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

world around me then began to lose its beauty.
As my hands grew more and more disfigured, I withdrew deeper within myself, hiding my hands that were so different from everybody else’s.
Hands communicate so much; they reach out, encourage, greet, and wipe away tears.

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

dermatophagia.
I lived for years with my dermatophagia hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles. Then at one point, I realized that after a long, slow battle against my dermatophagia, I had won. I haven’t bitten my skin for around two years now and the scars on my hands are long gone, simply a memory of the past.
Why did I suddenly change?
I had fallen to the very bottom of my pit of anxiety, inside which my hands would bleed and throb simply when holding a pencil between my fingers. I only then began to realize the beauty of the world above and the importance of the unbelievably tight-knit group of friends that I had been connected to for a long time. After all, as night grows darker, even the smallest source of light shines brighter. The world around me only seemed to become more and more breathtaking, and as anyone would do when surrounded by beauty, I began to wonder.
That beauty engulfed me.
As I explored this world around me, I realized that there was an unbelievably enormous amount of things that I did not know. And that was absolutely thrilling. The need to learn about the many things that I do not yet know have become my religion, my driving force.
My curiosity is consuming, my passion is transcending. While exploring, I may hurt myself. But wounds heal and leave me stronger. It is in dark times of failure like these that, time and time again, will only leave you thirsting stronger for the light.