Back to Working

12:36 AM (of Thursday, June 5th, 2025)

I'm back home at my parent's place and working again. My sleep schedule is still a bit messed up, as I was on the west coast for a week, and even there my sleep schedule was messed up. The past few days I've been falling asleep at around 5-6 AM, and then waking up at around 10-11 AM. I've still been able to work and get things done in time, I'm really grateful to be able to work from home.

In my spare time, I would usually be reading manga or watching anime or something, even though I think it's a waste of time, these are habits I haven't been able to break away from yet, but of course for the past 1.5 months I've been fixated on recovering from facial aging due to minoxidil. So I would spend hours every single day just reading different posts, talking to people, all related to recovering from minoxidil damage. I've read hundreds of posts. Some people recovered, some haven't, others partially recovered and have some slight issues left over. I'm still going through a recovery phase, and doing everything I can every day.

But yeah, facial healing is mostly passive I would say. It's like a wound healing. Serendipitously, I was injured while fasting a coupe of weeks ago. I was wearing this bracelet, and it plucked a piece of hair out, this caused inflammation and this one part of my wrist turned into a swollen blister. I think it turned red first, and then a blister started forming, and then as I was doing something I accidentally hit the blister causing it to pop, then it turned into a scab in another day or two. All this was very rapid, all happening in around 5 days.

After the scab formed and disappeared, it left this circular reddish/pinkish mark, which used to be wider, but has been shrinking over time. Now the wound and red spot are very small, but there's discoloration still, and some blemishes that make it obvious there was a wound here. So even now, this wound is still healing. These kinds of wounds are supposed to be some of the most rapid healing that our body can do, and yet even after a couple of weeks, this wound is still not fully healed. Our face rebuilding takes even longer, it takes months for any visible change.

So this is why I'm still in fear, because of the anecdotes of people posting that they haven't recovered even after months or years. How do I know that I will recover in a few months time? I don't. One thing does separate me from them though, it's that I have experienced any recovery at all. These same people who say they haven't recovered in months or years, say they haven't experienced any recovery. Although, some also do say they recovered partially. But yeah, it is fascinating that there are any people who don't experience any recovery whatsoever, and I am reading through a thread like that now.

There is this one person who created a forum thread who experienced deep heavy eye bags from minoxidil. They likely experienced other side effects as well, but they only uploaded a photo of their eyes, and the thread is about their eye bags. I don't doubt that they experienced facial aging all around, not only their eyes, but they are only fixated on their eyes in this thread. Anyway, I'm reading through their posts, this was back in 2012, and they are making updates every single week about the creams they used, techniques they used, stuff like that to recover from this eye damage. I'm about 6 weeks reading about his progress, so I don't know what happens later, but so far he has experienced 0 improvement.

That eye bag part is fascinating to me, because it was one of the things that instantly went away for me. Yes, I did use creams and stuff on my eyes, I did cheat, but that cured it. It literally cured my eyes after 1-2 applications. Some users reviewing the product, who did not experience minoxidil eye bags but bought it just for general usage, are saying they have to apply it every day to make their eye bags go away. For me, I just applied it 1-2 times, and I haven't used it since. It's been over a month since I last used it probably, my eye bags are still completely gone.

What hasn't gone away for me yet are my nasolabial folds. They do disappear under certain lighting, all the lighting I take these before / after photos in have them disappearing, but they are still there in other lighting and environments. My stretchier skin is still there, any time I make any slight expression with my mouth, my face makes these creases, this wasn't there before. Lastly, my derpy look is still there, this one is hard to describe, but I just look "off" to me in a lot of selfies and other photos, this could be due to the nasolabial folds and stretchier skin. Anyway, if these three issues were to be resolved, I'd be so happy.

Anyway, the past week I was in vacation in Seattle and Vancouver. Sadly I couldn't enjoy it as much due to my personal issues. I'm sure I made it an unhappy event for my parents since we sometimes argued and yelled, all about my appearance which I was extremely unhappy with. I hope they had a good and happy time though. My parents will not be around forever, so I should definitely enjoy my time with them while they are here.

Anyway, that was my day today.