I would cross a high speed highway road to my office (this is normal in India), and I would start casually imagining that I wouldn’t really mind if one of these cars rammed into me. Then, I wouldn’t have to go to this office. Maybe I’d get a break, or simply pass away, which felt a little easier. One day, at lunch, my dear friend and colleague says the exact same thing to me. She replayed the same fantasy in her head, crossing that same highway every morning. “You too?!”
We were too young, too accustomed to our sleep deprived hustle, to understand the brevity of what this indulgent maladaptive daydream reflected about the state we are in. We laughed and got on with yet another overtime day. Good Girls were supposed to stay back late in the office AND take work home every single day.
Another aspect of this era of my life was that I had uninspiring lovers who provided only chaos, confusion and instability to my already cortisol soaked body. I don’t blame them, they were lost young boys who hadn’t yet understood what it is to be a man for a woman. I, too, was only a naive maiden, swayed by extremely weird ideas of what was being modelled as ‘modern’ and ‘empowering’ and ‘feminist’ (lol) to my generation. Yet to learn the art of discerning who must even be in my orbit in the first place. We both taught each other valuable lessons, one would hope.
The acne, the hormonal imbalance, the feminine spirit wounds, the creative trauma and the psychosomatic inflammation of these 5ish years stayed in my system for long after I had exited this life and this version of myself.
I compare that to the energy of my life now, as a woman whose wellbeing and gentle flourishing I take complete responsibility to fiercely protect. Intentionally celibate for a year. Finally brave enough to desire what I desire in love, and honour myself enough to quietly hold that standard, instead of loosely giving myself away in every way to be the ‘Cool, Modern Girl’. Easing and edging my way into actually loving men as a whole, finding more examples of enjoying the masculine and his gifts, giving up the constant upstream battle of being ‘versus’ them. Calibrating my energy back into a world where I need to lean on men, and they need to lean on me. Where I am unconcerned with overriding my body’s wisdom to show anybody how I can do all the things men do.
Dancing, embodying, breathing, creating. Devotion over discipline. Trust over detachment. Soft, rounded and jiggly, no more a hardass girlboss. My life now orients towards running on honey instead of fumes. Depth, slowness, sensuality, meaningful work, instead of a performative headless chicken busyness, hustle-for-validation, and artificial-suffering-for-brownie-points. Slowly and surely exiling ‘rush’ from my life, everyday. Rarely, if ever, concerned with ‘proving’ anything to anyone.
I read that a woman’s body is a portal to heaven. that women, when safe and secure and settled, can nurture freely and bless the world with their deep feminine magic. we don’t need more phallic rigid cold energy. lets get warm and wet and hot out here.
- from ‘I Listen With My Good Girl Manners’ by Hannah of this is what a witch thinks about.
Sometimes I suspect that all my years spent obsessing over achieving clear skin was never about policing myself into the perfect diet or the 17 step routine of products at all. Everytime I see one of those skincare routine videos (I do enjoy them), I am a little shocked at how normal it is now to use so many things on our faces at once, multiple times a day. Maybe the actual force that illuminates our visage is something greater than that stuff. Maybe something else altogether determines our skin’s internal atmosphere. Something more long term, overarching, which goes far beyond stressing oneself out over ‘Bad Foods’ and complex arrays of creams.
Maybe sleep, rest, pleasure, hormonal harmony, giving yourself permission to be a woman in a man’s world, a lack of stress, a slow cultivation of joie de vivre inspite it all, that’s what women’s skin was always about. Maybe our skin is a mirror of what our soul and body is feeling about life. It’s how our hormones speak to us. It’s a reflection of the inner feminine, how she feels.
It’s also not that deep. The body is the body, sometimes you get a zit and there’s no reason for it at all, nor does there have to be. You live in a body. Life goes on. It’s never been about always having ‘perfect’ skin. The skin is like a living, breathing artwork. It is always speaking to us, telling stories, and we are in relationship with it.
It helps me to remind myself that there’s actually no rules or no Correct Way at all. Someone could be doing the exact opposite of what I’m doing, and glowing from their salads and green juices. Someone else, at the same time, is drinking and eating pizza, and still glowing.
My ideas around being a wellness ‘Good Girl’ who wants to eat ‘Clean’ have transformed in the past few years, and by that I mean they’ve largely been thrown out the window. And I have better skin than ever.
My periods are the most balanced, healthy and Goddess-like they’ve ever been. I have little to no extreme PMS, ever, unless I am in a month where I repressed a lot of my feelings. Dysmenorrhea? I’ve forgotten how that feels. I rarely, if ever, fall sick. I never feel like I am constantly tired. I never feel like my lower back weighs a ton, anymore. I do not have anxiety anymore.
All of these unpleasant things were normal for me all throughout my twenties, and it seems to me that they are so for everyone around me. And now, in the last few breaths before my thirties begin, for the first time ever, I actually feel younger, more fertile and more alive than I have ever been. And it’s not because of absolutely anything a wellness influencer on a Reel or a TikTok shouted at me about.
I have been incredibly lucky to peek into the depths of true feminine wellness in circle with some of the most beautiful mentors, guides and sisters around the world. I link below a few articles as starting points to dive into this idea of stepping away from rigidly controlling your body, your diet and your ‘wellness’ in this world as a woman, and instead, leaning into experiencing the possibility that you could have pleasure and still live a life that is healthy, well rounded and full of beauty in every realm.
~ This, and everything else by
on her Substack, as well as inside The Daily Rest Studio.
~
is another author and vitalist whose writings have gently transformed me from Strict Good Girl to well fed woman.~ If you are a vegetarian who can withstand listening to ideas that may be different from your worldview and still be able to takeaway learning and insight from something that is not 100% resonant with you, this is a beautiful, rich podcast to listen to. It’s called How To Be A Well Fed Woman.
~ French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano. I read it in 8th grade and I keep re-reading it again. It is an absolute joy. Do not be dissuaded if the title feels wrong in our current cultural climate. No, it didn’t make me fat phobic. It made me pleasure centric. I suppose this title is like clickbait, and it was published in a time where saying the word ‘fat’ didn’t feel as charged to do en masse as it does now. I am from the pre-woke generation, we tend to find gold in the weirdest places. We could all use a little bit of a spicy book, you know. We don’t have to be unproblematic to the degree of becoming white tubelit, sanitized and sterilized clinics inside our minds.
~ Everything
shares on . It’s a magical trail of cherries to follow into the woods, she takes the reader back into wholesome, deep, delicious, alive womanhood.~ Pieces I’ve written that elaborate on the threads in this one:
I loved this piece so much. I struggled with acne for 7 years and did all the diets and now I eat everything and my skin seems to be relaxed and unbothered. Congratulations, I know what it’s like to finally have those clear skin prayers answered.
Love this Oorja! As someone who has struggled with acne off and on since my late teens, this is inspiring and gives me hope 💛😭