“Guys are like buses”

You wait forever for one, then 3 come along at once!

Well, not exactly. The SJA guy, went missing on me for a few weeks. Well that solved the dilemma of what to do about him, as it didn’t feel quite right. I didn’t have to do or say anything – he just didn’t get in contact for 2 weeks!

I then met a guy at Greenbelt. I went speed-dating, but met him in the queue before and then in the queue in the beer tent after (it was a traumatic experience, the speed-dating!) We hung out for most of the weekend and have been in touch since. It’s not easy to keep in touch seeing as he runs a pub out of London and the only time he seems to have days off seem to be the evening I’m busy and can’t talk! Trust me to find the complicated one!

Then Friday night I went for someone’s leaving drinks. I went out for one, soft drink. Got home a little before 4am, absolutely drunk as a skunk! But I had spent most of the evening kissing the guy who was leaving!

And this is an interesting one. We’d become ‘talking buddies’ (you know, the people you more than just nod ‘Hi’ at in the office, the ones you can have a chat with) end of last year, had kinda flirted at the Christmas party, and I’d thought he was VERY hot, but not really thought much more about it, after all, he seemed out of my league!

Apparently, though, for a couple of months after the Christmas party – we were dancing at one point and it got a bit ‘dirty dancing’ (he was rather drunk, I was sober) – there was a rumour about us throughout his department! Well there you go! I didn’t know that at all.

Anyway, Friday I sensed something. He seemed to be paying me a lot of attention and didn’t want me to go home when he and the 3 guys moved onto another bar. And I thought – “sod it, he’s leaving, at some point this evening I’m going to kiss him”. So I did! I kinda just grabbed him at one point and kissed him. Well, I think that’s what I did. But I’m not sure he needed much grabbing, to be honest!

And well, it kinda just went from there. And I didn’t get home ’til nearly 4 am! I very much enjoyed myself – he was a VERY  good kisser (unlike my SJA guy, who had the principle, but was just to wooden about it). He has 2 more days at work next week before he leaves.

So there we go. Nothing for a looooooooooooooooooong time, and in the last 2 months there have been 3.

Who knows what’s going to happen next! Watch this space.

OCD, or self-diagnosing

At the beginning of the week I went on a Mental Health First Aid course. Thought it would be useful for my volunteer work – Street Pastors and St John Ambulance – plus might also give me some tools myself for dealing with depression, should it strike again in the way it did 2 years ago.

(As an aside, I’ve finished my CBT for looking at how to deal with my bottomed-out self-esteem, and things are looking up. Though I’m slightly nervous about doing it on my own, without a therapist to talk it through every week. But I’m confident I can manage, and am not putting too high expectations on myself – which was one of the problems!)

One of the things I discovered during the course – well, looking through the course booklet, was a condition on the OCD spectrum called CSP – compulsive skin picking. That and TTM, trichotillomania (or hair pulling) seem to be what I’ve been doing since I was a kid – more intensely since I was 18/19.

CSP – it has a name! That means other people do it! That means I’m not the only one in the world. That means although it’s a problem, people have recognised it and thought up ways to help people stop it. That means I’m not a lost cause! That means I can stop – after all, others can and have. Woo hoo!

It’s not just a form of self-harm, which I thought it was, though I didn’t think it was quite that, as there was something rather addictive – compulsive – about it.

I’m wondering if I suffer from Body Dismorphic Disorder in some way. According to OCD UK:

BDD obsessions may manifest themselves as excessive, disproportionate concerns about a minor flaw, or as recurrent, anxiety-provoking thoughts about an entirely imagined defect. The obsessions are most frequently focused on the head and face, but may involve any body part. When others tell them that they look fine or that the flaw they perceive is minimal, people with BDD find it hard to believe this reassurance.

Some of the ways it can manifest (relevant to my behaviour):

Checking the appearance of the specific body part in mirrors.
Excessive grooming, by combing, shaving, removing or cutting hair, applying makeup.
Picking their skin to make it smooth.
Picking the skin around the perceived defect.
Comparing the appearance of the perceived defect with that of others.

It’s amazing how giving something a name makes it a lot less scary.

I’ve always picked scabs and bit my nails since I was a kid. Not excessively, but was always told off about it, like it was a major deal. I remember when I first started growing the body hair we all grow, you know, the normal stuff. It was dark, dark, dark! And I’ve never really been able to control it: even when I shave I miss some (and take a good proportion of my skin off at the same time).

The hair pulling – with tweezers from my legs – started at uni. I remember the moment with clarity. I was trying to wax my legs and my roommate came in and couldn’t cope with me doing it when she was there, so I ended up with half-waxed legs, which I then had to shave. Of course I missed loads! And so out came the tweezers. Because hairy legs is SO unfeminine. (I think I mentioned one of my self-esteem issues is a feeling of not being feminine enough.)

I’ve seen and heard the lie that a ‘proper’ woman has a clear complexion and is totally hair-free, apart from long, luscious hair on her head, and realised I don’t live up to that.

And so it began in earnest. And 14 years later I’m still doing it. I can’t cope if there’s a dark hair growing. It MUST come out. It’s even worse if it’s growing under the skin – that’s where the tweezers get dug into my skin to get it out. Then it forms a scab, which is ripe for picking. And if there’s a hair growing out of the centre of that scab… well, that has to come out.

The thing is, I KNOW that picking the scabs, or pulling the hairs make my skin worse. They bleed and don’t heal quickly. They get infected and scar. My legs are a mass of scabs and scars – so the very thing that is supposed to remove the ‘defects’ I dislike creates more, which look a lot worse.

But there is hope!

There’s a treatment called habit reversal therapy – replacing the bad habits with good. For example – instead of picking I could rub moisturisers into my legs instead. I’m waiting for a book about overcoming OCD to arrive, so hopefully with the experience of having had therapy, and the buffer of the anti-depressants to keep me from going under again – I can work on reversing this. If I can’t do it by March, when I’m looking at starting to come off the pills (the doc suggested I keep taking them during winter, as winter can cause its own depression), then I’ll go to the doc and ask for some help.