Posted on July 15, 2023
TW: Mentions of Trichotillomania, Dermatillomania, and self harm.
Over the last twenty months – the period dominated by my latest depressive episode – my hair pulling has been much less of a problem, something that tends to happen when I’m really depressed; it’s like I’m too depressed to pull. I guess that’s something to be grateful for while incredibly depressed (scraping the barrel but it’s something, or at least not nothing). But, over the last few months, my hair pulling (and other BFRBs) have returned with pretty frightening force.
As I said, it’s been a long time since I’ve been seriously pulling at my hair. But in the last couple of months, the urge has come roaring back with relentless intensity. Whether this is connected to starting the Phenelzine again, to beginning the escape from The Great Depression, or something else altogether, I have no idea but it’s a frustrating and exhausting to be back here again, back to pulling so much and so often that I have constant pain in my shoulder and arm. It hit me a while back that it will, in a couple of months, be ten years since I started pulling, which has been a pretty overwhelming realisation – I never thought it would become such a permanent part of my life.
I also started picking at my skin, which isn’t something I’ve ever really done and certainly not to the degree that I pull my hair. Frustrated by the imperfections of my fingertips, I ended up compulsively chewing on the callouses that had recently developed on my left hand (coming out of the depression, I’d started playing the guitar again and the callouses on my left hand – my string hand – had begun to reform); it got so bad and I’d gone through so many layers of skin that I couldn’t touch anything without pain. How they healed, I have no idea. I was also picking at my nails and the skin around them. My fingers were a mess, raw and painful and I ended up going through multiple packs of plasters in my attempts to stop. But, of course, I’d start picking at them as soon as I took the plasters off so they really did take ages to recover, and it was even longer before I could play guitar again.
And as if both of those behaviours weren’t enough, I was compulsively scratching at a half healed self harm cut on my face. It had started to heal but then suddenly I couldn’t leave the scab alone, reopening the cut and eventually making it bigger and bigger. I wasn’t trying to stop it from healing exactly but in my mind, the uneven, ‘imperfect’ edges needed to be fixed and so I kept trying to smooth them out, make them neater, make them symmetrical, or… something. It’s completely illogical because I was just making it bigger – just making the wound worse (and at this point, it really was a wound) – and more likely to get infected but I couldn’t help it.
I just could not stop myself. I tried so hard – trying every strategy I’ve ever used, every one I could find on the internet – but I still felt like I was losing my mind – and I mean that literally – if I didn’t do it, a feeling that got worse the longer I tried to stop myself. In the end, I always broke and my fingers found their way back to whichever of the three was their favourite at that moment in time. And it was always worse if I was extra tired or extra stressed. The only way to in way curb it – the behaviour if not the compulsion – was to cover the skin I was attacking, plasters over my fingers and a dressing across my face (that one was harder and less comfortable to explain). That didn’t stop me trying, constantly fiddling with the edges of them, and my hair bore the brunt of that coping mechanism. I ended up buying a hat that I could tuck all of my hair under but even with all of that in place, the urge to pull or pick got so bad sometimes that I simply gave in to it. Sometimes it was just too hard.
(On the left: before we found the correct dressing // On the right: in the early days when I’d only chewed on two callouses)
Jump to a few months later. My callouses finally healed and, after a period of using the wrong type of dressing before switching to a better one, my face recovered for the most part too although there’s still a scar. With those ‘imperfections’ ‘perfect’ again, hair pulling has become the main problem again. The urges are less than they were but still pretty relentless – perhaps a side effect of restarting the Phenelzine after all? – and I’m so fucking tired of the whole thing. I don’t know what to do, how to stop; I’ve seen so many people say that it’s not actually possible. But I don’t want to live like this. As I said, I don’t know what I’m going to do but I think I might try hypnotherapy; I’ve heard that some people have had positive results. So I guess we’ll see. Ten years is long enough.
Category: depression, emotions, medication, mental health, self harm, trichotillomania Tagged: antidepressants, bfrb, body focused repetitive behaviour, body focused repetitive behaviours, depression, dermatillomania, guitar, hair pulling, medication, mental health, mental illness, pain, phenelzine, self harm, self injury, side effects, skin picking, trich, trichotillomania, trigger, trigger warning, tw
Posted on June 3, 2023
TW: Mentions of self harm and Trichotillomania.
