Still pull-free. But let me tell you- it's not easy. Not sure how much is the NAC and how much is will power (or whatever)... but it definitely takes work! The hard thing is I don't really want to stop pulling my hair. I want to pull my hair; I like to pull my hair. What I don't want, what I don't like is the damage. If I could pull and have no damage then I would have no desire to be pull-free. That really makes it challenging. I have to keep the goal, the end result in mind. And it's easy to think "it's just one hair." I mean really... how much damage can pulling one hair cause?!?! Well... keep telling yourself that every time and you'll see. The damage adds up.
I recently found your blog, and I'm (obviously) reading from the beginning of the blog. Some of the ways you feel about trich and how your trich feels to you is very similar to me. I also want to pull and like pulling. I hate the damage and the shame of bald spots. I even like the look of no lashes, but only very occasionally, and I hate how my lashes grow in twisted - so they irritate my eyes and make me pull even more during the growing in phase. Also... the hairs do sometime itch or hurt and cause me to pull. Sometimes one eyelash will twist around and just hurt, or actually poke me in the eye and not straighten out, so I have to pull that whether I want to or not.
ReplyDeleteMy first time pulling my eyelashes bald, my eye was hurting so bad like there was something in it, but there wasn't, and it was the middle of the night and not an emergency so I didn't bother my mom to take me to the doctor to get my eye checked out (I was 11ish). After I had pulled a big bald spot in the center of my eye lash line, it stopped hurting, and I decided that that looked silly and would pull out the rest of my lashes to make it look better. Apparently one of my teachers noticed, yay, and had CPS notified, boo, so I had to go to a therapist (who scared me because I was afraid of being taken away from my mom, as well as being dumb since they were trying to do baby stuff to get me to talk to them), when I also went to the eye doctor, they said the pain and pulling may have been caused by eye dandruff and to use baby shampoo on a q-tip to clean my eye lashes, and I remember the eye doctor saying trichotillomania ... that part might have been wrong, the therapist may have said it, but either way, at that point I heard about trich and understood that it was hair pulling.
My eye lash pulling is my worst, most visible pulling. I pulled scalp hair long before the eyelash incident. I remember pulling enough in 3rd grade class that I realized I need to roll the hair into tumbleweeds to make it less obvious that the hair is mine, because I would sometimes see hair tumbleweeds on the floor, but never big clumps of straight, loose hair.
I also have the derm, skin picking, but that only really started getting bad once I hit puberty and started getting pimples and blackheads... before that I would only pick a little if I had a scab or bug bite. And lucky me, my family gets pimples long after puberty! My 70 year old grandmother still gets a good one every month or so. My mother still has a regular crop of them on her face. I am lucky, my acne is not as bad as anyone else in my family during puberty and 20's (I'm 29 now), but being a picker makes it worse. Not being able to find an acne treatment that works. A few months ago I started getting some really big, painful, inflamed pimples all over my cheeks, and of course picked. A lot. It was terrible.
And I also chew my cheeks sometimes, I recently started up again after not chewing for months. I think that is because I ran out of my good chapstick and haven't been able to get it again yet, chapped lips make me start picking the dry bits with my teeth, which leads to cheeks. Grr.
Lucky you! I wrote you a book! (I'm weird, and that there is some weird sarcasm about how much I just wrote and made you read.)
Sorry about the ranting and weirdness, I think from the length of that, I've been needing to flat out tell someone all of that.
*hugs*
Hi, Diane! It's nice to meet you- glad you found my blog and are able to relate. Trich is such a strange disorder...and sometimes I think it makes us feel like we are the ones that are strange. But we're not. And we're not alone. Thanks for you sharing your story with me! :)
DeleteOh, just remembered... I lied (by omission due to forgetfulness) about the derm. I would also cut/peel off callus skin from my feet. Sometimes I would do it just a little too deep and it would hurt a lot when I walked. But I liked feeling the ridges of the fresh skin. I also liked feeling the bald patches of hair.
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