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