So the theme set by the Mental Health Foundation for Mental Health Awareness Week this year was anxiety. They pushed the hashtag #ToHelpMyAnxiety to raise awareness but I didn’t see it once on social media so I decided to write a whole blog post on the topic, on what helps my anxiety as well as what I’ve heard from others about what helps them. I ranted recently about how people engage with Mental Health Awareness Week, and awareness days in general, but I do think that sharing coping mechanisms for anxiety is a useful thing to do and a good use of those days.
I live with very severe anxiety, so bad that nothing I do actually banishes it, but I have found certain things that help to manage or reduce it. And I’ve spent a lot of time talking with friends and acquaintances about anxiety, discussing how we all try to cope with it. So I have a lot of tried and tested methods that have all worked for at least one person and therefore will hopefully be useful to at least one of you. If any of these ideas help just one person, then it’s worth the work to compile them. (Some of these have been pulled from my experience as an autistic person but many of them are useful for anxiety so I figured it was worth including them.)
I do think it’s worth mentioning that not all of my coping mechanisms are good, healthy ones. I’m focussing on the healthy ones because those are the ones we should all be aspiring to practice but I felt it would be remiss to not even mention them.
General Tips:
At Home:
Out and About:
Other People’s Tips:
Other notes:
So I hope this has been helpful. Hopefully there are enough ideas here that there’s something for everyone, to try at least. If you’re reading this and struggle with anxiety, I feel for you and I’m in this with you and I hope that you find something to help you manage it. Severe anxiety is not something that we just have to accept, just have to live with. There are ways to make it easier – maybe there are even ways to shed it – and I hope you find them because you deserve to enjoy your life. You deserve to feel everything, not just anxiety.
Category: about me, animals, anxiety, autism, chronic fatigue, chronic pain, exercise, family, favourites, food, hydrotherapy, medication, mental health, music, ocd, self harm, sleep, therapy, tips, trichotillomania, writing Tagged: anxiety, anxiety disorder, anxiety medication, asd, autism, autism spectrum disorder, autistic, autistic adult, breathing, chronic fatigue, chronic illness, chronic pain, coping mechanism, coping mechanisms, coping skills, diazepam, exercise, gad, generalised anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, hair pulling, health, mental health, mental health awareness week, mental health awareness week 2023, mental illness, mhaw, relaxation, self care, self harm, self harming, sensory issues, sensory overload, sensory overwhelm, sensory sensitivity, stim, stimming, stress, swimming, therapy, tips, trich, trichotillomania
Posted on May 13, 2023
So yesterday was the 12th of May, also known in the UK as Mass Observation Day! Every year, the Mass Observation Archive asks people to keep a diary for the day in order to record the everyday lives of the UK population. I’ve been keeping diaries for most of my life and I think that the idea of pulling together all of these accounts in order to get a picture of an ordinary day in the life, whatever that might look like, for a big group of people is really, really cool so I always try to participate. Here is my contribution for this year.
Some important things to know before reading: I’m neurodivergent, autistic and ADHD, and struggle with multiple mental health issues (Depression, Generalised Anxiety Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and Borderline Personality Disorder) and physical health problems (Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome). Having spent eighteen months in the worst depressive episode of my life, I’m recently back on medication and trying to get my feet under me again, working hard at both therapy and hydrotherapy. I’ve also recently released my latest single as a singersongwriter, ‘House on Fire,’ and am working towards several other projects.
I slept through two alarms, completely exhausted. I’d had a really late night in London seeing Ingrid Andress in concert (supported by Nick Wilson), which was absolutely amazing but between the energy expended and how late I got home, I was beyond tired.
When I finally managed to force myself awake around eleven, I lay in bed for a little while: I did a quick check in with social media (I’m trying really hard to find a healthy balance around time on my phone), did some Duolingo practice, and read a little bit of my book (both of these things are habits that I’m trying to practice daily). Then I got up and got ready for the rest of the day.
At one, I had a Zoom date with one of my best friends. We had a good catch up about what’s being going on for each of us, with many a tangent on kind of bizarre topics like alternate universes or the different sounds that insects make. And then we continued watching the TV series we’ve been watching together for the last few months, a series we both enjoyed when we were younger; we love it but we also love making fun of it so we always have a blast. We managed to watch two episodes and had a great time before I had to go. I didn’t have long before my therapy appointment so I got my bag ready and then fiddled around on my guitar until I had to leave (I haven’t been able to play for long stretches of time recently since I hurt a couple of my fingers so I’m trying to build it up again).
