i'm eleven. 2009. after a shower my mom steams my face and goes at it with a metal tool — a needle on one end, a little loop on the other. in her generation, that was care. with your hands. "squeeze it out and fix it."

twelve — my first "professional" cleansing. with a chinese beautician rumored to treat a famous kazakh singer. the word "professional" has been in quotation marks for me ever since.

thirteen — i want to feel like i "belong" at a school where i don't. in the evenings i watch korean dramas and imagine another life. meanwhile i'm seeing a beautician whose only treatment is extractions. eight months. i leave with skin forty percent worse than when i came. that's how i first learned what a toxic relationship with a "specialist" looks like.

fifteen. february 2013. at school they call me kari. read it as "curry" — for the color. i fall asleep at my desk and wake up with pus and blood on the cuffs of my school blazer 🤍 i want to fall in love and be loved. but i have no confidence, and the acne definitely isn't helping.

and then, after my twentieth doctor, i finally hear something different: "let's try without pills." five months, six days a week — liquid nitrogen, extractions, thirty injections into a single face. by day ten it's my meditation. and on the days they let me leave without injections, i worry they didn't treat me enough.

by winter my skin is clear. my first remission. ♥

(spoiler — there will be three more)

seventeen. 2015. i win a scholarship and move to korea.

a couple of months in, the acne comes back. in a panic, we decide on accutane — remotely. i do the blood tests in korea, translate them into russian, send them to almaty. my mom buys the medication and ships it through friends: in seoul it's three times the price and you can't get it without a prescription. ten months — and i'm in remission again. from another country.

at twenty — six thousand dollars on laser in a single year. ablative CO₂. salmon dna injections back in 2018 — years before anyone in the post-soviet world was talking about them. my face is as smooth as a face is allowed to be.

not much is left of those childhood dramas — but they planted in me the wish to live a k-drama life at least once. and i live it.

2017, 2018, 2019. i work, perform on stage, dance in clubs, hang out with the expat crowd, fall in love, break someone's heart and my own, then patch both back up — and go out again. and in between, i study. in a foreign country. at nineteen, twenty, twenty-one.

i think — okay, this is behind me.

autumn 2019. bunion surgery on both feet. six months of recovery. i come back from my korean life to almaty — the road from the airport is grey, the buildings still post-soviet, the whole thing feels like sliding backwards. i can't walk properly. and at the same time — a depressive episode.

the acne comes back. quietly. one breakout at a time. as if checking — did you notice?

2020, 2021, 2022, 2023. across those years — two more remissions. two more cosmetologists. more laser.

and meanwhile i meet my person. i marry him. i change one field of work after another — like trying roles on for taste. i learn about and slowly unpack a depression i'd apparently been living in for years. a thick, heavy state that ran underneath my outwardly active, full life this whole time. i didn't even know it could be like that. i come out of it. for the first time i choose a field from myself, not from survival. and i keep travelling.

late 2023. a ten-month trip. i leave with clear skin — the kind i pay good money for, every month, in someone's office. two or three months in, my skin starts breaking out. yes — climate, flights, food, stress — all of it matters.

but the main thing is — there's no cosmetologist nearby i can trust.

and i start frantically looking for one in every country. vietnam — i try a few, not it. malaysia — i find chinese practitioners doing something "effective" but dangerous: injecting steroids straight into the breakouts. every move turns into its own quest: where to look, who to trust, will they make it worse.

i'm not travelling anymore. i'm on tour with cosmetologists.

and at some point i'm sitting with my face burning from steroids, and it hits me:

"is this remission even real, if i depend on substances or on another person?"

i wasn't healing my acne. i was dependent 🤍

for fifteen years i suppressed symptoms — instead of listening to my body.

i carry that question with me further.

indonesia, february 2024.

i finally write to my nutritionist — the one i could have gone to years ago. but the readiness only came now. and the whole path before her — doctors, remissions, countries, mistakes — turned out to be exactly what made me ready.

i don't regret any of it.

she's in canada. for kazakhstan — serious money. i start working with her remotely. just like with accutane back then — only now not for a prescription, but for understanding.

for fifteen years, ordinary tests told me i was healthy. and i believed them — even though my skin said otherwise.

she suggests looking deeper — where the local doctors never looked, just shrugging and repeating "everything's fine." and the dermatologists, if they looked at all, treated it with the same three things: accutane, adapalene, antibiotics.

and for the first time i see not my face, but what's underneath it. that's where the cause had been.

for the first time it hits me that skin isn't a separate part of me. that the body isn't broken into pieces — it's whole. that you have to work with the whole organism at once — where physical and mental health matter equally. and that healing comes not through suppression, but through attention.

that care isn't a procedure — it's a way we choose to live this life.

today i work with my skin, not against it. not perfectly. but for the first time, honestly.

still learning, still on the way ♥

at twenty-eight i have twenty countries, four remissions, and fifteen years of waiting for my own permission in my body.

if you're reading this, and your own acne is on your face right now.

you're beautiful. now. not later.

not "despite the acne." just — beautiful. your own eyes, your own features, the charisma in how you smile, your own body, something that's only yours in the way you move, your own pull. you are deep. you are interesting to be around. you inspire people — even when you can't see it yourself.

and none of this becomes less true because you have acne right now.

you're allowed to live this life now — to be photographed, to take the stage, to be visible. not later. not when your skin "gets better."

acne doesn't make you undeserving of being seen.

i know. it took me fifteen years to hear this about myself.

you don't have to wait.

i'm here ♥