pick pick bite
bite bite rip
rip rip chew
chew chew gnaw
gnaw gnaw repeat
pick pick bite
I was twenty-four when I discovered what I had been doing to myself for twenty years had a name: dermatophagia. Dermato meaning skin; phagia meaning biting, eating, devouring. Skin. Devouring. It’s what psychs call a ‘body-focused repetitive behaviour’—a BFRB.
You might be thinking, ‘Hey, I bite my skin sometimes, but I don’t think I would go as far to say I have a disorder.’ Well, that’s where the repetitive, compulsive, persistent, life-altering part of it all comes in.
You see, sometimes I’ll spend three hours only thinking about the bit of skin on the side of my middle finger that I gnawed at the night before. I gnawed at it so much, ripping off layer after layer of skin and then sucking the blood out of the wound, that now there is an acute, sharp pain coming from the side of my middle finger. I catch myself looking at it every fifteen seconds to make sure there is no more skin to chew and chew and rip.
The side of my middle finger will take approximately a week to heal. I watch as tips of my fingers turn from red to a tender pink. Sometimes the light will catch the rings of my fingerprints with such clarity that I can count them one by one like tree rings, each one on a different healing cycle to the next. If I drew blood, the wound takes longer to heal. Sometimes a firm, orange tinted layer of skin will glaze the wound with such a perfect circular shape that I can’t help myself but rip it right off again. When a finger has healed enough that I can no longer feel edges of skin as I rub my thumb and fingers together, I will pick and bite until it bleeds again and continue the cycle.
Persistently distressed. Gnawing. Healing.
Now imagine doing that to all ten fingers.
My pinkies are on a different schedule to my thumbs. You know it’s bad when the pinkies are raw. You see, the pinkie finger is a tricky beast. Its outer skin brushes against so much in your life. Your mouse pad or the top of your thigh when resting on the sofa. I can’t count the number of t-shirts I’ve had to spot bleach after blood from my pinkie seeped into the fabric as I put them over my head.
pick pick bite
bite bite rip
rip rip chew
chew chew gnaw
gnaw gnaw repeat
pick pick bite
I once won fifty pounds from my mum in a bet. She referred to my finger biting as ‘auto-cannibalism’ and bet I couldn’t go the summer without eating my fingers. I said I could, for fifty pounds. And I did! I didn’t bite my fingers at all over the whole summer. She gave me two twenty-pound notes and a tenner, and I spent it straight away on a new t-shirt and some CDs.
When school returned for the Christmas term, I came home with the middle finger on my right hand throbbing. I put on one of my new CDs and continued to gnaw at the middle finger on my left hand to add equilibrium.
I hid my fingers from my mum. This began the cycle of hiding my fingers from people who loved me.
I’ve also been known to hide my fingers from people who had the potential to love me. Before a date, I would moisturise my hands and fingers to eliminate as much roughness as I could. It’s hard to avoid compulsively biting your fingers when it’s a behaviour linked to other anxiety and obsessive disorders. There is almost nothing that makes me as anxious as going on a date.
I once went on a date with a guy who was proud of completing the crossword puzzle in the paper every day. He ordered us nice wine and I patiently listened to him talk about Bukowski while we drank it. We discussed podcasts we liked over beers at a bar we both frequented but had never seen each other at. We sat on his porch and cracked a bottle of pinot while he smoked cigarettes and I told him what a dirty habit that was.
All I could think about while we were in his bed was whether he would notice my hands didn’t feel like the hands he was used to feeling on his skin. My hands are rough. The tips of my fingers are leathery, callused from years of gnawing, healing, gnawing, healing. If he noticed they felt different, he didn’t say anything. Then I thought that if I was him, all I would think about is how different this woman’s hands feel compared to the women I’d been with before. Why didn’t he notice how rough my hands felt? They were all over him. For someone concerned with how rough their hands are, I sure do give them every chance to be noticed.
