"It's not a catastrophe."

Last week I got a facial because my skin has the breakouts of a pubescent teen combined with the furrowed brow of a woman who has read too much about a drug-resistant fungus. I don’t know if its hormones or what I’m eating or the stress of having to take off a one-piece bathing suit to go to the bathroom, but something is awry.

As I lay down atop the facialist’s bed I expressed this to her by saying, '“My skin has gone nuts.” She turned on her magnifying lamp, which is one of the meanest thing to ever be created and she said, “Well, it’s not a catastrophe.”

That was her word of choice. My face, she said, is not a catastrophe.

When you tell an anxious person that something is not a catastrophe, there are only two things they are going to think. One - that it is in fact a catastrophe, because why would you even bring up the word catastrophe if it wasn’t a catastrophe?

Or two - it is not a catastrophe, but it is close enough to a catastrophe that there is reason to be concerned as if it were in fact a catastrophe.

I said “nuts.” Just give you a sense of other things I call nuts - I call my children nuts, I call answering an unknown number nuts, I call wearing water shoes nuts. (Too squishy. Yuck.)

Here are things I would call a catastrophe: sending a text to the wrong person, having to eat without washing my hands, trying to be brave by sitting on a public toilet seat after wiping it down extensively only to sit and feel something wet coming from the underside of the seat - things that are clearly and tragically irreversible.

So there I was for 45 minutes, at the mercy of someone who thought my face was catastrophically damaged. I allowed this person to poke and prod, to rub and moisturize, to text her friends that she was working with someone whose skin was, in her words probably, irreparable.

In the end, I forgave her. Not because she scrubbed away layers of debris and left my skin aglow, but because I learned something. I learned that you can come back from the brink. You can overcome. And you can lead with love. IF, and only if, you buy the right serum.

Now please go check out Wooby & Fotty’s newest release, a read along to “Be Brave Little One” by Marianne Richmond. Is it named after this personal saga of mine? There’s no way to know.

Love,

Lauren