Enter Caleb

[Content Warning added 20Jan2014 for trichotillomania aka hair pulling.]

It's good that I haven't blogged for a long time. It means I'm not obsessing anymore, and that's a step forward. I'm getting to a point now where I'm mostly reasonably comfortable with my appearance. There's a long way to go still, but my god I've come so far. Scabs are few and far between. Freckles are re-invading my whole face. Hyperpig is gradually fading. Life is continuing, without me needing to think about my complexion every day. Major pat on the back to me. I do still mess with it - maybe for a few seconds every other day or so. This time last year I would not have thought it possible to pick so little. I would have laughed at anyone who suggested it - right before crawling into a hole to await death by intense shame.

On Saturday July 21st, I met Caleb. I'm not going to go into details about him, that's what my diary proper is for. I don't write about dtM stuff in there, and I don't write about life stuff in here. So this is the part of last night that isn't going to make it into my handwritten diary. It's dtM stuff and it belongs here.

Last night, Caleb was filling me in on some of his 'oddities', as he affectionately terms them. The best way I could describe them is as OCD-type impulses and fixations. Nothing debilitatingly severe, but a liberal sprinkling of mild-to-moderate symptoms. He gets the symmetry thing sometimes, and can also get pretty twitchy when certain things are not as they 'should' be. He talked about it for a little while, then expressed an interest in any little oddities that I might have.

Of course dtM came instantly to mind. But I’ve only known him a month and I was a long was from ready to discuss that. So I went for something similar – something that probably happened because I am picking so much less now, and my crazy is looking for an alternative escape route. I guess I was sort of sounding Caleb out, to see if it would be worth trying to explain the dtM thing to him at a later date.

I made it funny, to start with. I related how I was trying to wax my legs for the first time on Sunday night, and making a right hash of it, and then tried to do my bikini line and dropped the wax strip directly between my legs, like a right klutz. Sticky side down and everything. Well it was meant to be soluable in warm water, but that claim was apparently a fine joke on the part of the makers, because I ended up having to shave down there to get it all out. I hadn’t wanted to do that. Stubble itches. Within twenty-four hours I could feel it growing back down there, and I guess it affected me so badly because I’m rarely doing my face these days. It drove me nuts. Here’s how I explained it to Caleb:

“Okay, so I have this thing about my skin. If anything’s stuck on it, or in it or under it, I just can’t stand the feeling of it. It makes me go totally batshit and I need to get it out. Like when you get a splinter or something? If I have a splinter, I can feel it there, and it’s got to go. It doesn’t matter how deep I have to dig or how much I make myself bleed, it’s just GOT to go, I can’t stand feeling it there.”

“Oh god, yes,” he replied fervently. The look on his face told me that he was right there with me and knew exactly how I felt on the subject. It wasn’t just sympathy, it was an instant understanding from someone who felt the same way. It was wonderfully encouraging. I went on,

“So when this stubble started growing back, it felt like a thousand tiny splinters down there. It was absolutely driving me insane. I just had to get it all out. And so that’s why my tweezers are in my room.”

He winced, hard. “Ohmigod. That must have hurt like hell.”

“Well, yeah,” and I shrugged, “but that wasn’t the point. I just needed to get it out, and nothing else mattered.”

We hugged. There was quiet for a while. And then he said, “Have you ever heard of Trich?”

I froze. He knew Trich? What other OCD-related disorders did he know? “Trichotillomania?” I said guardedly.

“Eh?” He looked confused.

“You mean, hair pulling?” I clarified.

“Yeah, yeah!” He sat up properly. “I used to do it all the time, mostly in my teens, especially when I was stressed out or something. I told a friend one day and she was like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s Trich,’ which was how I found out it was an actual condition. I’d just sit there and pull strands out of this particular patch for hours, sometimes I’d do it in front of the mirror. Spots are another thing, too. Like especially those little subdermal ones? I just can't stop fiddling with them, they irritate me so much, I just end up digging them out. None of my ex-girlfriends ever got why I'd get so pissed off with them if they pointed out a spot on my nose..."

I was utterly and completely rabbit-in-the-headlights frozen. He didn't look like a dtManiac, but then neither do I anymore - not much anyway - and he sure as hell was talking like one. Part of me wanted to grab him and squeal and jump up and down shouting "Me too, me too!" but the majority of me absolutely could not move or speak. So I just sat and stared at him as he reeled off all this stuff that sounded as though it came directly from my own head. I guess I was sort of spellbound. It wasn't just what he was saying. I couldn't believe his courage in feeling able to say it. He totally dumbfounded me. In that moment, he was the most amazing person on earth. I was in awe.

I was also staring with the most huge eyes ever, and Caleb broke off, studying me. "Are you okay?" he asked. "You look really shocked."

"No, no -" That was the last thing I wanted, to make him think I didn't understand. "I just... I..." Words were not my friends. They had deserted me. I looked away in confusion.

"I think I've struck a nerve here, haven't I," he said.

I nodded, taking a deep breath and focussing very hard on the bedsheet. I couldn't look at him. "If," I said in a low voice, "if you'd met me this time last year, you wouldn't... My face was such a mess."

I made myself look up at him. I think we were both holding our breath. I'd been absurdly scared to look him in the eye, but the second I did it was just, Yes. Yes, this person understands. I could see him thinking the same thing. It was an enormous relief. Hugging him was like coming home.

"My god," he said, "we even share the same neuroses."

I told him about dtM, showed him my stickers. He just got it, instantly, without me even having to explain. He hadn't known that it was a condition like Trich, but it didn't surprise him in the least.

