For those of you are fortunate enough never to have experienced cystic acne, basically it's like a normal garden-variety zit, but bigger, denser and deeper. In my experience the zit itself is generally about the size of a chickpea (plus any residual inflammation), and down so deep in the skin that it won't necessarily come to head at all. When they occur in places like earlobes or nostrils, I can't initially tell what side they're going to come out on. They're generally big enough to cause a temporary visible deformity, and painful enough that there's an omnipresent nagging pain - the pain isn't debilitating or anything, but I am always aware of it, at all times.
When I have cystic acne I can still do and focus on the activities of everyday living. Despite the pain, I can still eat, sleep, translate, read, write, study, run errands, keep house, and do anything that needs doing. However, when my mind starts wandering beyond my immediate activities, and I start thinking about big, distant, long-term concerns like the security of my pension or the long-term effects of having what is basically an employment equity system for selecting the governor general or whether if I'm caught in a subway bombing I should run away from the explosion so I have a chance of escaping or run towards the explosion so I die as quickly as possible, when I start thinking about these sort of things, my cystic acne distracts me. I don't get very far into worrying about big, distant things before my mind wanders to just how painful that zit on my ear is and how cool it would be if it popped all in one piece and how I could maybe get it to pop if I approached it from a different angle or maybe I should put a hot compress on it and then try to pop it or maybe I should just try to dry it out. Maslow's hierarchy kicks in, and any attempts to worry about Big Issues get distracted by thinking about my own pain.
I think this is a survival mechanism. I always get cystic acne when I'm stressed. Before I learned the word "cystic" I called it "stress acne". I think my body produces these deep, painful zits on purpose so that I will be physically incapable of worrying about anything non-immediate. That way I can deal only with the immediate during stressful times so I don't make myself sick worrying about things that I can't do anything about at the moment. Then when my stress level lowers, the cystic acne goes away and I can worry about Big Issues as much as I want.
My friend and I were recently talking about how we as a society are so hooked onto electronics. Reading this post makes me think back to that debate we had, and just how inseparable from electronics we have all become.
ReplyDeleteI don't mean this in a bad way, of course! Societal concerns aside... I just hope that as technology further innovates, the possibility of uploading our memories onto a digital medium becomes a true reality. It's a fantasy that I daydream about all the time.
(Submitted from R4Submit for R4i Nintendo DS.)