An Uncontrollable Itch

If I could change my own brain, perhaps via doppelganger floating outside of my body and deftly brandishing a scalpel to carve out one small area without impacting anything else, I would cut away my unhealthy, dysfunctional, embarrassing obsession with my own skin. When I feel that my skin looks bad, a pervasive darkness settles down around me, influencing my thoughts and perceptions and putting a significant damper on my enjoyment of life. This is so ridiculous, because it is appearance-related--and that's a main reason why it is embarrassing to me, because I don't necessarily think of myself as especially superficial, narcissistic, or vain. I think it is a deeper issue that insidiously manifests itself as dissatisfaction with the appearance of my skin. Despite my awareness of the ludicrousness of such thoughts, it seems to be much easier said than done to snap out of this encompassing mode of self disgust that often wraps me up in its cretinous cloak.

Sometimes I cannot stop thinking/feeling that almost every inch of me is grossly marred with bruises, blemishes, broken blood vessels, dry scaly patches, stray hairs, stubble, and blotchiness. Sometimes it gets to the point where I am feeling like an unclean, atrocious monster! I feel like something is wrong with me. As if I am not even a real woman. Sometimes I'll think things like, 'Well, maybe I'm just having a difficult time with the aging process; not dealing well with the fact that my skin is not quite as resilient and glowy as once it was'. However, that's not the whole truth, because I have always had some kind of mental issue associated with my skin, in one way or another. Even as a child.

I remember not being able to resist scratching my mosquito bites and feeling like I was a 'bad girl' because of my own lack of willpower. My skinny legs were covered with scabs and other small wounds because I couldn't stop scratching--and even though I felt very self conscious about my ugly legs, I still couldn't seem to resist the impulse to scratch. I remember being ashamed of my scratching and I remember being ashamed of my legs that I had ruined.

In retrospect, I was not a bad kid; I was a little bit sassy, but I didn't have any out of control behavioral problems. However, my mom started treating my compulsion to scratch as though it was an out of control behavioral problem. This exacerbated my own feelings of shame and wrongness. Maybe she was worried I would scratch my mosquito bites to the point of infection, so she felt she had to take some kind of action to curtail my unruly behavior. Not that I was purposely aiming for unruliness.

In any case, I remember being positioned on the exam table in Dr. Smith's office while my mom and Dr. Smith talked about my scratching problem as though I wasn't even there. In my perception, they both talked in a condescending, vaguely threatening tone about how I obviously couldn't control myself and maybe I scratched in my sleep and maybe I should be made to wear oven mitts to bed or my hands should be otherwise restrained.
I already felt embarrassed about my scratching and now I felt like they were trying to humiliate me into acceptable behavior. I was mortified about being treated like such a baby. I was also horrified about the fact that a behavior I was already personally ashamed of, that was already a problem for me, was now also being treated as if it was a personal affront to my guardians. I mean they weren't the ones who had to walk around the playground with hideous monster legs, were they?

Anyway, I didn't scratch at night in my sleep without my own awareness. I might have suggested to my mom that I was scratching myself unbeknownst to me. I had become furtive about my behavior with my mom, both because I was ashamed of it and because she was accusatory about it. She had threatened to start hitting my knuckles with a wooden spoon if I didn't stop scratching. And since I was the child and she was the parent, there really wasn't much I could do in the way of voicing disapproval about her method of handling this issue. Of course, I wanted to avoid the wooden spoon, so I would fib and say I hadn't scratched even if I had. Maybe we had been painting in class and that was red paint; not blood at all. Maybe my scabs just took a long time to heal.

It was true I didn't scratch in my sleep. What I did before I fell asleep was pray earnestly to awake with smooth, perfect skin. At times, I also prayed to be afflicted by scarlet fever. I had borrowed a child's book about diseases from the library and even though scarlet fever was described as a debilitating and potentially life threatening disease, it was also described in a way that made it sound like if one survived, she would molt. Like a vile snake shedding its old skin to reveal a fresh, new, glowing layer beneath. To me, that sounded perfect. I just wanted to wake up with new skin. With a second chance that was not marred and scarred with the evidence of my past failures.