as small as a world and as large as alone

12:36pm March 31, 2012

I got a book on trichotillomania, for kindle, called The Hair Pulling Problem. I figured it would have more practical advice than some of the bullshit out there about dermatillomania. It’s pretty well recommended by people who have it.

And I shouldn’t be all that surprised. But apparently before you can even get to learning to avoid picking, you have to change all kinds of things about how you see it, and yourself. A lot of which boil down to the same ethical or spiritual practices you’d use for anything else. Which tells me this is likely to be very hard. But maybe not as impossible as I’d been expecting.

I don’t know. I was reading along thinking I didn’t have a lot of the emotional problems described. But then I did after all. I can see why they’d fuck up any attempts to cut down, too. Have seen them do exactly that a million times already. It seems weird that such a seemingly minor habit upsets and depresses me this much. Then again I spend hours every day doing it until my hands get sore and my fingertips start peeling from the strain. So maybe it’s not so little.

It’s funny I never developed trich considering the similarities. It’s always been quite the opposite: Removal of body hair always felt like removing something really important. I had more fights with my mother over demands to pluck eyebrows, pluck or bleach facial hair, cut my hair, or shave my legs and armpits, than just about anything. Later I got used to haircuts but not the rest – although right now I’m finally returning to my childhood state of refusal to cut my hair. There were a lot of instances where my mom chased me around the house with a pair of tweezers alternately demanding and begging me to pluck my unibrow.

But I couldn’t. I can’t explain it. It’s not just not liking the sensation. It was that I didn’t feel like I’d be me anymore. This despite the unibrow and facial/body hair being one of the biggest things I was bullied about. And I longed to change into a nonautistic person (without knowing what that was of course) over bullying but I’d almost have died rather than pluck a tiny area of my face.

Makes no sense. But the point is – I had the opposite of a desire to pluck hairs out. When I began pulling head hair out (enough that I’ve got a few small bald spots, visible when I shave my head) it was a straightforward act of self-injury, not anything remotely like trich. (Although institution staff loved to hang around the dayroom showing off that they knew the word trichotillomania.)

Meanwhile they considered dermatillomania self-injury when it wasn’t at all the same. And went to great lengths to stop me. My parents, as with nose-picking, basically made me feel like crap for doing it but didn’t actually stop me.

Who knows how this will turn out. But I’m going to have to give it a try. It would really suck to fight off all the serious crap that can kill me and then die of a staph infection in my ears.

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