My Face Is Falling Off

My face has been falling off all week. Like, flakes of skin. It looks like a sunburn, except the skin is falling off in flakes instead of a peel, so it’s clearly not a sunburn. It also stings. It stings constantly. It stings so much that the nice autumn breeze blows through the cracks in my skin, and I squint my eyes in pain.

It’s bad to the point where people feel the need to check in on me emotionally when they see me. They think I’m dying or something. I am not dying. If I were dying, I would tell everyone and use it for attention. If I had terminal cancer, I would be one of those people who starts an Instagram account and runs across the country. Every video of mine would be like, “My face is falling off so hard it’s killing me, so now I ran to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Click the link in my bio for a 25% discount on a coffee made out of mushrooms.” I’ve tried that mushroom coffee before and it’s ass. However, I wouldn’t worry about that if I were dying. I would be too busy trying to get my money up one last time.

My skin is falling off because I started using a retinol lotion, used too much of it, and now there’s a chemical burn all over my face. Retinol is vitamin A. It’s supposed to make your skin look younger and have less acne. I have had the same two red dots on the tip of my nose on and off for a year. I think they’re pores or something. I don’t really know. All I know is that I don’t like them, and the only skincare medicine I have is a prescription-strength retinol called Epiduo that my mom gave me two years ago when one of my coworkers told me I should start a retinol.

The Epiduo expired in 2023. I googled how much it would be to buy a new one and it would be 800 dollars, so I said fuck it and rubbed it all over my face.

The two red dots went away immediately. The retinol still works exceptionally well. I didn’t even know whether or not it was the right thing to use on the red dots, but sometimes things just work out.

Sometimes, it takes a 27-year growth period before you’re even comfortable putting a beauty product on your face.

For me, personally, it took 27 years.

The crisis that's happening on my face now used to happen on the backs of my hands when I was a kid up until I was a sophomore in high school. Not because of retinol, but because I hated lotion. My hands used to get so dry that I would get open wounds from the cracked skin, and scabs that looked like tiger stripes would form on the back of my hands because of how dry they were.

My hands felt like sandpaper and sometimes when people weren’t looking I would rub the back of my hand on their arm or the back of their neck to freak them out. My uncle one time saw my hands and screamed in horror and said that I had “lizard skin” and then started referring to me as a reptile until I rubbed the back of my hand on the back of his neck and got a little bit of blood on his t-shirt. After that, I got in trouble for “being gross” and that “rubbing open wounds on people is impolite.”

I started crying because I felt like I was responding to being bullied with a joke, but in reality, my hands were gross, and everyone looked at me weirdly because of it. But this isn’t even close to the core of the problem.

As a child, I had a phobia of lotion. A deep-seeded phobia. Like, so deep that I only recently realized the core issue of it all. The core issue was that I had no real concept of what masculinity was or how to be comfortable with it. I grew up in Houston, Texas, which had this combo of southern cowboy masculine expectations and standards but no way to exercise any level of masculinity due to the fact that it was a city with no cows to herd or beans to cook over an open fire.

In my head, I equated any level of self-care to beauty, and beauty was for girls, and I didn’t want to be a girl. I wanted to be a cowboy. I cringed at the thought that I could be called beautiful and would do things to actively confound it. I had felt beautiful before. I know what that affirmation feels like. However, I hate that feeling. The way it makes my heart beat a little faster and the sudden shock to my system that not only I was perceived, but I was perceived and approved by someone makes me experience a natural high, followed by an unnatural low. An unnatural panic and frustration.

Why am I not being looked at as someone who can fix a sink?

All I have ever wanted is to be the guy who fixes sinks.

One time, I was having sex with this girl who touched my stomach and said “You have such a sexy body” and I lost my erection. She asked me if I was too drunk, then told me it was okay, and we could just watch a movie. We watched Where the Wild Things Are.

I don’t know if you have watched Where the Wild Things Are, but Spike Jonze completely rewrote the book and added a divorce plotline where the mother chooses her boyfriend over the kid, and then the kid runs away as a result, where he meets all the monsters and is forced to go home to his mother who gives him some soup. His mom didn’t even realize that it’s fucked up to choose your boyfriend over your kid following a recent divorce.

The movie made me so mad that I forgot about the whole “I lost my erection because I couldn’t take a compliment” thing.

Nevertheless, the erection thing is something I’m thinking about now and I think the spiritual equivalent happens with other men frequently. Men don’t want to think of their bodies as beautiful. They want their bodies to be tools, which is probably why so many men end up being tools.

I never spoke to that woman again. I ghosted her. I am a tool.

I started using lotion after I got my first forehead wrinkles. I got my first forehead wrinkles at 21 because I tend to raise my eyebrows a lot due to how frequently I’m shocked at how crazy the world can be.

The physical sign of age made me realize that things would only go down from here. It also didn’t help that I had just started doing stand-up in Washington, D.C., and one of the comics thought I was 30. Being viewed as older meant that my cells were showing more wear and tear to the point that people saw it and if my cells were showing more wear and tear, I assumed that I was probably going to die sooner if I didn’t start taking better care of my body.

I know that logic also might be flawed, but I’m the same person that refused to use lotion because my concept of masculinity was half-beer commercial and half-Remington painting.

I started using lotion because I was scared of death.

It’s been 6 years of lotion use. Sometimes, you grow as a person and you don’t even notice it. I think my relationship with beauty has started to change also. Using retinol is the pursuit of beauty. I was told that it would make my skin better, more youthful, and was hoping that it would get rid of 2 blemishes I disliked. I started using it without really thinking of the fact that it didn’t feel manly. It feels like when growth happens this way, it's a casual representation that I’ve become a better version of myself.

Regardless of this growth though, I’m still a stupid fucking idiot because I didn’t read the directions or even google how to use retinol and chemically burned the shit out of the part of my body that has 3 out of my 5 senses.

But maybe the spare skin is a physical manifestation of me shedding a concept of masculine beauty that I outgrew, like how snakes shed their skin.

Regardless of that simile, though, I have been waking up in a pool of dead skin on my pillow and it’s gross. Please read the instructions of your skin care products and do not use expired products either. You also shouldn’t use someone else’s prescriptions, even if it is your mom’s prescription.

I hope by the time this is published my face will be glowing, my body will be sexy, and that mom from Where the Wild Things Are finally learned her lesson.