"I think it's amazing, what you've done," he said. "Especially that you've done it for yourself and not because of somebody else or anything. You are genuinely amazing."

Was there ever a moment more perfect? I think not.

Angry

And now about Tom.

Sweet, cute, wonderful Tom.

Tom is a self-obsessed dick who can't even kiss me because he's too afraid to take his face away from the grindstone for long enough to do it.

I want a guy who is man enough to actually take me to bed. All he wants me for is to bat my eyelashes and wank his ego. While he pursues 'more important' things.

Bored now, sweetheart.

stopped counting stickers

WARNING, Bear with Sore Head

Man, did I ever get up on the wrong side of my bed this morning.

I don't know which came first, the pickies or the grumpies, but it's growing increasingly obvious to me that the two go hand in hand. Being grumpy makes me pick and picking makes me grumpy. No, that's inaccurate. Picking chills me out. Knowing what I've done, AGAIN, afterwards, is what gives me the grump.

My mum tried for years to tell me that I pick more when I get stressed out. Of course at the time I neither listened nor cared, and I certainly wasn't grateful for the observation. I only wanted her to shut the fuck up and stop reminding me how ugly I was.

Kelvin came home last night. He's been away for a week on holiday. I was looking forward to him coming home, and then when he did... I don't know. I had been hoping he would be as glad to see me, I guess, which was dumb, because who the hell is happy about coming back from holiday? Especially late at night after travelling all day. And then I felt really stupid and pathetic for wanting it to be a bigger deal than it was. For acting like a dumb puppy waiting for its master to come home.

I quarrelled with Leanne during the day, too, as much as anyone can quarrel with her, that is. She did her usual trick of turning into a total martyr at the first sign of crossed words. It drives me nuts when she does that. But maybe that's just because I'm cruising for a fight and she won't give me one. In any case, she'll now make a point of staying out of my way for a couple of days, like, "Oh, I'm just going to go to my room and listen to some music... I can see you're not in the mood for company, I might go out for a walk or something... I don't need to leave for another half hour but I'm just going to go sit in the car..." And make a big deal of putting herself out to accomodate what she thinks I want or need.

Lightbulb going on my head a second... Maybe she doesnt' do that to annoy me, or to prove that she's the nicer person, or to try and make me feel guilty. Maybe it's just that I'm not very pleasant to be around when I'm in a bad mood, and she doesn't like to come right out and say "I'm getting the fuck out of here so I don't have you put up with you being a moody bitch at me."

Marvellous. So actually, I'm the big bad. Now I'm even grumpier.

This is getting kind of off-topic. This is meant to be a blog for my dtMania, not for random rantings about whoever happens to have pissed me off at the time. That's what my diary is for. Although actually, I haven't written in my diary since I started this blog...

Anyway. I picked. Again. After four days Tue-Fri, I had a 'miss' day on Sat and a big fat 'X' day yesterday. I had a nasty sore one on my forehead and it just had to go. And then, because I was grumpy, I moved on to the next, and the next...

If I had stuck to my regime of look-free and touch-free, I wouldn't have even known it was there. I shouldn't have even known it was there. But it was so much easier not to look/touch when I knew there was nothing there but scabs. After a couple of days pick-free, I started obsessing over what fresh zits might be popping up all over my face... and by Sunday night I was back in front of the bathroom mirror, doing what I do.

Urgh.

I have come a long way. And now it feels like all I have been doing is stripping away the fur and the flesh on this thing that has me in its grasp, and so now it is just a cold hard shiny metal skeleton, and I can see it for exactly what it is, but that's no help because no matter how hard I struggle and wriggle, its claws are digging into me relentlessly and I simply cannot get away, however hard I may fight. I really feel like I am just fighting, fighting, fighting and not getting anywhere anymore. And I am tired. I am tired of the constant effort of fighting this monster. I may as well just quit wriggling and let it eat me. At least then I wouldn't be perpetually waiting to fuck up. Let's just get the fucking up over with, and go back to our daily lives.

clever girl, way to go; zero stickers in a row

A Sudden Flash of Realisation

Okay. I'm not healed. I'm a long way from it. In fact, I probably never will be fully healed, in the sense that I will always have to guard against a relapse, most likely for the rest of my life. But I suddenly realised, today, how much progress I've made.

I was passing the mirror in the hall this morning - okay, I know I'm supposed to be look-free. But I'm glad I took that quick glance in passing, because otherwise I wouldn't have seen what I did. A really huge and disgusting scab that I inflicted on myself on Monday evening, was healed to the point of just being a big flake of white skin attached to my face, and a couple of smaller ones were the same. I haven't been touching and I haven't washed my face since I showered on Tuesday, so the drying skin never got knocked off. I never even knew about it, and I was probably walking around looking like that for all of Thursday in school. It looked WEIRD. I picked it off, just because it genuinely wasn't a scab anymore and looked like I had eczema on my face or something.

The picking felt really strange.

And that was when I realised that I hadn't picked - I'm talking about actual fingernail scab-picking, not popping spots - for ages and ages. I hadn't even thought about it. The compulsion to squeeze out my comedones and clogged pores was so strong, and it was taking all my willpower to resist it, I just completely forgot all about picking at scabs.

Given that picking scabs is how this all started, that's a pretty big deal. As a little kid, ie birth to puberty, I was picking ALL the friggin time - face, arms, legs, body, I didn't care. That was the original habit. Popping zits came later, in my teens. I'm still struggling to rid myself of that. But the original habit is pretty much licked.

