Every time I heard about obsessive-compulsive disorder when I was little, it was people complaining about how crooked picture frames or mismatched pillowcases made them irritable. No one really mentioned the stress of feeling like you might burn down your house if you didn’t check the stove three times before leaving. And no one told me that picking at your hair or your skin until you bled fell somewhere along the OCD spectrum, either. It wasn’t until I had pulled out all my eyelashes and eyebrows at thirteen years old that I thought I might have a slight issue that needed tending to.
I have trichotillomania and it has me. Trich is defined as a compulsive need to pick out or pull one’s hair. It’s a disorder that is common in young children but usually gets sorted out in adolescence. Unfortunately, my trich wasn’t having that. I was a carefree, long-lashed baby face until I hit my teen years. I wasn’t an immediately stressed out and anxious teenager, but I would have days that felt like a lot of work. At the end of a long day, all I wanted was something to make me feel calm and comforted. For whatever reason, I was wired to find relaxation in pulling out my hair. At the beginning of arguably the worst four years of self-consciousness and peer-to-peer image shaming (aka high school), the urge to pick out my eyelashes and eyebrows surfaced.
It started off as a harmless way to unwind at the end of the day. I had just recently begun to wear light traces of makeup. During the day I would apply a bit of foundation and some mascara, which would inevitably come off at night before bed. Instead of just using a cleanser or makeup wipe to get rid of my mascara, I started pulling the clumps off my lashes. I thought I was merely getting my makeup off. But then I began to feel an odd satisfaction anytime I pulled. It became a ritual in which I would apply a crazy amount of mascara, let it dry for a couple of minutes, and then excitedly rip it all off once it hardened. The cakier and more spidery the better! Eventually I realized that I didn’t have to constantly layer coat after coat to get the same satisfaction I craved. I could just pull out my eyelashes.
It wasn’t like I sat down and decided to perform this really odd ritual every day. It just became a thing of habit. Anytime I was tired or stressed out, it was my go-to activity to help my mind zone out. I would pick before bed. I would pick right when my alarm went off in the morning. I would pick when I was hungry. I would pick doing homework. It got to the point where I had to start picking at my eyebrows because my eyelids were all but barren of lashes. I spent an entire summer feeding my new compulsion, and it made me look a bit alien by the end of it all. It never hurt, by the way. Sometimes my eyelids or eyebrows might be sore, but it was never really painful. By the time I was deep into my trich, I didn’t feel a thing when I pulled because my face was scarred.
I strolled up to my first day of freshman year of high school with carefully etched-in eyebrows and a cover-all coat of eyeliner. Up close, you could see something was slightly off with my face, so I avoided intimate conversations. I wore makeup every single day of school from fourteen to sixteen. Same eyeliner. Same obviously artificial eyebrows. I don’t think anyone ever knew exactly what I looked like under all of it, but a few people certainly were overly curious about my facade. I would touch up after class if I slipped and pulled during a long, monotonous lecture or overly stressful exam. I think some of my friends noticed my problem, but none of them ever said anything about it, and I never came right out and said I was struggling. I felt like I had a secret that was made public every time my makeup wore off.
It wasn’t until one afternoon at cheer practice in the dead of summer before my sophomore year that someone finally called me out. The team had to complete rigorous exercises in a relatively short amount of time, being expected to run, sweat, and run some more. That meant an hour of intensive sweating with no room for a makeup touch-up. I prayed to God my mask hadn’t melted. We ended this practice with a quick powwow before any bathroom breaks could be taken. Unbeknownst to me, my eyebrows had become my eyeliner, and my eyeliner had become my under-eyeliner. My entire face had shifted downward, leaving my bare brow bone exposed.
Being the unaware, unintentional asshole that a teen girl can be, one of my teammates sat down cross-legged next to me to stare at my face. She asked me where my eyebrows had gone. I told her I had picked them out. She asked me why I would do that. I told her to go to hell.
Okay, that’s not quite how it went. I really wish I had been secure enough in myself at sixteen to actually tell her something along those lines. Sadly, instead I resorted to mumbling something about OCD and pretending I was tired out from practice so that I could hide my screwed-up face under the shade of my arm.
