Content warning: Skin disorders, domestic violence

 

Akh, the things I do to avoid writing. Over Lockdown I clocked an obsessive habit of mine through the jagged, precious months I spent with my body. I didn’t know it was a thing but touched as I am by the generational curse of self-diagnosing on WebMD, I learnt. A clumsy hand at a jigsaw puzzle; derma, okay skin, mania, must be frenzy. What the hell is a tillo? A finance app? Stuck it in a search engine. Titillo- Latin, to pluck. Dermatillomania. They also offer “excoriation disorder” as if that’s any sexier a phrase.

 

I ‘d been thoughtless about it. Mostly it was as uncooked as the pleasure of feeling and watching a grain of fat unsheathe itself from a goosebump that forgot to go down. I do it in an unwitting stupor- again and again a dull guilty pleasure like rounds of minesweeper on company time, often for minutes, sometimes for hours. I compare the thought process of it to weeding a driveway, trying and trying again to unearth ingrown hairs and other subcutaneous radishes, nails mourning the perfection of skin. It goes in ritualistic cycles of reward and shame, freaky private neurons firing, klaxons shrieking stop. I soon enough looked outside and realised it was a stress response to a world, I felt, was happening in a slow shatter.

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Dense developmental psychology pages said, “what could little Mo do, living day to day with fear behind their eyelids digging tunnels, laying eggs?” My frantic nails became a better alternative to the blades in the street, the screaming downstairs, the odd crash of plates, the thud of a body. I woke up for play, then class, then work in pyjamas irrigated with cold sweats through the years. A miracle how I kept it together. My hands had an idea where my mind would not go and I took the feeling out of my heart and poured its hot wax onto my skin.

 

Now my back maps nebulae; hardly gets the weak English sun but freckled through and through. As constellations are the light of  many expired stars, some scars on my back burnt away in novae of terror and relief a whole childhood ago, their light warped by the occult quantum physics of aging and body image.Because of my patina, I never liked to show too much skin, it would bait me out. Would rather wear a vest than go bare torso in the house in the hottest summers. Would rather not be caught off-guard by new red craters in the mirror. 

 

I feel less shame about it nowadays; I think less along the lines of troubling pathology, more as a chart of survival despite domestic violence and the cluster of ‘isms with barbs pointed against me. My picking took its hand to what the shame was and it dug out several things: the fear of being misunderstood, a permanent reminder of the toll things took, airbrushed beauty on the timeline that snatches us all out of euphoria and so we can buy it back in small pieces. In researching my condition and giving it a name, I learnt to lift the stigma and accept the convoluted way I’ve made a home in my body; by pulling up floorboards in a perfectly liveable house.

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