My Sacred Fuckin Fault Line

My Face Finally Told Me to Fuck Off
(and I Needed to Hear It)

It's funny. I sit here and preach — listen to your body, your body talks to you — and here my body has been telling me to fuck off this entire time. And I wasn't listening.

My lichen has been trying to get me to listen for the past year, and I've ignored it. Mine is extra-genital, meaning that while it typically attacks people in their genital area, mine has shown up all over my body. The most recent has been my face, and even though it's not the only episode I've had on my face, this one is bad. Probably the second worst episode I've ever had. It hurts to move my face. It hurts to go outside. The cold air hitting it, the wind — it feels like something is tearing my nerve endings straight out of my body. Water stings. My own face stings.

Why my face? The fuq! (As my daughter would say.) Yep — believe it, peeps — some of those were even taken on the same days!

Today, I figured it out.

I was talking to someone about leaving Geneseo. About feeling lost here sometimes. About how overwhelming it can be to feel so alone. But every single time — no matter what I have lined up, no matter how close I get — something happens and I don't leave. In the past, it's been me getting in my own way. Last week, the day of, it was things out of my control. But those things only happened because of a choice I made the night before that set them in motion. Something holds me here. I'm still not entirely sure what. But sitting with that thought cracked something open, and I started connecting dots.

I used to not be comfortable in my body. Not showing skin, not showing my midsection. I would never have run around in my underwear in front of anyone.

Then I lived with my best friend. He's a man (You can read more about him here ), and it was an open studio apartment. You can't exactly hide in a space like that. And somewhere in that time, without even realizing it was happening, I became comfortable. He accepted me in every single one of my many forms and never made it weird. That was a gift I didn't even know I was receiving.

Then came the trailer. No power. No air conditioning. Tin can in the summer heat. I was always in my underwear and genuinely did not care. It wasn't until the creeper across the way started making me feel uncomfortable that I closed the door policy entirely — but by then, something had already shifted in me. (Yep — chalk markers and mirrors are my besties. Another post, though.)

Being small, sweating in my skin, hot flashes that somehow mostly stopped around mid-summer last year (still strange to me), booty shorts and crop tops became just... normal. My skin needed to breathe. I needed to breathe. And I stopped giving a damn who thought what about it. Ten years ago? Hell no. Not a chance.

But there was one thing I held onto through all of it.

My face.

Always putting it on. Covering the big pores, the scars — not hiding exactly, but presenting. Looking together. Looking strong. The face I looked at in the mirror when I needed to convince myself I wasn't weak. That I was enough. That I could handle it.

What I never did was look at that face — the bare one, the real one — and tell myself I was enough as is.

My face has had it with my shit. It's literally telling me to fuck off. It was the last wall, the last thing I kept armored, and my body wasn't going to let me keep skipping it.

The last two days I finally did it. I looked at the raw, sore, broken-out mess of my face and said: I am enough. Me. Enough. Not the presented version. Not the covered version. Me.

And yeah, it still looks rough and it's still sore. But it's on the mend. Finally.

None of this would have landed the way it did if I were still living the old life. Throwing money out the door, not being grateful for the small things, not looking inward, chasing the material stuff. As much as I catch myself missing who I used to be sometimes — I don't know if I actually miss her. Because I really like this version of me too.

If you are new, and want to check my other posts about my dumb ass autoimmune- you can find them here and here.

And now I'm sitting here overwhelmed with feelings, crying like a baby — so that's my cue.

xoxo JstJenni