Y’all, my heart.
I love seeing Lucy play music with her GrandDonnie.
With everything going on, moments like this, they’re just so sweet and wonderful to share. And I think it’s safe to say, this kid will definitely be a musician. It’s going to be so fun helping her find her instrument and watching her learn. 😊
Well, I’m not really sure where to go from here.
The Accutane works. My face was clear all throughout the holidays and it felt like I got a little bit of my life back, and y’all, when I say that was amazing. Just, wow.
But the side effects. Oh my God, the side effects.
So, let me preface by saying that everyone is different, and everyone reacts to medicines differently, and I don’t want to scare anyone away from a treatment that might work very well for them. But I want to share my experience, just in case anyone needs validation, or has questions, or is just curious. This is definitely not the update I wanted to give.
Let’s start here. My face cleared up! Yay! My skin also dried out everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Every mucus membrane, and nothing I did to help with that side effect (lotion, an Omega-3 supplement, changing soaps and showering habits) actually helped at all. The dryness, though, I could handle. It was expected and wasn’t so bad. Well, not on my face at least. It was less than tolerable in other places.
Which brings me to my eyes. About two months into the treatment, after my dermatologist and I had agreed to up my dose (as is standard), my eyelids just went insane. None of my glands wanted to work. Everything just stopped up, and my eyes got all red and gross and watery, and my eyelids got really inflamed and swollen, and my lashes were all full of flakes and tear residue. And long story short, after a weekend visit to the eye doctor, I can confirm I now have ocular rosacea as well. Because Type 1 and Type 2 were not enough. Sigh. One steroid drop prescription and treatment plan later, and I’m doing a little better. But my eyes still aren’t normal, and I’m real tired, y’all, real tired of wearing my glasses instead of my contacts. Lucy is happy, though, and tries to pull them off of my face a few times a day.
Even the eyes, though, I think I could handle. Maybe. But I experienced some weird mental symptoms, too. My dermatologist did not think they were Accutane-related, but they coincided with the bump in my dose. My anxiety skyrocketed, and I started to have really strange, not-me thoughts about the hopelessness of life. I never think that way. I love life.
And I love my hair, which is now really thin at my hairline. I just don’t know if it’s worth it to lose my hair to clear my face, you know? They say that it’s temporary, but it’s very visible, and it makes me very uncomfortable.
I’m just generally uncomfortable these days, actually. My joints got super achy, and I’m also having some abdominal pain and really awkward, painful GI issues. Again, can’t say if they’re caused by the Accutane, but things are certainly not the same in my gut since I started the medicine.
About a month ago, my dermatologist recommended that I knock my dose back down. I tried that. No changes. So, I tried taking the pill only every other day. I still wasn’t happy about the side effects. So, I’ve just stopped the medication for now. Unfortunately, my face has started to break out again, especially around my mouth, which makes me feel so pretty. But I’m just not certain I want to continue. I’ve got an appointment at the end of the month to check in, and I plan to discuss all of this. We’ll see where we go from there.
I’ve suspected for a long time that there’s an underlying cause to this rosacea – hormones, maybe, or something to do with my gut, or maybe even my thyroid. Maybe that will be my next step. But for now, I’ll just be here, obsessively applying lotion and hoping that my stomach settles down and I can wear my contacts again one day.
I wonder how many times this year I will be called upon to grieve.
How many times will I grieve for the world, for senseless violence and gleeful cruelty and hatred turned into policy? And how many for my corner of it?
My uncle died yesterday after a short battle with aggressive cancer. He was a good man, though like so many others he wasn’t at his best all the time. I remember a year when he pretended to pour beer on my birthday cake. I also remember singing with him, seeing him smile and laugh and just be there with our family at my parents’ basement karaoke bar, which a family friend lovingly titled “Club Doozie’s.”
That family friend passed away in the fall, after a long battle with aggressive cancer.
Graham lost his aunt in the summer. Her daughter, sick in the end-stages of aggressive cancer, made it to the funeral, and died only a few days later.
And the big one. My dad.
My dad has cancer. I don’t know that he’d like me putting it out there, and to be fair it isn’t my news or my diagnosis to share. But he is mine. And my fear and my grief belong to me, too. He’s never even broken a bone, despite years of sports and motorcycles. His prognosis is good, as far as we know, but to see him struggling with this, to know that cancer might take him from me, feels like something out of a story. Not something out of my own life.
It’s the shock, I think, always. Even if you see it coming. It’s the shock, that moment of “this can’t be happening,” that drags you into the dark.
Right now, we’re living through a regime that wants us shocked. They want us so wrapped up in the news cycle, in atrocities and trauma and broken laws, that we don’t have the space for any other reaction. But grief is a reaction.
Grief is resistance.
To grieve in the face of such abject and inhuman malice, to be soft, to feel pain, that is resistance. To be sad when they want you to be scared, and to feel tears when they want you to feel your heart beat fast in your chest, that is resistance.
And grief is strength. To look sadness and tragedy in the eye and keep going, to feel deeply even when it hurts, to allow yourself that time and space and know that you have to feel it to get through it, that is strength.
This is not the post I’d intended to write today. Or, yesterday, as it were, but the day got away from me. I was going to write about my word of the year for 2026. It’s “LISTEN,” by the way.
But I guess it still works, doesn’t it? I’m up at 4:00 a.m. with a cold and a sinus infection, unable to sleep, taking this quiet time to write, listening to what my brain and my soul need – to get this down on paper, to get it out of my head. I’m listening to my grief, and letting it take its course. When I feel a little better, I’ll listen to my heart, and allow it to lead me this year – to the people I love, to the life I’m building, to the quiet, fallow places that help you grow.
And on that journey, I’ll keep listening to my grief, too. I’ll listen, and I’ll let it open me up like a wound and I’ll bleed out sadness and love, and I’ll share that love with everyone I can.
Because what else can any of us do, in a time like this?
Here’s good:
There is something so surreal and so absolutely,
achingly,
magically,
transcendently beautiful
about watching my mama rock
her granddaughter – my daughter – to sleep.
My heart can barely hold it.
And I know:
It’s not the wars that will keep us safe,
that will keep us going.
It’s the women.
A Virginia Writer's Diary 