Dermatophagia culmination : Day 3,4,5,6.

I haven't updated my blog in a few days. Well, I had a wedding to attend. And boy, can they be torture some. Catching up with relatives, long lost cousins, old people. The worst part is yet to come. Yeah, questions about your career, relationships, future marriage prospects. When you just wish you were buried under a pile of compost. (This is not applicable to people who have their dream jobs, a straight career focus, or have found the love of their life). But if you were one of those, you wouldn't be reading this now, would you?
So when you don't have the answers to their questions, they obviously have their own amount of input, well, because we just don't know anything.
So let's get to it then.

                            Wedding Day.

Other fingers. They're not so bad. Consciously controlled.

Well, this was yesterday when I was studying in the library and my friend hit my hand and yelled " why don't you start pulling out the skin from your toes too."
With utter disgust and a tinge of sarcasm, obviously!

Dermatophagia culmination: Day 2

Day 2:
I finally made progress today. From brutally pulling the skin off my left thumb, which is now a numb area, I did not move the the next finger.
I consciously stopped. Of course, exams are now over. So I attribute that as a factor. I also came to notice that my thumb has become so numb and immune to pain, that when it bleeds I don't feel anything. Just numbness. I've made up a chart of my progress and decided to get rid of this habit by 30 days.
If anyone is reading this at all, accompany me and keep me posted on your progress.
Here's the end of day 2 for you:

Dermatophagia Culmination: Day 1

Day 1:  8.15 AM
I've finally decided to stop chewing my skin.  The decision in itself was not a staunch one, as I knew I would go back to doing it again.
Nevertheless, it's a start.
So the day went by, and since I had a paper due tomorrow, the phase of 'lead picking' started. Yes, I was poking the sharp lead pencil in my thumb till it bled. It's not as easy as you think. I'll tell you that.
End of Day 1:

Dermatophagia culmination

Dermatophagia: Mind over body

The day is the 27th of April, 2015.
I'm sitting on the couch, flipping through the papers and come across this abhorring image.
It was a thumb, the gruesome bleeding skin, which was obviously picked on. I wish I could say otherwise, but it was my thumb.
If you're still reading, you've probably understood the subject of this article. Yes, it's this filthy skin picking habit of mine. Four hours back, I picked my left thumb in a regular fashion, just the way I do it day in and day out. According to my mom, even when I'm napping.
(Which honestly seems like exaggeration). Well, it so happened that I wanted to use a smart phone. And so I did. Unfortunately my left thumb which had been picked on refused to bend without getting hurt.That's when I decided to check this skin picking habit of mine. It turned out I never had to type even a whole sentence, when I realized that the skin picking had a name. 'Dermatophagia' it said on the Wikipedia page. The pictures shown there were mirror images of my thumbs and fingers. I read through the whole page with sheer relief that I wasn't crazy, and that there were many others like me out there. (There must have been quite a few, since they have a medical name for the disorder).
The page focused on psychological development, Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and various other causes and effects of it. I looked up a few of those horrendous images. "That's it!" I told myself. When did this happen?
How did it get so bad? Was I so negligent about my own body, and what I was doing to it? I starting poking at the cause of it. I asked my mom, if it was something that was recent or developed gradually through my adolescent years. She said it wasn't long before I starting this fixation with my fingers.
I went back and focused on the part of adolescence and my transitioning period and nothing came up. I had an appointment with an optometrist and he happened to see my fingers. He asked me what I was doing, where's my career headed. And finally told me that the skin picking was psychologically linked to drastic changes causing severe emotional distress. I was pondering about the things that were utterly wrong in the past two years.
Not boring you all with the details, but I found the cause.
-Moving from one home to another at the drop of a hat, due to a family emergency.
-Loosing a family member, extremely close to my heart.
-All of the distress leading to continual anxiety, episodes of depression and ultimately self harming.