That's amazing. Not just for itself, but also for the message it gives me about the other half of this problem:

I can do it. I can do it. I can do it.

clever girl, way to go; three stickers in a row

A Lighter and a Pack of Twenty

[Content Warning added 20Jan2014 for comparisons to quitting smoking.]

Why is it that I can never get onto the StopPickingOnMe! forum on my lunch hour? It works okay at ten to nine in the a.m. But one ó clock - forget it. I wanted to get on there to quote from a thread that really inspired me a couple of days ago. Somebody was making the point that part of what makes the habit so hard to break, is that we carry our face and our hands with us everywhere we go, and there's not much avoiding mirrors either. We have to be strong all the time, every second of every day, because half a second's weakness is all it takes to muff it up. It's like a smoker trying to quit, whilst keeping a lighter and a pack of twenty in his back pocket the whole time. Or like an alcoholic trying to dry out with a six-pack still in the fridge.

It was an amazing relief to me to realise the truth in that perspective, because I felt so down on myself when Kelvin quit smoking pretty much just like that *snap*, and left me to eat his habit-breaking dust. I don't want to say it was easier for him because that's probably not true. Nicotine-dependency is a chemical addiction, and that's a can of worms that I can't claim to know anything about. But he was able to approach his problem with the tactic of putting his habit out of his reach, at least by a five minute walk to the shop. To fall off his wagon, he would have had to make a conscious decision to put his shoes and jacket on and walk to the little corner-store for a packet of fags. All I had to do was absently put my hand to my face when I was thinking about something else. The feeling of all those little lumps and bumps under my fingertips drove me instantly nuts.

I don't wish to downplay Kelvin's achievement, though - his addiction wasn't always so far out of his reach, to be fair. His workmates smoke like chimneys, and during the day he could have sponged a cigarette in less time than it took to ask. But he didn't. So all credit to him. But recognising the reasons why breaking my habit is difficult for me, all adds strings to my bow when it comes to being stood beside a mirror, trying to find the willpower to not look.

That's what it comes down to in the end, I think. Not looking. I'm learning more about how to be pickfree, all the time. Every time I fall down, I learn something new about how and why it happened, and how to avoid that particular pitfall next time. I started out, at New Year, by deciding not to pick. That didn't go so well, because I could feel the spots every time I touched my face and it was torture not to deal with them. I fell down. At the beginning of March, I resolved to combat the problem by going touch-free - this was still just over a week before I found dtM on Wikipedia and learned all about it, before I had heard of 'touch-free' as a phrase. That went pretty well for quite a while. Sixteen days, w00t! But I could still see the most obvious of the little bastards every time I looked in the mirror, and in the end that wore me down too.

It's like a weed. It needs taking out at the root or it will just grow back. And the root of the problem is not the compulsion. The compulsion is the symptom. The root is the obsession. I need to remove the obsession from my mind. I need to deny myself all contact with my face - both tactile and visual.

If I don't see it and I don't touch it, I won't know it's there to scratch it.

It's hard-line approach. But I've realised that I've been doing this thing half-assed and it hasn't been working - not in the long term, anyway. It's easy to think, when I have seven or eight stickers in a row, that I'm strong enough to just look without picking. And probably, for that one time, I am. But then over the next few days I look more and more often, and the obsession builds, and the compulsion gets stronger... And then I fall down flat on my blotchy weeping face. And I think, "Dammit! How did that happen?" Like an idiot.

Even when I just want to look to see how amazingly well I'm doing, and admire the clearness of my skin, I know that my eyes will uncontrollably zoom in on the tiniest little blemish disrupting the harmony of my complexion. And when I find one - which I will, even if I have to pretend to wonder if that freckle might really be a blocked pore - when I find one, that little place inside my mind will start its relentless irresistible itching, slowly driving me insane until I gouge the flesh from my face and leave a gaping red sore there.

So, look-free. It's the future. And I'm going to be 100% touch-free too, as opposed to March when I was washing my face three time a day and running my hands all over that maddening-ness. If I really want to wash my face, I'll take a shower. My complexion isn't actually greasy. It doesn't need washing every day, regular washing with water only dries my skin out and makes it want to produce more oil, which causes more spots. I could moisturise - but then I'd have my hands all over my face and I'd be back to square one. And why bother to constantly dry it out and then remoisturise, when I could just leave it alone to be perfectly happy at its natural balance?

No touching. No looking. If I can break the obsession then the compulsions will take care of themselves. This is as close as I can possibly get to throwing the lighter and the pack of twenty off a cliff. My face needs to stop existing to me.

clever girl, way to go; one sticker in a row

Not the Best of Weeks

[Content Warning added 20Jan2014 for thoughts of self-harm.]

I haven’t had any stickers on my calendar for over a week now. I’ve only had one so far this month. One lonely sticker on the second of April, followed by a very long stretch of blankness. Most of those blank spaces should in fact have big nasty black crosses on them, on account of actual mirror time rather than just non-visual fiddling. But I don’t draw those crosses on until I’ve earned another sticker to follow them up with – it’s just too depressing to look at otherwise, and I’ll only end up feeling even more discouraged than I already do.

I don’t know what the hell happened. It was a bit on-and-off for the last half of March, after I fell off my sixteen-sticker straight. I figured I’d get back into it again at the start of April – new month, clean sheet on the calendar, no discouraging misses to look at. But the first day in April was a miss. The second was a hit… and then, miss X X X X X X miss.

