Lauren

It took me a long time to understand that I had a problem, and it took much longer to understand that it has a name - “trichotillomania.” It sounds like a monster, so I just call it “tricho.” I always had a tendency to “play with my hair” - when I read, when I watch TV, when I scroll on my phone, basically absent-mindedly when I’m focused on something. Or at least for as long as I can remember.

In my teens and twenties it was mostly “splitting hairs,” something every woman with long hair knows happens to long hair when you don’t cut it and it’s exposed to the sun. So I “split,” and it was satisfying, even if it looked a bit strange to someone watching from the side. The sense of satisfaction, in any case, outweighed the embarrassment at that stage.

From my thirties on, the problem worsened without me really noticing. I started pulling hairs from my head—not from the root, but sort of from the middle. And the more I did it, the more my hair reacted to what I was doing and became more and more damaged, until it was easy and very satisfying to cut the hair exactly where it had a weak point. Since I was blessed with a lot of hair, the damage wasn’t very noticeable from the outside, which encouraged me to keep going and going.

Every place I stayed for a while, I left behind piles of long and short pulled hairs. Of course, at some point I understood the scale of it and collected the piles of hair after myself, in shame, but persistently. Despite the effort to “collect the evidence,” for anyone who spent time with me—whether at work or at home—it was clear that there was a problem. They saw me constantly with my hand in my hair. On the index finger of my right hand I developed a wounded indentation shaped like a thumbnail, which performed the cutting, repeating the action again and again and again.

Sometimes people would comment, but I didn’t give too many explanations. I would just say, “Yes, I know,” and “Yes, I’ll stop,” and “Yes, you’re right.” But even when I tried, I didn’t really succeed. There were periods when the habit decreased, periods when it stopped—mainly after a mental war of me against myself for several days—tying a rubber band around my finger, tightly gathering my hair, to increase awareness of the technical action that happens absent-mindedly. But always, whether after a week or after months, the hair pulling returned. Every time I came back and saw the piles of pulled hair, I was filled with anger and disappointment at myself—so weak, setting my hair back months “backward” in a few minutes of weakness.

I was ashamed to go to the hairdresser. I knew that what was well hidden under my abundant mane were hundreds and thousands of short hairs that jumped out unnaturally and testified to prolonged pulling. There were hairdressers I told in advance that I had a problem—some knew about it and didn’t judge, and simply “worked around it,” and some ignored it or explained to me that it wasn’t a problem at all and that I had short hairs because of “new hair growth.”

I had a friend who had a similar tendency, but much milder than mine, and I shared the issue with her. She told me that her sister suffers from the same problem, and at that time the sister was almost without eyebrows because of it. That was the first time I was exposed to the fact that there are other people who suffer from the same problem as I do. I admit it made me feel a bit better, less flawed, knowing there were others with the same issue. About two years ago I started to take an interest—I searched online and found information about the phenomenon. I learned about it, I learned about myself. I learned that I’m not alone, that it has a name, that it has statistics, and that it’s hard—very, very hard—to get rid of this thing.

I envied women who are able not to damage their hair. I couldn’t stop thinking that if I stopped, within a few years my hair would be healthy and abundant, uniform in length (years… it’s impossible to describe the despair at the thought alone). So I took on the project and decided that I would stop. And indeed, I succeeded on my own with a lot of mental work, accompanied by emotional exercises and an understanding of the mechanism, and I was free of it for quite a long period. But like many things, the monster crawled back, and almost without me noticing, after about half a year or maybe more, I found myself again with pulled hairs around me. My partner noticed, and with great sensitivity, gently remarked that my tricho was back…

Extremely frustrated and ashamed, I understood that I had “fallen back into pulling” again. After great success in quitting smoking (both cigarettes and weed), a few months ago I decided to face this issue again—and this time for good. I came across an ad for the SoloUno app that specifically addressed “hair pulling,” trichotillomania—my nemesis from time immemorial—and I was surprised that someone had devoted an entire advertisement to the phenomenon.

It took me a few more weeks to decide to give it a chance and seek help, and I downloaded the app. After about two very successful months, during which from the moment I downloaded the app I stopped the habit completely, it recently returned—and with it the despair, the self-disgust, the disappointment. These days, I am returning to the fight and trying to take all the systems that were already there, all the tools that already helped, and combine them for the overall campaign. I successfully quit things in my life that were so hard and addictive—why can’t I get rid of this?

But despite everything, I am confident that I will succeed—just not to despair, to keep fighting, every day anew, until it disappears from awareness, until the need is no longer present. What helps me is to open a day and not start at all; to be aware of the moments and situations in which I tend to pull absent-mindedly, and to prepare in advance. To do meditations, to start the day with a conscious decision that “this will be a pull-free day,” and also to try (and sometimes succeed) to tell myself that even if I “fell,” not to let despair worsen the situation—not to allow all the walls to collapse—and to start again, every time anew, from a clean slate.