I bit my fingernails as a child.
I was nervous a lot without really knowing it—I wasn’t medicated yet—and I didn’t like sitting still long enough for my mama to clip my nails. I loathed the sensation of having my cuticles pushed back. To this day, I’m not sure why I thought the alternative was a better idea, but there we are. I bit and I chewed and my fingers were ten little points of mutilation for years.
When I was eight, I saw something that probably should’ve made me stop.
I was at the mall with my parents, and we passed a store filled with stuff for skateboarders. You know the kind of place, lots of hoodies and baggy shorts and Vans. Anyway, there was this t-shirt hanging in the window, and it had a cartoonish graphic of a man on it. His body was bowed backwards almost double, a pretty good illusion of recent movement. His eyes were screwed shut with pain, head thrown back, and between his teeth he gripped a sliver of his own skin.
The skin was ripped from his arm in a thin strip, a bloody line trailing from fingertip to elbow. I can see it clearly in my memory, if I close my eyes and really think about it. I could probably draw it. He’d split himself open, his skin like the skin of an orange, all from what looked a lot like nail biting gone horribly wrong. You would think, of all possible cautionary images, that that one would have been enough to break me of my habit.
But no. It only gave me a distant, undeniable dread of being peeled.
Did you know there’s not actually a word for that? I looked around on the internet, wording and rewording the search, but couldn’t find anything. I had to make it up myself.
It’s not a rational fear. It’s not even something I actually believe may happen to me. Years and years of biting my nails and destroying my cuticles, and not once has my skin torn farther than a quarter-centimeter from the nail bed (I measured). I’m never going to find myself in a situation where I’ll be flayed.
Doesn’t mean I don’t fear it. Doesn’t mean I don’t cringe if it happens in a movie or on TV. Sometimes I physically shiver and have to cover my eyes.
I don’t know why I’m admitting all this on Reddit. Maybe I’m just hoping it’ll make people understand what I’m going to do.
The only way to get past your fears is to face them. That’s what they say. And I thought maybe, if I faced this, I might be less afraid. Or at least maybe I’d be less disgusted. If I see for myself that it’s not as bad as I imagine…
It’s not like they’ll really be missing anything. Acne, eczema, psoriasis… I didn’t pick them because they have good skin. I’m not planning to do anything with it afterwards, no lampshades or masks or handicrafts.
I’m not crazy.
I just want to see what it’s like, what it’s really like.
You understand, right?