Sometimes, you find yourself in a position when you’ve become so self-aware of your behavior and ticks and you are forced to make a decision about it: will you acknowledge it and continue to do it because you know how it starts and where it stems from, or will you acknowledge it and then challenge it?
Hi, my name is Liz, and I am currently challenging my trichotillomania.
I spoke about what trichotillomania looks like on me a couple of years ago when I thought it was at its worst. I was just returning to my bookstore job after the pandemic lockdown in 2020 and I was dealing with some anxiety about things I didn’t have control over. Needing to feel some type of control, I would nervously tweeze, pluck, or pull hair from different parts of my body mindlessly and would feel helpless when I know I needed to stop.
Like I mentioned in my first blog post about this, I remember this habit developing one day when was 12-years-old, reading a book that I was really into at the time. I have this memory of reading this book on my bed; on my back with the book in one hand and my other hand mindlessly pulling the hair off of my eyebrows. As the years progressed, my eyebrows have always been the one consistent place on my body that suffered the most with this bad tick. Other places on my body have had points where I hyper-focused on at once, but my eyebrows have always been the place where I struggled to not touch when I had these hair-pulling episodes.
For years, I deemed it as nearly impossible to let my eyebrows fully grown out to its full potential. Before this tick, I always had naturally thick eyebrows to the point that I even rocked a baby unibrow when I was a kid. After years of plucking and tweezing the same hairs off of my eyebrows over and over again, I was afraid that the hair in those places would never grow back. I started to accept my patchy and spare eyebrows when I learned how to draw them with makeup back in 2016 (before that, well, let’s just say were drawn horrendously…)
Anyway…
The first half of this year has been one with tons of challenges whether they’ve been my own personal/mental challenges, or external challenges like social and familial ones. I tried to find ways to hide the fact that I was never going to be able to grow out my eyebrows, so I bleached them earlier this year to hide the little hairs I had left on them. I liked the look of them; it was the first time I ever tried the trendy, bleached eyebrow look and it was low maintenance since I didn’t have much hair to bleach whenever I had to touch them up. But, after having bleached eyebrows for three months straight, I didn’t have much eyebrow hair left in which I dyed whatever I had left and tried to grow them out again. Needless to say, it wasn’t long after that I plucked all of the remaining eyebrow hair off of my face.
When dealing with a nervous tick that in a way is categorized as a self-harming type of behavior, it’s easy to accept it for what it is and find ways to live around with it. For me, I thought that having bleached eyebrows would help me not resort to plucking if I didn’t see the hair on my face. Wrong. I eventually would get so anxious, I went back to plucking them once I saw the roots turn black, and before I knew it I was completely hairless in my eyebrow region.
I knew the only other thing I could do is challenge this nervous tick. I wanted to test myself this time around instead of allowing and accepting that this was something I was going to live with for the rest of my life. I wanted to test if I was capable of truly being able to control what I can. I wanted to see if I was able to find healthy alternatives to these ticks, like playing with a fidget toy or apply castor oil on my eyebrows whenever they weren’t drawn in. At a bigger scale, I wanted to not let these unhealthy ticks control me whenever I feel like I am not in control of the situations happening around me.
So, here I am.
I don’t know how my progress will look like by the time this post is published on the blog, but this alone has made me the most proud I’ve been in regards to manifesting something into existence. I don’t know how my eyebrows will look like (or how long my actual hair has grown since writing this), but I’m excited to continue challenging myself from something I haven’t been able to tackle in more than a decade. After a last couple of months of things not being in my field to control, I feel like this is one of the few things I actually have some way over, and if I want to see just how long I can go without relying on my nervous tick to ease my anxiety, I can.
My goal is to not only fully grow back my eyebrows, but I am hoping to grow out my hair (finally) out of the pixie stage its been in since December 2018. I think i am just at a place in my life where I want to take back control of the things I know I can and be proud of making those goals into active changes in life. I would love to see myself a year from now with a little short bob and full eyebrows!
It’s all about celebrating the little victories on the way to the main goal, and I think that’s the path I am continuing to walk down on.
Letters From Liz. 