Finding no fault in your flaws.

I had not one but two girlfriends, back in my wilder days, who chose to love me when I was having an wicked bad acne outbreak in my mid-20s.

Who gets acne in their mid-20s? I thought. Me. Lucky fucking me. I realize that it was me and many other people, now that I’m a health coach and I better understand the human body and how it processes stress, grief and trauma.

But back then, in my mid-20s, I was suffering tremendously from my painfully obvious, flawed skin. Every day was misery. It took me hours to summon the courage to leave the house because I was so self-conscious. I spent more hours trying to scrub, exfoliate and all other number of methods and products to try to make it go away.

Little did I know, I was making the problem much, much worse.

Months later, I stood at a desk where I worked at a health food store co-op and this girl sauntered (yes, sauntered) up to the desk. As I took a call, she took a pad and wrote her phone number on it.

Ballsy, that one.

I called her. Invited her to hang out — at night. We walked all over the town and talked until the wee hours of the morning before finally parting. We made plans to do it again soon.

A week or so later, I invited her to stop by my place. I turned off all the lights and lit candles because my skin was especially bad that week. I was sketching by candlelight when she arrived, praying she would sit on my good side so she wouldn’t see the source of my greatest insecurity at the time.

Weeks later, when we were seeing more of each other, she confessed how romantic it was that I invited her over to hang out by candelight. In a moment of total vulnerability I admitted it wasn’t meant to be hot, romantic or seductive at all.

I was trying to hide my face from her.

She smiled. Well, hers was this curling grin that went on for days more than it was a smile. But she did that grinning thing and her sea-green eyes revealed total and complete empathy.

All these years later, I channel that sympathy and empathy once gifted to me. Now that my skin has survived another intense bout of acne, this time induced by hormone treatments and massive embodied grief during my gender transition, it seems to have settled for the most part. It gets stirred up whenever I neglect basic nutritional common sense like drinking enough water, getting enough sleep, eating plenty of vegetables and not too much sugar.

But the biggest sources of stress, sadness, grief and trauma have left my day-to-day and for that, I’m grateful. They were the source of my problem, I know that to be true. Where once I only saw ugly, flawed skin, I now see a bright, shining face. If something small pops up, I always say a silent prayer that it’s nothing like it was before — because it was that hard for me.

And when I see someone struggling with acne like I did, I send them all the love in my heart — both for the physical discomfort and the emotional pain it may cause. I think of those women who chose me despite my imperfect, flawed skin. They’d both say, “I don’t even see it. I don’t care.”

And it felt like bullshit to me but they weren’t lying liars. I tried to trust them.

For as hard as it was for me to believe at the time, I think it’s true that when someone really loves you, they don’t care if your skin is a mess or your behavior is a little wonky or anything else that you feel makes you wrong, weird or inherently bad. They find no fault in your flaws, in fact they may see them as reasons to love you even more.

In a world full of constant rejection, you might be gunshy from a series of people telling you in no uncertain terms that you are NOT GOOD ENOUGH, LOVEABLE or OKAY as you are. When someone is suddenly standing there, contradicting the ones who validate your self-depricating inner voice, you might want to fight them off a little. Push them away.

I sure did.

But I stopped doing that after a while and what happened is nothing short of magic. The Rx I’d been taking for a few weeks only worsened things, so I stopped taking that poison. I journaled and wept and prayed for my old face to return, making a deal with Whoever (a God?) that I would never shy away from another picture and I would smile as much as I could — facing the camera, and people, head-on.

Within months of gradually accepting the love offered to me, as imperfectly as I did it, my acne cleared up and went away by itself. Cleaning up my nutrition, which I’d neglected for far too long as a subconscious act of self-sabotage, probably also helped a bit.

Opening my heart and striving for self-acceptance were the eventual, lasting cures to the flaws I feared defined me.

Your flaws are parts of your whole self — and you get to play the game of choosing how much to love and accept them and allow others to do the same. We are all in the same boat, here. Each of us has something we find wrong, weird or flawed about us.

What matters is that we learn to find no fault in our flaws. And then generously create that space for others as well.