Where does willpower come from? Why is it that sometimes it is right there, keeping me strong, and then at other times I just can’t find any resolve anywhere? This last week I’ve woken up every morning promising myself that I’ll be good, but even as I make that promise I know it’s a lie. And sure enough, ten minutes later, I’m trancing out in front of the mirror. How can I make myself mean it, when I promise myself not to pick? Why does something which IS my choice, feel so much like something that happens to me which I have no control over? I can screw up my eyes and make fervent promises to myself until kingdom come – why is it that sometimes they feel real, and other times I just can’t make them seem solid in my head, even as I’m saying them?

I thought about going back to cutting. But I don’t think I’m going to do that again. For one thing, warmer weather is coming now and I don’t want to be stuck in long sleeves. I also don’t want to take a jumper off without thinking and then suddenly, say, my mother, erupts into screaming hysterics at the sight of my mutilated skin. And then I keep thinking of Kelvin saying, “You do realise that’s really stupid, don’t you?” Yes. Yes, I do. I don’t really want to go back to it.

One thing that has really pleased me, though, is that my freckles are coming back. I had a bit of a mirror-fest a couple of nights ago, but as my skin has gotten a lot clearer lately, there wasn’t a whole lot to mess with, so I didn’t do much damage – and my other calendar-crosses were for quick-picks at the spot which was annoying me most at the time. So, although I have some scabby marks right now, my complexion as a whole is much improved – the pink hyperpigmentation is beginning to recede, and my freckles are coming back, just under my eyes and below my hairline. They should be sprinkled right across my forehead and cheeks, if photographs of me as a child are anything to go by, but it’ll be a long time – months, maybe years, I should imagine – before they’re back in full force.

Talking of photos of me when I was ickle, I was looking through the family album this weekend and I made a couple of little discoveries. The first was a picture of me when I was a babe-in-arms, probably six months old or less. I had a little scab on my left cheek. Even as a tiny baby, I was scratching at myself! I knew it had been a habit for as long as I could remember, but to see that I had been doing it at such a young age was a bit of a shock. But secondly, I found a school photo of myself when I was about seven. It was a summer picture, I was wearing my blue chequered school dress and my grinning face was plastered in freckles – and not one red mark. It is, quite literally, THE ONLY school (or even nursery!) photo of me with a clear complexion. In every single one of the others, I have a scabby mark somewhere on my face. But this one – beautiful. I’ve brought it home with me to stick on my bedroom wall, as something of a goal to aim for I guess. I want those freckles back.

I miss Polly. I want to tell her about all of this, so much, because I think she is possibly the one person who might take me seriously, and believe that it isn’t as easy for me as ‘just stop’. I could really do with talking to her. But she is about to start her final term of uni, and she doesn’t have time for cross-country visits. I don’t really want to talk about this over the phone or MSN. And the other thing is – I sort of want to surprise her. It’s a really motivating idea to think of getting off the train and hugging her and hearing her say, “Oh my god, Tee, what happened to your face? You look really well!” I practically hug myself with anticipation every time I think of it. And I have got to make it happen if it bloody well kills me.

clever girl, way to go; zero stickers in a row

When You Fall Off A Horse...

I dipped it. Saturday morning. I had a total monster coming up on my forehead and it had been driving me nuts for two or three days. Hadn't even come to a head or gone red; it just sat there beneath my skin, feeling sore and getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Utter torture.

Friday was a bit of a stressful day. I was near the end of a really long blogpost, and suddenly the page refreshed for apparently no reason and I lost everything I'd written. I was sure I was going to go straight to the mirror when I got home, but luckily my other housemate Leanne and her boyfriend were home and that helped distract me. We grabbed a couple of beers and went down the park. Getting out of the house and away from the mirrors was exactly what I needed. By the time we got back home again, Kelvin was back from work and his sister and her boyfriend were there too. So we had a right houseful and it was a good laugh. The crisis was temporarily averted.

Saturday morning I felt okay-ish. I was thinking about doing my arm again just in case, but I didn't really want to do that unless I had to. I was slightly hungover/still a bit tiddly from Friday night. I went to the bathroom and thought, "I'll just look..." I could see the head coming up and that made me want to touch it and then whoops...

After sixteen days, it was enormously satisfying. And then I was like, "Damn." I got the hell out of the bathroom, quick.

So that's how I fell off the wagon. But as soon as I did, I thought, "The most important thing is that I don't use this one little slip-up as an excuse to massacre myself. It's absolutely crucial that I don't do that." That's why I backed off so fast. From that moment until bedtime it was more important than ever that I be strong, in the face of the fact that I wasn't going to get a sticker that night whatever I did. It would be so easy to decide that no sticker = doesn't matter. But it would matter. It would drag me down from reasonably pretty (finally!) to scabbed-up mess. And that would have a more damaging effect on my continued resolve than any number of missed stickers.

...So that's how I got back on the wagon :)

Peach
xxx

clever girl, way to go; three stickers in a row

Being Flea

[Content Warning added 20Jan2014 for use of ableist slurs.]

I've just had a bit of a mental epiphany, after reading this in a post by Angelina on the StopPickingOnMe! forum:

I'm 24 and I've been battling this curse since I was 2! Yes, two years old. I've noticed many people (even the textbooks agree) begin with this disorder in adolescents or teen years, but I'm the oddball. From the time I was learning my first words I was also tearing myself apart-literally. I would pick at sores or mosquito bites, or obsessively scratch at my legs and always claim to be "itchy".
http://www.stoppickingonme.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=43989#43989

It was so familiar, I had to check the name of the poster to make sure it wasn't something that I had posted whilst too hideously drunk to remember, lol. It reminded be of being Flea.

