When I Feel That Somethin

After brewing some coffee and getting back into bed this morning, I opened the 2023 Inspiration Issue of Poets &Writers magazine. At the top of page 19, the Literary MagNet section, is a paragraph about a woman named Katherine Indermaur who recently had a book-length lyric essay, I|I (Seneca Review Books, November 2022) published. 

It was in this beautifully written paragraph that I learned new words for something I have been dealing with for most of my life. Dermatillomania, also known as skin-picking or excoriation disorder. No fucking way did someone know my secret shame, let alone write a book about their experience with this behavior. How was I reading about skin-picking in THIS magazine?

 

I went to my laptop and immediately began googling and writing in my handmade leather-bound journal. It was only a couple months ago I told my therapist about my disgusting habit, as my hands worked their magic underneath my desk as we virtually continued to discuss my secret shame. If I remember correctly, I told my therapist about the weekly/daily dead skin snowflakes on the green carpet next to my childhood bed. When my mother vacuumed my room, she didn’t hide her feelings of disgust. It was a shameful habit I couldn’t, and can’t, control. 

 

According to multiple sources, dermatillomania is a mental health condition that can severely affect your life due to feelings of shame, embarrassment, or guilt. It is a skin-picking disorder that, I have recently been wondering, falls under the obsessive-compulsive order category. It can be caused by boredom, stress, anxiety, and negative emotions. All of this checks out.

 

When I was eight or nine, I began seeing white spots appear on my skin. I would eventually be diagnosed with vitiligo, a skin disease where patches of skin lose their pigment. I’ll be honest, the correlation between this skin disease and skin-picking did not occur to me until today. 

 

According to the multiple sources I spent looking at today, skin-picking usually starts during puberty and is more likely to happen to people who have “triggering” conditions. Again, this checked out. The type of picking I most identified with is referred to as “automatic,” which happens when a person isn’t thinking about it. It is also called “scanning” because it involves running hands/fingertips across areas of skin to find areas that feel different, areas that can be focused for picking.

 

Growing up, I was told that I needed to keep my hands busy. I did not know this skin-picking was a symptom of negative emotions. I did not know it was a way of avoiding stressful situations or a way of releasing unexamined tension. It was a disgusting and shameful habit I often didn’t and still don’t, realize I am doing. 

 

I went to see a movie when I lived in Nashville in 2003, and in a mostly empty theater, a woman who choose to sit a few seats away in the same row asked me to stop picking at my hands because it was making her sick. I immediately felt heavy with shame when I should have told her to keep her eyes on the fucking screen. 

 

“No one is ever going to want to hold your hands if you keep picking at them like that,” my mother used to say. 

 

I hate that I still pick at the dry skin on my fingers and wonder if it’s true that no one will ever want to hold them. I hate that sometimes at night I have to wash my hands in order to stop myself from skin-picking. I hate that this chronic habit also happens when the bottoms of my feet are cracked and dry. It’s all I can about it until that tension is released. 

 

I did not know there was language for this until today. I did not know there was a foundation for Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors, of which skin-picking disorder is a category. I did not know I wasn’t alone.

Sources:

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22706-dermatillomania-skin-picking

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/conditions/dermatillomania-skin-picking

https://www.bfrb.org/bfrbs/skin-picking

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolefallert/skin-picking-disorder-dermatillomania