We were sitting upright, legs wrapped around one another, when he asked me to dig my nails into his skin and scratch them down his back. Easy, I thought. He didn’t tell me my scratches were too much. Instead, he leaned his head back and let out a throaty gasp. He took the skin on my neck by his teeth as if to tear it all away. A familiar feeling. I’ve always liked it when they bite.
Is this sounding familiar? Do you spend most of the time you’re having sex with someone thinking about how awful your hands must feel against their skin? If you do, I’m sorry. I wish we could both think of more exciting things in those moments.
If you’re reading this and thinking why on earth does this woman care so much about the way her hands feel on other people’s skin, I wish you well and hope you continue to think about whatever you think about in those moments.
When I was eleven years old, I got a wart on the middle finger of my right hand. I didn’t know how you got warts but somehow I had managed it. Because by this point in my life I was hiding my fingers from my mum, I didn’t want to tell her that I had a wart on my finger. Instead, I continued to bite and gnaw and rip the skin on my fingers like the happy, compulsively repetitive child I was.
Three weeks later I had multiple warts on every finger. I learnt that warts spread to other places if you spread the wartiness of one wart to other wartable places. I had to show my mum.
She took me to the doctors. The doctor told me that they were impressed the warts had not spread to my mouth or face. They told my mum to buy me some WartOff and if that didn’t work, each wart would have to be frozen off with a special machine. I missed this prescription at the time because I was stuck on the ‘spread to my mouth or face’. The warts disappeared after using the medicine. I stopped biting my fingers for three months.
pick pick bite
bite bite rip
rip rip chew
chew chew gnaw
gnaw gnaw repeat
pick pick bite
No, I’m sorry. The yucky nail stuff doesn’t work. Painting my nails doesn’t work. Dipping them in lemon and chilli doesn’t work. I obsessively gnawed at the flesh on my fingers when they were covered in warts. Literal warts. Nothing will stop me from ripping the skin off each and every finger.
A global pandemic that began with health advice to wash your hands for 20 seconds after going anywhere really shone a harsh light on those of us with dermatophagia. If warts couldn’t keep me away from my own fingers, neither could a deadly Coronavirus.
Admittedly, I was more aware of the situation and brought back the whole ‘not biting out of fear of contracting something horrific’ thing that the ‘could spread to mouth and face’ thing first introduced. But the existential dread and anxiety of being alive in a global pandemic also meant that all I wanted to do was chew and chew and chew.
When Apple released the fingerprint recognition software on the iPhone, my boyfriend sent me a meme about burning your fingerprints off so that they couldn’t track you. ‘You wouldn’t need to burn them,’ he wrote. We both laughed. I am comfortable enough with him and he knows how much I chew my fingers, and he loves me despite that.
I could only use the fingerprint recognition software for a week before it would not recognise my fingers anymore. It was no longer a joke. My fingerprints were just not sustainable.
I hide my fingers from my boyfriend. He doesn’t need to see them. He’s used to how they feel, and they never get bad enough that they feel any different to what he’s used to.
The first time I told my boyfriend I bit my fingers was in response to a ‘what’s a bad habit you have?’ type of question. This was before I found out what I had was a BFRB. Until then, it was my bad habit. He didn’t really understand what ‘I eat my fingers’ meant. Now, he throws pillows at my hands if he catches me biting them while we’re watching Netflix, or he flings the back of his wrist at my hands in the car on the way to his mum’s house. I think it annoys him more than it annoys me. I wish it annoyed me.
pick pick bite
bite bite rip
rip rip chew
chew chew gnaw
gnaw gnaw repeat
pick pick bite
Kenna MacTavish is working on her PhD in contemporary book culture at the University of Melbourne. She is aggressively Tasmanian but she’s currently happy living in the tree-spangled gateway to the Yarra Valley. She spends too much money on extra-fine nib fountain pens and too much time thinking about what other people are thinking. Follow her on Twitter, @kactavish.