Skin Picking

I overheard my mother talking to Larry about picking at the skin on her face. Now I know where I get it from. Any ways, senior year I wrote a monologue about it. It's technically not me.

I pluck my eyebrows a lot. It makes me feel better, like I am achieving something. Each eyebrow hair I pluck, I put on the edge of the mirror. It’s a locker mirror, but I’ve never put it in a locker. I think it might actually be my brother’s. I laughed at him because it is pink and sparkly. My brother tries to take my tweezers from me. He says my eyebrows are already too little; I need to let them grow. Maybe he’s right, I mean, I know that my eyebrows are too little, but seeing the little black points of hair sticking out of my pore, I can’t help but pluck them,
Actually it has been hurting lately to pluck them. I think some hairs are becoming ingrown, like that little black spot, just above where my eyebrow starts. Once I read a book about a cocaine addict who plucked her leg hairs, but the hairs became ingrown, like mine, creating swirls of hair underneath the skin, plucking leg hairs sounded like a good idea before that. I don’t want that to happen to my face, but I can see it happening. I think it might already be happening, I can see more of the black dots forming around my eyebrows.
God, I’m becoming so vain. Even my vanity is compulsive. Compulsively I pluck my eyebrows and pick at my blackheads. My forehead ends up looking like a human pincushion, all of my pores swollen and red. Every night I fall asleep, hoping, wishing that I’ll look okay tomorrow, like somehow everything will change over night, major transformation. When I was little I used to think about what it would be like to wake up as someone else. When I blew out the candles on my birthday cake for years that is what I wished for. Honestly though, seven year olds aren’t supposed to think things like that, they are supposed to be happy with themselves. I’ve spent my entire life being unhappy
This picking at skin, it all really started with zits and yeah I know that’s disgusting, but it’s the truth. I could sit for hours trying to pop all five million zits on my face at once. I used to put a green mask on at night too. It probably didn’t help because it had mint in it and mint irritates my skin. Once I used mint conditioner and it felt like my entire head was on fire. I don’t really like mint toothpaste either, but it gets rid of bad breath and so I tolerate it. That’s another thing that I’ve become compulsive about. I never was worried about bad breath until I tasted it on someone. Now I chew mint gum, but like I said I hate mint, but I am so worried, because bad breath can change how you see the composure of a person. Not that I am composed. I hate the way that I move. In second grade I decided I moved differently from everyone else. All my movements are so awkward and sharp, and all I want to be is this subtle, demure person, but the most I have managed is to pluck my eyebrows down into lines that don’t match up and it’s funny because I didn’t used to care what my eyebrows looked like, that’s the one thing that I thought I didn’t have to worry about. Then I went to get my hair dyed when I was fourteen and the hair stylist told me that I needed to get my eyebrows waxed and she could do it for me. I mean, maybe she just wanted money. Now that I think back that makes sense, but at that moment it was like the entirety of my being was reduced down to the fact that my eyebrows were too hairy. I got a third degree burn when she did it, a red arch underneath my eyebrow. It didn’t hurt when she pulled the wax off. Not anymore than it hurts to stick a needle through your ear and I am almost as compulsive as that as I am about my eyebrows.
I don’t really know when I started plucking. Probably when I saw the miniscule hairs creeping upon my nose. I just started with the middle, between each of my eyebrows. Right away I discovered a problem. We are covered in little hairs. Look at your skin, anywhere on your skin, look really closely, go under a light, and you’ll see them. Little transparent hairs, like the hairs on a spider. I felt it necessary to try and pluck all these hairs as well. I would sit down, just with the intent to pluck my eyebrows, and I would get frustrated, because it was like they were growing back while I was plucking them. So I just kept plucking them. Eventually I found how fun it was to pluck the really long hairs, the ones with a crimp in the middle, and then of course there are the dark hairs, the really dark ones that grow the slowest. It’s so satisfying to get them when they are just a bud, just a little dot. When you pull it out it’s longer, the little white ball of a root at the end. I mean, when you see that, you have to wonder how many other things are hiding underneath your skin.