Every week through Lent, a writer will reflect on a journey through a wilderness to an unexpected grace. Here a poet describes how humiliation and sickness led her to take a different path

A rejection, this time from Rada. It comes on a Wednesday. My boyfriend – call him R – visits at the weekend. We are on the pavement by Green Park; I am fretting about the track line of acne that has erupted down the side of my nose. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been crying about the rejection. He laughs. Greasy tears. Then he says: no one notices a few spots, but there are other things … and trails off. Like what? Like your moustache. The traffic lights change and we cross.

I have fine, blonde hair all over my face; recently, it’s been thickening on my upper lip. I’ve been trimming it with scissors and have spoken of it to no one (the shame). I’ve been telling myself that it doesn’t show. I was wrong. R and I break up, but tryst every few months. I long for him in between, but know not to write, or phone, or ask for anything at all. Instead, I subsist on slivers and scraps of ­affection. Rejection becomes a mode of being: Lamda, Webber Douglas, Central – recalls, then nothing. I stop eating. At night, I can’t get warm. I curl up in bed wrapped in jumpers, and shiver, and ache. I finger my bones and my sore skin, the lumps of rosacea that boil across my cheeks. It takes hours to get to sleep.