on trichotillomania

It was in the fall of my tenth grade year that I noticed a very curious thing: my deskmate was completely ignoring the teacher. In fact, the sum of his energies was focused on the extremely simple, (if painstaking slow), task of removing the hair from the backs of his fingers.

I was not repulsed. There was something methodical, almost comforting about the motion of his perfect white teeth, the tip of a red tongue, the delicacy of a small-scale operation, the almost imperceptible click as top and bottom incisors came together, trapped a hair, pulled it out. His mind was Elsewhere, being on neither the lecture nor the hands which betrayed our secret but shared compulsion.

Yes, I eat hair, and while I'm not exactly sure of when it started, I know that it was about three years ago, and that day in particular, that I began to recognize it for what it was: an obsession-- if not a particularly damning one. I saw myself from the outside, caught a glimpse of secret and unspoken desires, irrational compulsions. I thought about what these hands signified, my bruised fingers revealing the Dirty Little Secret: so many days, months, and years of pinching, pulling, covert eating, not to mention a convenient excuse for Russell's sign.

Of course, to be exact, its not actually eating the hair-- I don't swallow it. That would be trichophaglomania. And it's not just biting; sometimes its pulling or tweezing. But regardless of method, and technicalities aside, there is something vaguely satisfying and comforting in collecting a small pile of hairs. At the same time, it is an act of impossibly large momentum, and beyond my control -- once I start I cannot stop until the spot is suitably bare (or I realize that I have turned myself into some sort of hairless monster). In fact, it was only after numerous incidents in which I'd completely plucked away an eyebrow while reading, or bruised my arms with incessant pinching, that I learned to pluck from different areas, so as to prevent one spot from ever going conspicuously bald. Three years later, I've come to resist the urge in public completely (though how I gained such resolve I've no idea). I can usually -- usually -- control myself.

And yet I suffer the occasional disconnect. While biting, my mind goes somewhere secondary and forgettable. I am happily oblivious to those things around me, and actively resist being pulled back into the flow of time. I do not always answer to my name. I lose myself entirely, seemingly in a page of reading, but in reality concentrating all my energies into the elimination of my left eyebrow. The pile grows and I grow peaceful, knowing I should perhaps resist the urge and yet not trying to do so. I escape and evanesce...

...until, at last, the spell is broken --out of time, or no hairs left to pluck-- and, taking a deep breath, I suspend it a moment, and blow them all away.

learn about it: www . trich . org