I was so tired and really sleepy (one of the ongoing symptoms of my health struggles and quite likely a side effect of my medication), plus my chronic pain was pretty bad (my shoulder and knee have been particularly painful for several days now), but I tried my best to push through and engage the best I could with therapy. In some ways, it was a fairly chilled session (as they go): my therapist had asked me to send her the poetry I’ve been working on over the last month or so, which I did. But it was also hard and I felt really vulnerable because most of the poems are so honest and so revealing. There were some that I said, before we even started, that I couldn’t talk about; just writing about those topics and sharing them (my anxiety about them was so high that I was really tempted to leave them out) was a big step forward. Obviously I want my therapist to know about these struggles but talking about them is beyond difficult (just the thought of it makes me want to scream or run or both); this is the best I can do for now. So we went through the poems, talking about what inspired them and my feelings about those people or experiences or struggles, which inevitably turned into bigger discussions. That meant that we didn’t get through all of them but we did cover some important stuff. I’ve been back at therapy for a while now – several months – but my new therapist is still getting to know me and I’m still getting comfortable with her; there are many things that I can talk about but there are still things that I can’t, things that I’ve never been able to. It’s a process, as I often have to remind myself.
Back home, I talked with my Mum about some of the stuff that had come up in the session but I’m always completely exhausted after therapy – I have been known to fall asleep on the sofa afterwards, hence the late afternoon appointments – so I checked in with the cats, put on The Good Place (my current rewatch), and lay on the sofa for a bit. I called one of my parents for a catch up, had some dinner, and then spent the rest of the evening working on some different things for this blog.
What should’ve been a fairly pleasant evening was complicated a bit by how bad my hair pulling has gotten. That restless, anxious energy that drives me to keep doing it is so hard to resist, especially when I’m tired, and the longer I do it, the more it hurts: my scalp, my neck, my shoulder, my elbow, my hand. But I can’t stop. There have been periods of time where different coping mechanisms have at least reduced the amount of hair pulling but I don’t have one that’s working right now. It’s frustrating and it’s exhausting and painful but I just can’t stop, regardless of how much I want to. I did look into Hypnotherapy briefly a long time ago but didn’t get very far with that endeavour, maybe because it always felt like there were bigger things going on, but maybe I’ll try again because it’s been ten years and it would be really nice not to do this anymore.
Given how tired I was, I tried to go to bed earlier – I’ve been going to bed far too late – and while I did go to bed a bit earlier, I still ended up staying up too late, catching up with my diary. I had multiple cats curled up with me, which was very sweet, so it could’ve been worse and, after all of my problems with sleep, I did at least go to sleep quickly and easily; I’m always grateful for that now, having struggled so much over the last couple of years.
So it wasn’t the most fascinating day of my life but it’s pretty accurate to my life right now and I guess that’s the point of the exercise. It’s a normal day in my life and this is what normal looks like right now, for the most part.
If you keep a diary or want to note down some thoughts about what your 12th of May looked like, the website is here, where you can learn more about this project (and their other work) and submit your entry if you would like to.
Category: animals, anxiety, chronic fatigue, chronic pain, depression, emotions, family, food, medication, mental health, music, response, special interests, therapy, trichotillomania, writing Tagged: 12th may, anxiety, best friend, chronic fatigue, chronic pain, concert, depression, fatigue, friend, hair pulling, house on fire, independent artist, ingrid andress, live music, mass observation, mass observation archive, mass observation day, mass observation day 2023, mental health, music, new music, new therapist, nick wilson, pain, poetry, singersongwriter, songwriter, songwriting, the good person tour, therapist, therapy, trich, trichotillomania, writer, writing, zoom
Hi! I’m Lauren Alex Hooper. Welcome to my little blog! I write about living with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), ADHD (Inattentive Type), and Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS), as well as several mental health issues.
I’m a singer-songwriter (it’s my biggest special interest and I have both a BA and MA in songwriting) so I’ll probably write a bit about that too.
My first single, ‘Invisible,’ is on all platforms, with all proceeds going to Young Minds.
My debut EP, Honest, is available on all platforms, with a limited physical run at Resident Music in Brighton.
I’m currently working on an album about my experiences as an autistic woman.