Saturday, February 8, 2014

I have a Bald Spot


Yesterday was a BAD day! 

What are the triggers? What makes pulling worse? Stress! Boredom. Frustration. Anxiety. Fear. Uncertainty. Nerves. 

But STRESS is by far the number one trigger.  Yesterday was a stressful and frustrating day. Pretty much right now my whole life is a little stressful and I am amazed how all of sudden, NOW, I chose to try and quit!  Ha!  (and somehow seem to be succeeding) But yesterday…I left a bald spot.  A day in the life….

I sit at my desk (problem number one is I have a desk job…lots of time to do things with my hands). I do part of my job on Instant Message, meaning…while I am waiting for the person on the other end to respond…my hands are idle.  So, I pull.  Usually, I am waiting for them to be nice to be me with what car they decide to take back for whatever car it is I need from them.  I'm anxious…so I pull. Add to that normal daily task the fact that for the life of my dealership, we can't manage to keep keys where they belong. This may not seem like a big deal, but it drives.me.insane!  So…I sit at my desk and I start to pull. "One.Two.Three.  STOP! STOP! Four. STOP. Five. OH MY GOD…..STOP!"  There is a little pile growing on my paper in front of me. I look at them. They're so long. I have a silent conversation with myself on why I can't stop.  As I am staring down at the paper with several (very long) eyebrows I have managed to grow…my hand is STILL feeling my face. I manage to put my hand down. I blow away the evidence in front of me and change the subject in my mind.  "Go back to work, stop thinking about it"  five, four, three, two, one….I'm pulling again.  I don't even know I'm doing it.  Repeat last 3 sentences.  

I do this all day long.  I know I'm going to be mad at myself later. Shit, I'm already mad at myself, and I haven't really examined the damage yet. I chastise myself on all that hard work / time that is now just poof gone.  And that I have to start all over…Again!  Oh, and it wasn't just the eyebrows. As my eyelashes grow, I find that I can't stand the feeling of the ones in the middle. They're gone. I went full force tweezer action on those! (Rule #1 when trying to beat Trich….GET RID OF THE TWEEZERS!  Haven't managed to do that yet…) A trick is to freeze them in a block of ice…because you have the "safety net" of them being there, but the idea is that by the time you melt them and can access them, the urge to pull has gone.  Again….mine are NOT frozen. 

So I got through my work day and came home.  Stress number two.  I sit in my upheaved living room and don't even know where to start. Moving in three weeks and I just am at a loss. I sit on my couch, and start to pull…again…..more.  It feels good to be able to actually grab at something (since the eyebrows are, in fact, growing).  So more get pulled. More time and hard work gone. Damn it! I eventually talk some sense into myself, get my butt off the couch and start packing. Finally, I stop pulling. I'm moving. Doing. Working. Hands are busy.  I finally stop obsessing in my mind.

And then I go wash my face.  It deflates me. Totally. Why? Why can't I stop? So Angry! I take off my makeup and there is a total bald spot from the day. ONE day. How many weeks to get here and it's ruined all in just one small day.  The spot is actually tender and red today from how much I pulled all right there! 

This morning I took pictures. I figured If I'm going to document this in words, I should document it in pictures, too. So…Here is where I am today. I have more eyebrows than I have had in 23 years. Twenty-Three YEARS! The hard part is to KEEP them!  Eyelashes are much more tricky (no pun intended) to keep. They poke me.  I feel them. I see them. Baby steps.  I'm super happy about actually getting the courage to go outside my four walls without makeup on because to a normal person, my eyebrows just look a little "thin" and most people probably wouldn't even think twice about them. It's just all in my brain that it is "obvious" that I pull. 



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