I went on like that in a constant state of fear of discovery, and subsequent shame, for most of my adolescence. I didn’t want anyone to see me as bizarre or disturbed. I couldn’t stop what I was doing to my face, but I also couldn’t handle the critique when someone caught me. It’s not like I wanted to pick—I just felt so much better after I did. But I also felt terrible when I saw the repercussions right on my face. It was a vicious cycle where I would feel insecure and down, so I would pick to feel better. Then once I had gone through my ritual and felt mentally better, I wrecked my face and didn’t feel great about it anymore. I wanted to stop so badly, but I had no one telling me how to snap out of it. It was such a rare issue and something that didn’t have an actual cure. I felt hopeless for a long while.
As I grew older and accepted my face sans hair, it got easier to explain my disorder. Fortunately, I had a fairly forgiving school that wasn’t prone to all-out bullying people. My classmates generally let me be and only occasionally asked questions when their curiosity got the best of them. For the most part, I was able to come to terms with my issues in my own time. One school night, I had gone on a picking binge in bed and didn’t check what I looked like before I left the house the next morning for school. After first period, I went to go check in the bathroom to assess the damage, and I realized that I had absolutely no eyebrows. I had gone a whole class period without them. I fumbled around in my purse and found a dark chocolate colored liquid eyeliner that I attempted to fashion into eyebrows. I looked like I had taken a brown Sharpie to my eyes. At first I wanted to cry and sneak out of school and drive into a lake or something. But then I decided to just say fuck it and go on with my day, business as usual. No one actually cared what my face looked like, and if they did, they never mentioned it to me.
It took me a good four years to accept that I had a problem that couldn’t be solved with a pill or a therapist. Trich can be managed, but not cured. I’m currently in remission, meaning I don’t feel a strong urge to pick, and I attribute it entirely to the fact that I’ve stopped letting myself feel shame. I’m no longer looking for an excuse or crutch to lean on and help me. Everything that was supposed to cure me just made me disappointed and desperate. I now know the only thing I can do to save myself from a spiral is being confident in the fact that I will never have it completely under control, and that’s totally fine.
So much of having a disorder is living in shame. Shame of being caught, shame of being seen looking different from others, and shame of having to take complete responsibility for what you’ve done. Once I stopped seeing myself as a breakdown waiting to happen, I started feeling more in control. I thought of my problem as a work in progress, not a disaster that I’d been left with to handle. I was gentler with my mental health, and I found a community online that made my disorder feel relatively normal. I was no longer the only one I knew dealing with this. There were other girls and guys out there with bald scalps and bleeding follicles. I could relate to and understand them, and I could also recognize they were in bad, dark places I didn’t want to reach. It made me realize how fortunate I was that I could successfully conceal my missing facial features. These online friends forced me to stop feeling like I needed to hide.
In LA I started going to the grocery store or my local coffee shop without any makeup on. The general public saw my worst and never said a thing. Once, I went to Chipotle, and as I was going through the order line, I realized one of the employees had no eyelashes or eyebrows. As I was checking out, I plucked up the courage to ask if it was trich. She said yes and seemed shocked that I knew what the disorder entailed. I explained that I had been suffering from it for years, and all she could ask was how I had beaten it. I looked like someone who had conquered trich! What a boost of confidence that was! I wished her the best of luck and she gave me free guacamole. What a cool girl.
All my nightmares of public shaming were unsubstantiated. If anything, I had several kindred spirits come up to me and gently commend me for showing face when they didn’t feel comfortable doing so. It was surprisingly helpful for my self-esteem. I made a video online talking about my trich and had even more people flocking to the comments to share their own struggles with OCD and impulse control disorder.
Disorders make you feel like you’re singled out and shoved in an unwanted spotlight. You want to hide and you want to ignore your issues while still allowing them to manifest. But telling people and being forthright with a deep-rooted problem is the best cure for any mental illness you have. Create a circle of helpers around you who can keep you in a positive upswing and help you when you dip low. Without a support system, even the strongest of individuals can crumble. Talk about it when you’re not doing well. Celebrate when you’re at your best. Make sure everyone around you is on the same page when it comes to your triggers.
I have to give a special thank-you to Will for always holding my hand or letting me pick at his back when I’m feeling stressed out or like I want to pull. He’s been the absolute standard for a person with a significant other with mental health issues. Will’s undeniably the number-one person who’s kept me solid and firm in my recovery. No other person, doctor, or therapist has made such a positive impact on my trich. I hope to anyone out there who’s struggling with a similar issue that you find your William one day. Or learn how to be one yourself for others.