Dermatophagia-Personal Narrative

In the movies, when a main character is about to mess something up entirely, sometimes the director chooses to slow the frame down, or even freeze it completely. That’s the singular moment when the entire audience is thinking the exact same thing: “Don’t do it”.
If my life were a movie, that moment for me would be the first time I started biting my fingers on a boring car ride across the country to New York, my fourth new home, in the summer before fourth grade.
Dermatophagia: a compulsion of gnawing or eating one's own skin, most commonly at the fingers—an indicator of anxiety.
Each time I would move to another state, I desperately wanted to blend in. While everyone else around me seemed to succeed in this quest for perfect integration, I stood apart, painfully aware of every single one of my differences. With each relocation, as my world felt like it was quickly spiraling out of my control, I reached desperately for this ideal, perfectly conformed version of myself that simply did not exist. This anxiety born from sticking out took on a physical manifestation through the act of biting my own fingers.
Strangely, as I started to imagine myself as a black stain against the backdrop of an otherwise beautiful world, the

But for me, my hands could not. So instead, I began to use my hands to play an instrument. At my new school, everyone was encouraged to take up a string instrument in fourth grade, and I just happened to choose cello on a whim. To my surprise, whenever I performed, the only thing that flowed through my mind in that moment was the emotional thread connecting my soul with my audience’s. When I played the cello, my fingers stayed glued to the strings. It was through the cello that I was able to first taste what it felt like to be free from my anxiety. Becoming more and more desperate to prolong that taste, I fought the long, grueling battle between myself and