Practical advice: how do I live with physical disfiguration?

[image: proharetic human]

A. wrote: Living each day is being very hard for me. I try to fight low self-esteem due to acne scars. I have tried several dermatological treatments and it seems that little can be done anymore. I think the only thing left for me is acceptance.

Of all the religions and philosophies, Stoicism is the most convincing to me so far.

Honestly, it would be great if someone like you would dedicate some advice to people who, like me, suffer from this bad luck. How does one — from a Stoic point of view — overcome a serious physical and psychological problem such as acne scars?

Your situation is a particular version of a more general problem: how do we live with aspects of our physical body that we don’t like? In your case it is acne scars. In my case is having been overweight since I was a kid. In the case of a close friend of mine it is to be confined to a wheelchair. Some of these conditions are more manageable than others, obviously. But they all present similar psychological issues.

I can (and have!) changed my diet and exercise regimes, but there is likely something in my genetics and physiology that puts a limit to how much progress I can make or sustain. My friend is lucky enough to live in a century where technologically advanced wheelchairs are readily available (if you can afford them), but he is still greatly confined in his movements. And your case has to do with the psychological impact of aesthetic judgments about one’s face.

Frequently, these cases trigger low self-esteem because we somehow feel responsible for the problem, even though our responsibility is, in fact, very limited or entirely non-existent. The low self-esteem actually results from internalizing other people’s (or society’s at large) judgments, particularly when it comes to body image.

Of course, it would be easy to just say that society is wrong and leave it at that. But even if that were the case, that sort of dismissal is not very helpful because it is pretty difficult to change deeply entrenched societal attitudes. It isn’t a battle to be fought by just one person.

The Stoic alternative, of course, is to focus on the other side of the issue: your own judgments which, unlike the judgments of other…