Weird things I used to (and still occasionally) do. Warning: some of this is completely disgustingly gross.

I used to bite my nails but a lot of kids go through a phase of biting their nails so I don’t really count that, but I used to do some pretty odd things during my early teenage years and some of them have continued until now.

I remember sitting watching Coronation Street with my Mum and I’d be biting the skin off my fingertips until they were sore. My thumbs were best as I’d get a nice big piece of skin and peel it off in one bit. Then the skin would go a bit weird until it healed and grew back. I know – quite gross when you think about it but at the time it felt normal. The even worse bit is that I used to swallow the bits of skin I’d bitten off. Can you imagine the germs and bacterial shite there must have been on my hands as a 13-year old?

I can’t remember how or why that habit started but I think it was around the same time as my obsessiveness started. I don’t know how or why I stopped doing it either, but it seemed to only ever happen in my early to mid-teens.

There are certain phrases that people use like ‘tearing my hair out’ and they aren’t meant to be taken literally. In my case it is literal. I have stood in front of a mirror for HOURS and pulled strands of my hair out, one at a time, and not felt a thing. If I get a particularly wiry hair or one that’s a bit thicker than the rest I’ll examine it closely and play with it for ages. When I talk or write about it, this hair thing seems like the most bizarre thing to do but when I’m doing it, it feels normal.

A few years ago when I was going through some financial difficulties, I sat up in bed one night and pulled every single hair out of my eyebrows and laid them all out in a neat row. Again I didn’t feel any pain when I was doing this at all. It’s lucky I have a fringe so that nobody noticed.

If I rub my eyes and an eyelash falls out, I save it for days. It’s like I have this crazy compulsion to look at it. I’ll build up a little collection of them over several weeks and every now and then I’ll closely examine the longest or thickest ones. Then I’ll chuck the lot in the bin, deciding that this habit is just too weird, and a few weeks later I’ll start all over again. I wonder if there’s a connection between this and my moods….? It might be worth keeping a note in my diary.