I’ve had a skin-picking disorder known as dermatillomania since around the time I hit puberty
I’ve had a skin-picking disorder known as dermatillomania since around the time I hit puberty ten years ago. Basically, imagine if you took the anxious perfectionism of OCD, the loss of control of a substance addiction, and the “I don’t care about the pain” mentality of self-harming and rolled them all into a single mental illness. Any blemish gets attacked: acne, ingrown hairs, dry skin, callouses, etc. My brain prefers raw, bleeding skin over any perceived imperfection. One of the worst target areas has always been my legs. When I started shaving in middle school, I started causing more ingrown hairs to grow, and I was suddenly hyper aware of any spots that I had missed. I was the only person of color in my class, and none of the other girls had dark body hair like I do. I felt like a gorilla, so much so that I started shaving my arms, too. Once I graduated and moved on to a public high school, I was able to come to terms with my arm hair. There was another Latina girl in my choir class who was popular and considered very pretty, and she didn’t shave her dark arm hair. So I stopped shaving mine and got a little confidence back. It didn’t count for very much because by that time my legs were riddled with scars from all the picking I’d done. And whenever I’d wear something to school that showed off my legs, people would ask me about the scars. I usually lied and said it was razor burn because at the time I didn’t have a word for my disorder. I didn’t know how to explain to the people asking unsolicited questions about my body that I obsessively, compulsively picked at my skin until it bled. After a while, I stopped wearing anything that showed my legs. I didn’t do shorts anymore. I had to wear tights or leggings with any short skirts or dresses. It was the only way to make the questions stop. But the shaving and the picking continued. My abusive mother would have been scandalized by the idea of her daughter not shaving her legs. When I went away to college, people for the most part learned to mind their own business, and I started showing off my legs again. But there was an incident at a bus stop where a total stranger asked me very loudly if I was okay because of my legs. For several terrifying moments, I thought he was going to call the police on me, and I’d have to explain my illness to them and hope that they’d understand. It had happened once before, only I’d been pulling the bark off a tree rather than the skin off my body. I stopped wearing shorts again after that. In 2014 I finally got sick of my abusive mom and dad and cut off all contact with them. The years since then have been a journey of self-discovery and an exercise in independence. My life, for the first time, was mine and mine alone. There was no one left to make me feel guilty about my appearance, body hair included. No parents, no judgemental classmates, only people who had seen what I was going through with leaving my family and had stood by my through it all. I started reclaiming my appearance, first by shaving part of my head and then by making the call to stop shaving my legs entirely for the sake of both my physical and mental health. No shaving has meant significantly fewer ingrowns and significantly less picking. It hasn’t gone away entirely and it probably never will, and I don’t know that I’ll ever feel safe exposing my legs in public again, but the decision to stop shaving my legs has been an incredibly important step towards healing the damage done by my broken, oppressive childhood. -- source link
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