Fucking with the lights on

From time to time I find myself in these strange picking moods. I pick at my face, my hair, my body. Peel the nail polish off my fingers. Pull at my eyebrows and lashes. Fish foreign objects out of my teeth and from beneath my nails. I scrape and poke and pick until there’s nothing left to remove. When I was a teenager this was much more frequent. And now as a healthy, happy? adult I find myself doing this rarely. But today my nails are bare and my right shoulder with the bug bites is bleeding a little. The reality of it is a bit gruesome so I left many details out. As always, I’m writing to try to make sense of. So I consider my mental state, a potential precursor for the onset of this set of nasty habits. About 4 days ago I started to pull myself out of a deeply depressed state that had been growing and consuming me for around 3 weeks. I could barely move let alone pick at my nails. This weekend was beautiful, I spent it with my boyfriend Jay. Yankees game, good sex, deep conversation, beautiful man. He’s a pretty amazing person who treats me well. But I always feel the pulse of my control and trust issues beneath our movement together. Childhood and past relationships creep up from the abyss and infiltrate, they roll around and mix in with my PMS hormones and you have a veritable shit storm in my head. Jay usually quiets it though. He has a very unobtrusive way of handling me that works well with my crazy. So I came to this day with a beautiful weekend behind me, thoughts about possibly loving someone again and what that means, thoughts about control and trust and which parts of that disaster are me and which are him, thoughts about hating this job, and preparing to take my licensing prep test. I brought all of that to the table and now my face and nails are scraped and chalky. I suppose it makes sense, I guess it all fits together. Many anxieties swelled at once and pushed up the OCD in me. The tricho in me. But my anxieties ebb and flow constantly, why this, why now? I sense there’s a deeper more analytic genesis of this. Something about cleansing and purging and starting over. An effort to force out the bad in me, the crazy. I wrote about this once, freshmen year in college. I wrote it in the back of my psyc 101 book because I was trying to study and couldn’t stop picking. The current state doesn’t border compulsion, probably never was close, yet it’s something curious to me nonetheless. I think it may be somewhat a function of trying to totally break myself down physically. Pent up feelings of repulsion to my physical appearance manifested in efforts to remove all obstacles, all the bad. That I buy. My self esteem has been shit lately. Jay is great, but he’s really hot and i constantly wonder if I’m good enough for him, physically. I evaluate everything. I become paranoid, see him looking at women when he’s probably not. Keep it all inside. Doesn’t matter what he says about liking my body and thinking I’m beautiful, I have felt this growing, gnawing insecurity since we got together. Doesn’t matter that I’ve lost a lot of weight in the past year, doesn’t matter that I felt totally beautiful and confident pre-Jay. Being with him brings out the crazy. My brain can’t process things it usually understands, I become devastated at any indication he thinks someone is attractive. It buries me. So the picking feels something like it did when I was 15 and being teased on the bus. It felt like desperate cry for release and love and total hate of my body. I have grown a lot as a person since then but old wounds are still wounds. Wishing I could heal overnight and see the sun again every day. Knowing that I probably never will be whole and complete brings sadness to my heart. So damaged. At the same time so improved. But if I can slip back into that old depression so easily, slip back into picking at my body without realizing, slip back into those devastating emotions in the context of a relationship, what does this mean for my future? Is it pointless to try. I can’t even afford my therapist. I feel like a need a fucking therapeutic retreat not just 50 minutes a week. Can a tree die a few times and keep growing. Hard to take stock of progress when you still feel like you’re 15. Tired of all these bullshit answers about women and self esteem. It’s not that simple. Magazines don’t know you as an individual. Moms don’t even give good advice. Shit runs deep, into the core of who you are. A bloody tangle of childhood experiences, genetics, and life. There is no quick answer for that.