Day 1: Hazy beginnings

Day 1: A steamy bathroom mirror

The first step you make by going backwards. You decide it is possible to change and sustain that believe for longer than doubt or laziness or memory normally allows. You decide that all the previous attempts failed because they were simply the previous attempts, and not this attempt. You decide not to be immune to your own failure, for once. You decide you will risk caring. You decide on making it public, outside, in the online speaking to the air and everywhere way, because it thrives on the silence you have made for it otherwise. There are no words for it, there are no people, there is no money to fix it, and there is no way you want to talk about something so private when dignity is in such short supply. Anyone not you, anyone normal (the anyone you would love to have the luxury of being), would decide it is a stupid, weird, unimportant joke. They would not see the routines that rise and set on it day in, day out. You don't either, except when you are forced to, like on a New Year's day in the bathroom, noticing and noticing until you realise it is everything. It is your life. In these lucid after moments, when you take a step back to see the damage done, when it is all you see, you can keep going back and back and back to it, but today you don't. Today the first step you take back is the first step you take forward instead.

A writer I like a lot says, 'discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes'. This year I need the courage to discover what is right in front of me and keep staring until it stops. I need to see that I have a compulsive order, that it runs my life, has defined every minute since childhood and that I want it over, I want to see what I could do if I won. If it is possible to win freedom from it.

The compulsion is a weird one. A strange aberration that just goes to show there is nowt as queer as the carved tangles of the human brain. We can get addicted to anything, literally ANYthing. It's not cutting, cleaning, drinking, nor weight. It's not order but dis-order I seem to do so well at. Skin picking sounds too innocuous, too trivial, too teenage an obsession, too laughable to make it a 'real' problem. But the truth is, I've decided, it is my problem.I haven't lost my house, but I have directly or indirectly lost jobs, friends, lovers, looks, truth and self-respect to it. It is every one of the thousands of scars on my body. I don't want to see it but the scratching, the covering up scratching, the worrying about someone seeing me scratching, the anticipated repulsion, the worsening scar or infection, means I find my own hands tearing my skin apart before I realise I am doing it.

The New Year's resolution is to call this demon out. Where it happens, how it happens, when, and what I am going to do about it. Today with new eyes I saw it was all about privacy. So the locked zone of the bathroom is the place to start. With all the self-aggrandizing self-awareness and fairly medium levels of stress, today is a 3/10. I decided to track levels daily. There might not be as much writing as this . Won't be, in fact. My life is frantically busy. But I can do a quick pic (rather than pick) and grade it.

So this picture. The well-lit solace of the bathroom before a shower is a real danger spot. I did go for the skin on my face, lips, hands and around my eyeline. I tore at it with tweezers till the blood came and I stopped, and I held my hands out wide in big stars. I heard once, the single time I ever heard anyone talk about this problem publicly (on the radio as it happens, R4 Woman's hour), that there is a CBT therapy that works through movement. When you feel the urge coming, spread your fingers out wide and try to stop and think about what you are doing, why. And this blipblog was what I thought.

Happy new eyes and New Year all. Hope I make it long enough to see a change. Hope someone else reads this and new eyes are switched on like the lady on the radio did for me. It's okay, it's not right, but it's okay. Now fix it. It's nothing till I face it as everything and make it nothing again.