change — Blog — JESSICA ROSMAN

Have you ever seen those little mounds that soldier crabs make on the beach at low tide? Well, if you can imagine them making those same gritty globules all over my face, you will have a good idea of how I looked at fourteen.

The most distressing part of having horrendously ugly skin was not the fact that my face resembled something that had just come out of a Dominoes’ pizza oven, or that I was forced to sleep with fifteen blackhead strips plastered to my face every night. It was the fact that, in the eyes of the opposite sex, my head was the equivalent of a badly battered apple; I was destined to be left on the shelf to rot.

Fast forward a few years of wearing a paper bag over my head to every house party, and we get to a moment in class that changed my life. Instead of receiving a lesson on periodic tables, I had a lesson on pimple-free skin.

It happened when a new school friend leaned over my desk and keenly inspected the many lumps and bumps on my face. She concluded that the only way I could ever confidently step out in public was if I took a tissue salt supplement known as Comb D. (She also suggested I reduce my daily intake of jelly frogs.)

Two weeks later, much to the shock of close friends and family, I had a face again. A frog-free diet combined with those miraculous Comb D tablets worked! I still had pimples, but they came and went like a shooting star, as opposed to a heavily clustered galaxy that just spiralled out of control.

The thing about having terrible pimples is that you kind of let the rest of your body go too. I mean, why make an effort if your skin refuses to come to the party? So once my skin flattened out like a freshly paved road, I decided there were some other ways to improve my appearance.

Here’s what I did:

I stopped viewing my daily walk to the front door as the perfect form of exercise.
I realised that two blueberry Pop-Tarts each morning would not give me my RDI of fruit.
I reduced my daily quota of hair spray, so that my locks no longer sat glued to my head like a tightly fitted swim cap.

With those simple changes I felt I was on my way to great things! And the only need I had for a paper bag was as a place to store my multi-grain sandwiches.

Text © Jessica Rosman 2015

When I was thirteen I wanted nothing more than to fit in and be accepted by my fellow peers. This proved kind of challenging, since I was a head taller than most of the girls in my grade. Luckily, there were other ways to fit in, like cramming my gob with junk food.

So given I had just changed homes, schools and friendship groups, I did what every teenager does when they need to buy a few friends: I took a job at Donut King.

It felt good to be the centre of attention. After school I would change into a bright pink hat and pink and white uniform and stand under hypnotic spotlights in the middle of the shopping mall, serving up processed snacks and deep-fried lard.

I made friends overnight.

Even my big brother paid more attention to me. Instead of looking at me like I was some kind of deformed kitten, he started to embrace my presence of an afternoon, especially when my schoolbag was loaded up with the day’s unsold donuts.

For once in my life I was popular and I didn’t care in the slightest that I had just sold my soul to the junk food devil.

Fortunately for my soul, I was completely inept at the job and it wasn’t long before the manager discovered I had no cashier skills whatsoever. The Donut Queen had no choice but to hand in her crown.

Funnily enough I didn’t care about the money or the job, I cared about losing friends because I was no longer ‘that girl with the free donuts’. I was just ‘that girl who used to have free donuts’.

When you are a teenager, there’s a lot of pressure to eat crap. Cooking up some mung beans and vegetables is not the way to improve your social status. Little do you know that by eating processed garbage in an attempt to make new friends, means you are inadvertently making enemies with your gut and by the time you reach ‘adulthood’ you will be forced to go on a decade long fast if you want any hope of making it up to your tired, swollen body.

The best thing you can do is take a leaf out of my book and quit while you are ahead. There are worse problems in life than trying to find new friends - try and find a new pancreas for example.