When I was five-and-a-half, my dad was given a kitten for his birthday. The kitten caught fleas, real bad. We had to have the whole house treated. I had flea-bites all up my legs, and they itched like crazy. I was already scratching my face by that point, but it wasn't a proper mess like it got to be in my teen years - I usually only had one or two marks, and sometimes I was completely clear. You could still see my freckles back then.

These bites on my legs drove me nuts. I scratched them til they bled but they still itched, so I scratched them more. I was literally clawing chunks of flesh out of my calves and shins. It didn't occur to me to care how it looked; I was a completely unselfconscious child. It was summer, so I wore my school dress down to my knees and knee-high white little-girl socks. I would put my hands down my socks and scratch until blood blossomed on the cotton like red roses. Then, when the scabs formed in the cotton of the sock, I would pull my socks down so the scabs tore off. They would bleed like crazy, trickling down my legs into the tops of my socks.

Totally unselfconscious. I ran around in the playground and at the park with my socks bunched round my ankles, the whole mess on display. I wasn't even thinking about it. I was too busy playing at being Indiana Jones.

I was playing in the park on my own one day, when a small cluster of girls who were a year or two older than me came over. They asked me what was wrong with my legs.

I was so young and so naíve. It didn't occur to me to lie.

"Flea bites," I replied.

I have always regarded that day as the starting-point of my school career as a social retard. I was known as 'Flea' from that day onward until I left that school when I was nine (we moved house, for unrelated reasons). Kids would run up to me in the playground, jab me, then run off and jab someone else, shouting "Flea germs, flea germs!" It was a game that never seemed to get old. I guess that after that, after we moved away, I had just been an outcast and a weirdo for too long to work out how to fit in. It wasn't fleas after that, but it was always something else.

Back when it all kicked off, I don't think I connected the social problem with the scratching problem. As far as I was concerned, I got picked on because I was unlucky enough to get flea bites. Later, I would add the reason that it was because I had been too stupid to make something up when they asked me about it. I should have lied. I don't think it ever occured to me - right up until writing this now! - that nobody would have noticed the bites if I hadn't scratched them.

My god! How the f*$& could I have gone seventeen years without realising that!?

Talk about your epiphanies... I guess that sort of makes the social retardation thing my fault in a way... dtM was actually responsible for making my childhood/teen social existence a total hell, and I never realised til now...

It all started with those damn bites.

Peach
xxx

clever girl, way to go; fourteen stickers in a row

Self Image, one hundred and eighty degrees

An interesting thing has happened. I have remembered that I don’t much care how I look.

I have never really cared about my appearance. As a kid, I was far too busy having fun to worry what I looked like. I never had any Nike trainers or Reebok joggers like the kids from trendy families, and whenever I brought it up my parents would go off on one about scandalous wastes of money. I was told so often that other people’s opinions didn’t matter (but catch me trying to leave the house without brushing my hair – “Get back in here! What will everyone think!?”).

Irony aside, it’s a philosophy I’ve always grown up with. “It doesn’t matter what others think of you, and it’s what’s on the inside that counts.” A lot of people scorn that as a load of Little House on the Prairie bullcrap. I really took it to heart.

So, unlike most dtManiacs it seems, I have never bothered to put on make-up every morning. It seems like a waste of time and effort to me. I’ll sometimes paint myself up a bit if I’m going out somewhere of an evening, if I feel like it. But there’s no way I could be bothered with it every morning. If other people have a problem with how I look au naturel, that’s their problem, not mine.

So it was only lately, when I started facing the fact that I had a problem that had spun way out of control, that I started obsessing over my looks. I found myself staring at girls on the bus who wore the latest clothes and perfect make-up and had immaculate hairstyles, and thought about getting my hair cut like theirs with that long floppy fringe, and buying some new clothes and make-up. I wanted to look like them. It was an absurd ambition. The floppy fringe in my eyes and face would have irritated me to screaming point, not to mention the tickling of hair on my cheeks making touch-freedom impossible. And frankly, at the moment I just plain can’t afford to spend that much money on clothing and cosmetics if I want to keep making my rent each month.

Logic had left the building. I just desperately, desperately wanted to feel attractive.

I don’t feel like that anymore.

My skin is clearing up. I have some spots, sure, but I think they may be because ‘that time of the month’ is coming up. I don’t know for sure if that’s the cause, because before now my skin has always been too much of a mess all month round for me to tell how my cycle affects it. I have been pretty spotty this last week, but now the last couple are going down and there aren’t any more coming up to replace them yet. My skin is reasonably clear for the first time since forever. With all the scabs out of the way, finally I can see the scarring I’ve given myself. I don’t have any deep pits or prominent marks, but my whole face is slightly mottled with pink all over. I’m hoping that will fade over time. But the main thing is – I don’t feel ugly anymore. I’m comfortable with my appearance, and I’ve stopped feeling desperate to be beautiful. Beauty be damned. I’ve got bigger fish to fry.

Peach
xxx

clever girl, way to go; thirteen stickers in a row

Emotional Blowout

[Content Warning added 20Jan2014 for use of ableist slurs and self-harm.]

The other thing that happened over the weekend was that I got a bit drunk on Saturday night and basically vomited my pent-up emotions all over Kelvin, in one huge unintelligible tear-streaked snot-caked globule. There were upsides and downsides to this.

Upsides:

1) He didn’t think I was gross, or if he did, it didn’t show.

2) He didn’t freak out when I showed him my arm.

3) He told me I was “working on the assumption that ‘pretty’ is something primarily to do with a person’s outsides” – it was really nice to hear him effectively say “Who cares how you look?”

4) I felt so much better for talking and I haven’t cut since – and still haven’t picked either.

