Hands, p.18
Hands, page 18
Some things have genuinely helped me stop picking, if not forever then at least for some time, which I’ll list here:
Showering in the dark: Now, as you can imagine this isn’t something for the fainthearted. In fact, for legal reasons I urge you not to try this at home and assume zero liability if you do. OK, I’m being dramatic, but I have slipped and seen my life flash before my eyes a few times. Miraculously, I’ve never ended up actually body slamming the bathtub, but even just the feeling of my heart leaping to my throat in the long seconds before I somehow managed to right myself is enough to make this one of my least favourite strategies. It turns out I don’t need to see my skin breaking – my fingertips are like police dogs able to sniff out even the tiniest of bumps – but I don’t get half the satisfaction without sight. So being in the dark worked, just not in the shower. For that reason, I’ll give this method 7/10.
Bathing in the dark: The bath has always been my happy place. For as long as I can remember, I’ve read my book in the bath until the water is cold and my toes shrivelled, so the way picking started to ruin it was one of the reasons I sought help. I say ruin because the bathroom is my trigger, which is to say it’s the place I’m most likely to self-destruct. Instead of a sanctuary it became deeply distressing, because I couldn’t be trusted not to tear my chest to shreds. It would only take one little bump to set me off, and only when the trance-like state I’d fallen into passed would I realise I was covered in blood. So, I got a clip-on portable reading light that allowed me to have the bathroom light off while still being able to read in the bath. This worked wonders as I tore my way through The Thursday Murder Club and I thought I’d really cracked it, but alas it’s only really good for hardback books. I found that when I clipped it onto the cover of a paperback, the adjustable arm wobbled and swung with every movement and turned page, like the barbaric swoops of an aggravated goose’s long neck. The resultant light show was enough to give me a headache and I had to give up and turn the light on. Plus, it made the book way more unsteady in my hands and I’ve already lost more than one book to the depths by accidentally dropping it in without the added help of a sentient reading light. Particularly devastating was the loss of Charles Dickens’ chunky David Copperfield, which slammed into the water hard and was entirely submerged before I could save it. It eventually dried out but has never been the same since. For this reason, the bathing in the dark technique gets 6/10.
NOTE: Any light shed on my skin was a trigger to pick, so another iteration of this was the discovery that the switch to turn off the bathroom’s light entirely was located above the door frame and therefore out of my reach. Jovan would turn it off every evening – dusk falling being another trigger for me – and it worked until I realised if I did a little jump I could surreptitiously turn it on again. The moral of the story: believe in yourself and you’ll reach heights you could never have imagined.
Bathing chaperoned: When I was little and went in the bath, Liv would sometimes come into the bathroom and sit on the toilet seat to keep me company and chat with me while I soaked. Now, my poor boyfriend has been roped into doing the same thing, sitting in the bathroom with me while I bathe in order to gently say the word ‘hands’ whenever he hears a flick of water that might suggest inappropriate hand movement or sees me scanning my face. It makes me love and hate him so much. I loathe this method because it works. But, of course, my boyfriend can’t be my 24-hour carer, I wouldn’t want him to be, and my little enemy knows he’ll help, so sometimes I purposefully don’t ask him to do this because I want to pick and don’t want him interrupting me. It’s complicated, OK? A begrudged 9/10.
Wearing plasters on my fingertips: This helps for the five minutes I’m able to keep them on before tearing them off. Turns out it’s hard to get anything done thus impeded. Also, it feels good and naughty to rip them off when I know I shouldn’t. Haha, fuck you for trying to help yourself, Lauren, Lauren says to Lauren. Think you can get past me? I mean, you? 5/10. Very confusing.
NOTE: Wearing plasters on my chest – though not face – does help, when I can keep them on.
Clay masks: By this I mean a clay mask slopped onto my face and chest in great big handfuls, or fancy bath stuff. Let’s tackle the former, first. This is a good method because if I touch covered areas while the mask is still wet, I just get the gloopy crap all over my hands, which then transfers to the pages of my book. So far so good. But washing it all off before getting out of the bath requires more attention to the areas I pick than would otherwise be the case, thereby defeating the purpose of the whole activity entirely. Also, being a tight arse means I refuse to spend real money on these masks, so they actually cause more spots to appear. 2/10 (They smell nice, I guess?).
Fancy baths: Ensuring the experience is as akin to a relaxing spa trip as possible can and does make it more enjoyable, and I feel focused on the soothing, self-caring aspect of the bath if I zhuzh it up a bit. Not too much though. One especially involved bath bomb that released leaves and petals did make me feel momentarily like that famous painting of Ophelia in the pond, though not … dead, just beautiful and ethereal; however, upon getting out of the bath, wet foliage was plastered to my body and I looked like a swamp creature emerging from the boggy depths. Also, sometimes this method just doesn’t work and I pick anyway. Probably a state of mind thing. 10/10 for fun. 5–7/10 for helping picking.
None of these things have stopped my picking entirely. I wanted there to be a grand, triumphant ending to this story of frenetic impulses and heart-stopping moments, but I realise now that life should for the most part be adoringly, wondrously dull, and I intend to end my story that way. I want to be bored out of my skull and know that I’m still living my best life, despite the upward trajectory branded on us from childhood. I’ve always wanted so hard to be inarguably excellent, at the top of my profession, any profession, the skinniest and most beautiful and richest, where I finally didn’t have to run any more. But there isn’t a top, is there? There’ll always be an afterwards; none of these things can shield you from the sometimes painful reality of being alive.
