Self-Improvement and thumbs

I have the bad habit of chewing on my cuticles. I don't know quite how it started. When I was a small child I used to suck on my first two fingers. (Several of my peers sucked their thumbs, and I remember thinking that was silly. This was apparently before I understood irony.) When I was in middle school I chewed my fingernails, which I may have picked up by watching my sister. There was once a time when my sister's friend showed me how she chewed her cuticles, and I was really disgusted. But then, some time in high school, I switched from chewing my fingernails to the skin around them.

The difference is that the soft bits protected by fingernails hurt immediately if the nails get too short. Cuticle skin is dead and doesn't hurt, or show any signs of true distress, until it starts to bleed. There have been times when all of my fingers are torn up, the skin ragged down to the first knuckle, with several of them scabbing from recent bleeding. It sounds gross because it is. I'm very self-conscious about it. I'm always surprised that very few people notice.

It is a compulsion. I don't even notice I'm doing it until it's too late. I've identified that a big problem is feeling the ragged bits scrape or catch on anything. I want to cut off the offending hangnail. My incisors being the only cleaving tools available, I end up biting or tearing the skin off. Of course, this makes the skin more ragged (and harder for it to grow back). Always wanting to stop, I try to beat it with pure will. Every year I plan to stop chewing my fingers as a new year's resolution, or for lent, or just as a goal for myself. I stopped chewing my fingernails during one of these bouts of determination (and it stuck to this day), but I have never succeeded in laying off the fingers. The closest I have gotten is during my last year in Cleveland I would obsessively manicure myself while sitting at my desk. There was little left to catch or scrape. My fingers generally stayed out of my mouth, but the end results of over-manicuring weren't much better.

Recently I've been going back to a tried-and-true trick. I've been covering up my thumbs with bandaids. Every morning I put them on, every night I take them off and let my thumbs air out. I carry spares in my wallet. It's been fairly effective, as it has been in the past. The thumbs are my go-to fingers for chewing, so having them covered keeps me off of the other fingers for the most part. Seeing the bandages, people have been asking what's wrong with my thumbs and it's embarassing to tell them, but it seems to be working.

I am proud of my progress. It might be the healthiest my fingers have been in a decade. Pretty soon they will be healed to the point where the bandaids will serve no further practical purpose, and I will have to decide whether I will wear bandaids for the rest of my life or if I'm ready to try and go it alone. I am not confidant of my ability to keep it up.

This may be an extended metaphor.