5) Kelvin was quite drunk himself and doesn’t remember a damn thing.

Downsides:

1) I got the ‘so just stop’ response. He didn’t really understand – but then I didn’t really explain, I just vented.

2) He asked me if I realised how stupid it was to cut myself. Not in a spiteful way, I think he meant ‘pointless’ rather than ‘totally retarded’. I can see how pointless it looks from a logical point of view – pick or don’t pick, but why cut yourself? How does that make sense? I don’t know. But it did help me.

3) I’m pretty sure I failed completely at portraying the idea that I m struggling with a real problem that I am desperately looking to solve. I’m pretty sure I came over as an immature little emo fuckwit on a major attention-seeking bender.

4) Kelvin was quite drunk himself and doesn’t remember a damn thing.

Conclusions:

1) I have learned that, if I want to tell someone about this and actually get them to understand a little, I need to be sober, serious and calm when I tell them.

2) The emotional blowout was good for me. Days 1-10 = cutting every day but no picking. Night 10 = emotional vomiting. Days 11-12 = no cutting or picking. I feel kind of stable.

Peach
xxx

clever girl, way to go; twelve stickers in a row

Really Good Weekend

I went to the zoo with my friends on Sunday, and I did the coolest thing. I got my face painted. I would usually be way too self-conscious to let anyone else near my face, but I was at the ten-sticker mark and I was totally scab-free. I had quite a few spots, and they were annoying the hell out of me inside my brain, but at least I looked normal - other people get spots too. So I let the lady paint my face. I was choosing an animal to be, and I like cats but I didn't want to be a lion or a tiger because there were lots of lions and tigers already. The leopard wasa bit more obscure, but I thought, "I can't be a leopard, leopards have spots, I don't want someone to paint markings on my already over-markinged face, it'll look stupid." And then I remembered that I didn't have a load of big marks on my face anymore. So I got the leopard done. I had leopard-spots all over my face and I didn't feel paranoid about it, I felt great. I felt really liberated, that I could feel confident enough in my skin to actually deliberately paint fake spots onto it. And having the paint there was a major help in staying touch-free, as I didn't want to smudge it :) It was a really fantastic day.

Peach
xxx

clever girl, way to go; twelve stickers in a row

Here Goes

[Content Warning added 20Jan2014 for the following, all of which are perpetrated by myself: ableist slurs, fat shaming, flagrant disregard of (non-sexual) personal boundaries in the context of a romantic relationship, and prejudice against mental illness.  There is also content towards the end of the post pertaining to self-harm, before which I have inserted a marker 'discussion of self-harm begins here'.]

As posted on the www.facetheissue.com forum on Friday 9th March.

I have always, always, always picked at marks on my face, ever since I was old enough to co-ordinate my hands. Even as a little kid, in all my school photos except one I have a little (or big) scab somewhere on my face. I don't know if they started out as spots or what, but once they got there they would last for weeks because I would not leave them alone. When I was four or five, in my first year at school, my teacher used to tell me off for picking. I once got sent to the toilets with a tube of cream for a gaping sore on my nose where I'd picked a scab so deep that blood was welling up out of it. All the kids in my class were staring at me as I left the classroom. I felt so ashamed, but there I stood in the girls' toilets, alternately dabbing on cream and picking at the sore edges and telling myself that when I got bigger I would stop doing it. I realise, looking back, that feeling ashamed and unhappy didn't help me to stop, they only made the problem worse.

I guess it really became a big problem when I hit puberty and the spots started coming thick and fast. I picked all of them, constantly, and quickly discovered squeezing. I remember the first time I did it, in front of my bathroom mirror, and the little thrill of repulsion I felt. It frustrated me when some of them wouldn't pop because I felt like I just HAD to somehow make that sore bump go away - they always felt so much huger than they looked, as though they were practically engulfing my face. Sometimes if it wouldn't pop I would just squeeze and squeeze and squeeze until it was such a mess that the scab would come up green and slimy from infection. I tried not to let it get that bad because I hated going to school and facing the other kids looking like that. I learned the trick of sticking pins into stubborn pimples to break them open, sterlising the pin with my dad's lighter first to kill the everyday germs.

I knew I looked bad. But as I only had to see it when I was alone and looking in the mirror, I didn't really relate that to what other people saw when they looked at me. I wasn't the kind of kid who had a lot of friends in school, I had a couple of really good ones who would stick by me no matter what I looked like, but as far as the rest were concerned, I knew that my face could clear up magically overnight and they still wouldn't like me any better - I would still have the wrong hair and the wrong clothes, and like the wrong things. I would still be a social retard. So it didn't seem to matter. And anyway, somehow I just didn't connect the way I looked with what I was doing. I just told myself I was an unlucky teenager with really bad skin, and that one day I would eventually grow out of it.

Mostly I could get away with not dealing with it because I didn't have to see it. Occasionally it got brought home to me at unexpected moments. Little kids would ask me if I had chicken pox, and their mothers would go red and shush them, mumbling embarassed apologies. I would stoically pretend that it was fine. I didn't mind the kids' curiosity half so much as I minded the parents' embarassment. One time, when I was fifteen or so, I was shopping with my mother in a charity shop, and the plump and friendly old lady behind the counter said, "I hope you don't mind my saying, dear, but my grand-niece used to have problems with her skin, and you know there are lots of face creams and things out there that will really help a lot." I froze, like a rabbit in the headlights. My mother was watching to see how I would deal with it - she'd been telling me to stop picking pretty much since I was born. I wanted so badly to scream at the nosy old ***** to mind her own business and slam the door as I ran out in tears, but I have never been much good at expresssing negative feelings and there was no way I could ever have actually done it. I fixed a brittle smile onto my face, thanked her for the advice and left quietly, feeling utterly mortified. I wished I'd had the guts to reply with, "Hey, it's cool. While we're caring and sharing, did you know that there are lots of really good diets out there that would help you to not be such a sperm whale?" I was so angry that she had dared to pierce my litttle bubble of don't-see-it, don't-talk-about-it, don't-have-a-problem. She was only trying to be helpful.