I think this – the afterwards – is true of selves, too. Although CBT hasn’t, alas, stopped my picking, it has opened a window out of which I can see that there’s a future where I don’t do it. It just doesn’t feel inevitable any more, which for someone whose claustrophobia extends from sitting in the middle row of a theatre, or being stuck on a bus without a loo, to feeling trapped in time, is nothing short of miraculous.
With this final revelation, though, comes a caveat it would be dishonest of me not to mention. As the number of sessions I had left wound down from three to two to one, my panic rising that I was still picking and why hadn’t it worked, this glimmer of hope for a picking-free future was clouded by a developing fear gathering, like a storm, apace.
Tipping glasses over turned into worrying I was going to be struck down by Almighty God for lying, then to weeing a bajillion times a day, to biting my nails until they bled, to picking my skin. What had felt like the most random thing in the world for me to start doing was suddenly exposed to be just another breadcrumb on a very long trail that began in a small Billingham cul-de-sac. The signs had been there all along, and while it was reassuring that each phase ended, I was terrified to discover that the recession of one epoch simply gave rise to another one entirely. Moment after moment after moment. Would picking be just another crumb? Sure, I was ecstatic to finally be able to envision a future in which I didn’t do the hideous thing I’d been doing for what felt like forever, the thing that felt like an inevitability, but what was going to come next? It was like the same chaotic energy had been shapeshifting over the years and would never go away.
But I’ve been shapeshifting too. This Lauren is dead set that this will be the end of the road. I’m stronger than it, I tell myself, and I’m in control. I can’t see another road forking off this one yet, but if one doesn’t appear any time soon, I’m quite content to rip a trail through the woods. I don’t need to see it from above. And hey, until now I hadn’t been able to see the road at all. I’m learning to palm read, in my own way, and I don’t think disruptions to the lifeline are necessarily the foreboding signs Mam’s books once said they were.
As I sit and write now, I feel all the past Laurens nearby, as if they’re all sitting around me in my living room that’s blinking with candlelight. Beside me on the sofa is very little me, wild curly hair tumbling down her back, holding my index finger tightly while looking around the room we can call ours in awe (as well as scanning for the nearest exits and likely route to the toilet). On the floor awkwardly sexting her boyfriend is teenage me, her head a mop of bright red, over-hairsprayed curls shaved at the sides, without a clue about who she is and unable to envision herself beyond the age of 22, max. She’s probably thinking I could do with having my eyebrows waxed, even though there are barely any left after her over-zealous plucking. There’s hair-extensioned me and fake-tanned me and skinny me and fat me, in love me and heartbroken me, goth-phase me and another me who’s just left the room under the guise of needing the toilet to put her fingers down her throat until she gags, because some inner voice won’t let her relax until she does.
All the Livs are here too. I can’t claim to know what they’re thinking beyond being, at times, justifiably sick of the many Laurens’ shit, but I feel aglow in the heart-knowledge that whichever Lauren walks through the door next, a Liv I’ve not yet met is also on her way.
Acknowledgements
Before I start thanking those of you who’ve supported me – not just while I wrote this book but as friends, at whatever stage of my life – an apology to those I’ll inevitably, accidentally, miss out.
Firstly, thank you to my endlessly patient, kind and thoughtful editor (/therapist), Jon, without whom this book simply would not be what it is today. Thanks for believing in it and me. You and all the wonderful HarperNorth team are legends – I’ll always, always appreciate everything.
I’d also like to thank my partner, Jovan, who I love more than words; my sister Liv, who is everything to me; and all my family and friends, in particular my dearest friend Callum, my university friends and all the girls from home. You all keep me going, smiling, trying.
Special thanks go to my agent Marilia, who has been just a beacon of light for as long as we’ve worked together; long may it continue.
Thanks, too, to Claudia Canavan, who commissioned my first ever writing on the topic of skin picking; to the wonderful mother of my great friend Charlotte, Rachel Grace, who looked after me while I was struggling with picking in Cambridge; to Paula Wain and Fiona Lodge, former English teachers who helped me believe in myself; to Ross Wilson and Robert Macfarlane for the same, and for helping me find myself during some of the most difficult and glorious years of my life.
I’d also like to give a shout-out to the Picking Me Foundation, the only donor-supported non-profit worldwide focused on Dermatillomania – if you’re struggling, I would really recommend checking them out.
Book Credits
HarperNorth would like to thank the following staff and contributors for their involvement in making this book a reality:
Hannah Avery
Fionnuala Barrett
Claire Boal
Charlotte Brown
Sarah Burke
Alan Cracknell
Jonathan de Peyer
Anna Derkacz
Tom Dunstan
Kate Elton
Mick Fawcett
Simon Gerratt
Monica Green
Graham Holmes
Megan Jones
Jean-Marie Kelly
Oliver Malcolm
Simon Moore
Anna Morrison
Alice Murphy-Pyle
Adam Murray
Melissa Okusanya
Genevieve Pegg
Agnes Rigou
James Ryan
Florence Shepherd
Angela Snowden
Hannah Stamp
Emma Sullivan
Katrina Troy
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Lauren Brown, Hands
