The game is simple. You close your eyes and put down your head, leaving your thumb raised until one of seven people comes to tap your finger. Then, you open your eyes and try to guess who tapped you.
“Alright, class! Heads down, thumbs up!” The lights were turned off as I excitedly cradled my head in my arm that rested bent on the desk. I stuck my thumb out like a trophy, suspensefully awaiting for the slight brush of a hand that I so hopefully wished for.
Third grade. So simple. The next time I played Heads Up 7 Up in a classroom wouldn’t be until– oddly enough– senior year. It was after I finished our first semester final, and my teacher suggested we play a game to celebrate the beginning of winter break; the class decided on Heads Up 7 Up. During the time in between third grade and that day of senior finals, needless to say, a lot had happened.
“How about Heads Up 7 Up?” My teacher’s voice rang through my ears and I could feel the ever-so-slight shifting of the fabric on my shirt that emphasized the acceleration of my heartbeat through my chest. It’s a children’s game. Stop panicking. My eyes darted from face to face around the classroom to see my classmates nodding in agreement to the consensus, to my horror.
“Okay, can I get seven volunteers to stand up here so we can get started?”
My palms, sticky on the desk, smeared condensation with a subtle squeak. I lifted my shaking arm to wipe the smudge off with my sleeve as I kept my eyes fastened to the surface. The talking and laughing of my peers seemed to drown out my thoughts and erase my ability to think clearly. I peered down at my hands as if a refusal to acknowledge my surroundings would mute the blurring noise.
“Dermatillomania.” The voice echoed in my ears from several months prior, when I had been sitting on the table, the one with a crinkly layer of paper to sanitize between patients. “It’s also sometimes called Excoriation Disorder. It’s defined as repeated picking at the skin, resulting in lesions that cause significant disruption in one's life.” She had read off her paper to me, clipboard in hand. I remember leaving the building with a scoff, the diagnosis of a nervous habit seeming irrelevant to my ignorant self at the time.
And now. My hands. Raw, excoriated, torn pieces of flesh attached to my wrists. I picked at my thumb as I furiously debated escaping to the bathroom. Stop it. You can’t pick. I turned my palms over and over, and the visual of the skin on my fingers ripped and damaged from all the picking and rubbing and scratching and scraping tore into my mind like a child opening presents– nervous anticipation for the moments in the unfortunately near future. I can’t. I can’t put my thumb up. It looked like it had been forced through a paper shredder, covered in excoriations. I hadn’t even realized the extent of it until the blanket of shame fell over me, as I imagined my peers catching even a glimpse of what was hiding in my hands, scrunched in my own lap.
Tape. I carried tape in my backpack.
“Is everyone ready?” The class nodded eagerly from my peripheral vision.
I desperately ripped through my backpack to search for my roll of pink electrical tape. The lights shut off in the classroom. My stomach churned as I dug deeper into my backpack with a dropping heart, realizing that I had left the roll of tape at home.
“Heads down! Thumbs up!”
I can’t. Dermatillomania. I have dermatillomania. It was such a simple task; a game I played in elementary school. And I couldn’t do it.
I was heavily tempted to leave this narrative off on that sentence: “I couldn’t do it.” Some stories are more effective without a concretely positive ending or the author’s personally insightful takeaway from the writing. However, many times we feel the need for closure, so I will provide some.
After the incident, I went home and thought for a long time. I eventually reached out for help, but I can’t say that the issue has been resolved. It’s a process. The reason I don’t want to leave off on an indefinitely positive note is because that is not a guarantee. It is a struggle. I will keep pushing to overcome it, but the battle doesn’t stop upon the simple realization of the need to ask for help. Asking for help is simply an acceptance and preparation for the fight that is to come. And I encourage you to step up to that fight, whatever yours is.
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