The only person who didn't offend me when she said something - and she only ever mentioned it once - was my best friend Polly. I forget how we got onto the topic, we must have been talking about looks in some shape or form, one day at school when I was fifteen or sixteen I guess. She said, perfectly seriously and sincerely, "You really need to stop - you know," and motioned with her hand near her face. I began blustering an outright denial, but it was clearly a total lie and I gave it up. "Yeah, I know," I said, looking away. I knew it was my own fault, when I thought about it. I knew I should stop doing it. And figured I would. One day.

The worst thing was when I started doing it to my first girlfriend. She would sometimes get these big blocked pores on her nose, and in between kissing her I would squeeze them out. I made up this thing about her nose being really cute, and I would squeeze it when I said it. She didn't like me doing it and sometimes complained that I was hurting her. I loved her more than anything and I would have walked off a cliff for her in a heartbeat, but this one simple thing I couldn't stop. She wasn't very confident at standing up for herself and having a go at other people, so I continued to get away with it. I thought she didn't realise what I was actually doing, until one day when she had a proper lump of a spot on her nose, I popped it and she yelled "OW! Stop squeezing my spots!" I went bright red and mumbled, "Sorry." I decided then and there not to do it anymore. I think that promise lasted about three days. I knew she didn't like it, but it was as though my actions were totally beyond my control.

I was eighteen before I got my first boyfriend - I'd gone to a girls' school so I didn't really know any boys until I started working. I'd thought I was a lesbian, but it turned out I liked guys too, once I actually met some! By that point I was feeling a little more conscious of the way I looked, probably as a result of being friends with these other, pretty waitresses at work who wore make-up and did their hair and looked generally perfect, to my eyes. So when I got together with one of the chefs, I felt kind of bad that I didn't look as pretty as the other girls. I felt like he deserved better than someone who looked like me. So I decided to stop picking and see if I would start to look a bit nicer. That lasted approximately four hours. The itching inside my mind was so much stronger than any desire to look pretty. I went back to my old ways, and pushed away the beginnings of a nagging voice telling me that I wasn't in control. That, like an alcoholic, I was kidding myself that I could stop anytime I wanted to, but that in reality I was completely incapable of walking way from my habit.

Last summer, it really started to get me down. I think it was because I got this crush on my friend/housemate, Kelvin, who was amazingly good-looking, so when he turned me down I felt like I wasn't pretty enough for him. He could easily have a girl who looked like she belonged on the front cover of Vogue, so why on earth would he want one who looked like me? I stopped for three whole days in August. It was a mammoth achievement and an enormous mental strain. On the fourth day I went on a picking frenzy. I was a mess.

I tried repeatedly to stop after that, not just because of Kelvin, whom I still liked, but because I was now consciously aware of the fact that I wasn't in control of this habit, and I didn't want to be stuck with it forever. At twenty-one, the validity of the 'teenage acne' excuse was wearing thin. I was beginning to realise that I was going to have this problem forever if I didn't actively face it. I started to think: Before many more years have passed, I'm going to start getting some wrinkles. If I leave it until then before I stop, then I'm never going to know what it feels like to have smooth, clear skin on my face. Ever. I'll go from scabby to wrinkly to dead and that'll be the end of it.

I would really like to know how it feels to be pretty.

At the beginning of December I met with a professional contact about finding a new job. He had a bad complexion and a nervous disposition, and throughout the whole meeting he rubbed and picked at a bulbous cluster of spots above his left eyebrow. It looked really offputting. My first thought was, "Gross!" My second was, "My god, I do that all the time." It was an awful shock to see someone else doing it. Nobody says anything because they're too polite, so you think it's not noticable. That little incident showed me just how horribly obvious it is when you're messing with your facial acne in public. I started noticing people occasionally doing it on the bus, too, and I was totally horrified at just how visible it is. I took to gripping my left hand in my right when sat on the bus, gripping very hard so my left couldn't start unconsciously messing with my face while I was thinking about something else.

I tried to quit a few more times coming up to Christmas, but each time I would cave in as soon as something stressed me out a little. By New Year I felt totally helpless. I was starting to think about some kind of professional help, but I really didn't want to do that. I'm pretty prejudiced against shrinks and so forth. I feel like it would make me weak and stupid to have to go and see one, I feel like shrinks are for people who are too weak and stupid to sort their problems out themselves. I really do apologise for any offence I've caused with that comment, because I'm perfectly aware that it's an irrational and offensive prejudice. That's not what I THINK about professional help, it's just how I FEEL about it, if that makes any sense. I know that asking for help takes a great deal of strength, and that it's the stronger, smarter thing to do. But even knowing that, I still feel too proud and scornful and ashamed to do it.

At New Year, Kelvin quit smoking. I bought some smiley stickers for him to put on his calendar on days when he was 'good', and I got a packet for myself too. I felt like, knowing that he was having a tough time of it too, might help me to also quit my habit. Like we were in it together, and that I shouldn't let him down, even though he didn't know what I was doing. I got three stickers in a row, missed one, and then got four in a row. I was really pleased. Then I missed one, then got one, then missed three... and it all went to pot. The more I missed, the more I felt like I could never quit, which made me feel like I had no control, which made me more stressed, which made the feeling of needing to pick/squeeze stronger, which made me mess with my face, which made me miss another sticker... I got a few two-days and three-days in January and February. In February, I missed more than I got, by about a 60/40 ratio. Kelvin was slapping stickers up onto his calendar, left right and centre. I felt like such a failure. If he could quit his smoking habit, which was not only psychological but also a physical chemical addiction, then why was I so stupid and useless that I couldn't quit something which was only a psychological bad habit? Why didn't I have any willpower? Why was I so weak? Needless to say, my self-esteem was taking a battering.

It's hardest when I'm at my desk at work, or studying at college or at home. My right hand holds my pen, and my left constantly gravitates toward my face. It picks and rubs and squeezes without me even thinking about it. I have to actively concentrate in order to put it somewhere else, but as soon as I get into whatever I'm doing, it strays back again. A couple of times I've put socks over my hands when I'm doing my homework, like scratch mitts for a baby. It works, up to a point - I can't scratch, but I'm so used to scratching whilst writing my homework that the frustration builds up inside my head and drives me to distraction. Homework takes me twice as long because concentration is impossible. The resulting mental itching and frustration from having socks on my hands can get so bad that I just rip them off and go find a mirror, because I feel like I'll go crazy if I don't. Back to square one.

At the beginning of March, I was thinking about why I found it so hard to stop, and trying to understand why on earth it should be so impossible. I was thinking, "It's like some kind of sick obsession... the urge to fiddle with my face is such a strong compulsion..." And the words OBSESSION and COMPULSION just slammed together in my head like thunder. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. "Oh hell no," I thought to myself. Bad habit is one thing. Mental illness is a whole different ball game. I WILL NOT be mentally ill. I absolutely refuse.

[Content Warning added 20Jan2014: discussion of self-harm begins here and continues to the end of the post.]

That led to the implementation of desperate measures. My mother once told me that what I was doing was a kind of self-harm. I think she wanted to shock me out of it, but at the time I wasn't listening, and her nagging only stressed me out and made it worse. She stopped bothering after a while. But that comment stuck with me. Self-harm.

So here's the theory:
If I subconsciously feel a need to self-harm, then maybe I could satisfy that need by other means. Maybe if I was to self-harm in a different way, then I wouldn't feel the need to pick so much. If I can't stop outright, then maybe I could at least transfer onto a different bad habit. One that doesn't show on my face.

On the first of March, I took a disposable razor to my room and had at my upper left arm. I'm not even using proper blades; it's impossible to go deep using a disposable. They're surface scratches. I've no interest in causing myself serious injury. They bleed a little, and they sting, but it's nothing that will leave scars or anything. At bedtime on the seventh of March, I completed a full week's run of stickers. I had cut myself every day for a week, and I had stayed pick-free. And it was showing. But I couldn't allow myself to look too much. Mirrors are too big a temptation, which is why I don't keep one in my room. There's a wall-length one in our bathroom. I hate that mirror so much. I feel like I can't get away from it. I feel magnetised towards it every time I go in there. Some days I want to smash it, but I can't - it isn't mine, and it's expensive. Kelvin would only replace it, anyway. One mirror could be an accident - but two? Three? Four? Not a practical solution.

Yesterday, the eighth of March, was a college day. I was in the library on my own, working on my project, bored out of my brain. So, by way of a break from work, I googled "obsessive compulsive disorder" and browsed the Wikipedia entry it threw at me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsessive_compulsive_disorder

Some things seemed to fit and others didn't. The thing that decided it was this: "OCD sufferers do not actively want to perform their compulsive tasks, and experience no pleasure from doing so." And I thought - "That's not me." Because, I sort of like it. I sort of enjoy it. And that's a horribly embarassing admission.

I kept reading anyway, feeling a bit lost. If I didn't have OCD after all, then what was my excuse? Why was I being such a retard over it, why couldn't I just break a damn habit like any normal person? And then I got down to "related disorders" and saw the words "compulsive skin picking" and my heart flip-flopped. I immediately scrolled back up to get away from those awful words, sat stock-still for several seconds, and then cautiously checked over my shoulder (I kid you not) to see if anyone had seen what I was looking at. Nobody was paying the slightest bit of attention. I scrolled back down and clicked the link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_skin_picking

And it was me. It was one hundred percent me. I don't have a skin condition. I have a mental disorder.

So here I am, sharing my story with you fine people. I am on day nine and I have eight stickers, and I will continue to cut myself for as long as I need to. I am hopeful that, one day, I won't need to anymore. But for now, it's a plain choice between scabby arm or scabby face, and I'm happy to make the trade-off.

I'm scared of messing up. Because if I can't do it like this, if knowing that it's a mental illness and scagging my arm up don't do the trick, then I have no idea where to go from there. I'm frightened of missing one single sticker, because I know how disheartened and defeated that will make me feel, and I know that will make it so much harder to get back on track. I'm scared of being ugly forever. I'm scared that someone will notice what I'm doing to my arm and there will be a huge hullaballoo. I don't cut myself because I hate myself. I do it because it's the only way to even slightly appease the overwhelming compulsion to mutilate my face. How on earth could I make somebody understand that? They would think I was a total fruitloop. They would want me to go to a doctor - or worse, a shrink. And the stress of being caught out, of having a hundred and one questions fired at me, of being interrogated about this enormously embarassing personal problem... I'm not sure I could manage that stress and still keep pick-free.

I feel like such a freak...

Peach xxx

clever girl, way to go; eight stickers in a row