Lash: My Life With Trichotillomania

A guest essay from Emily Van Duyne.

“The body may not be an apology, but it is the problem I face,” writes

Emily Van Duyne

in an essay on her life with trichotillomania — hair-pulling disorder, a condition the two of us share. I’m so grateful to Emily for sharing this guest essay, below, with The Review of Beauty.

Emily is also the author of the book Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation, out on July 9. With fresh interviews, revisited archival material, feminist theory, and a personal story that parallels Plath's, Emily takes a washcloth to the writer's public image — the mad woman, the sad girl icon — and wipes and wipes away at it to reveal the Plath underneath, Plath as she was: the best of her, the worst of her, the parts she hid in plain sight, the parts she made harder to find. There is so much in this book about how beauty culture shows up in literary spaces too, and I really can’t recommend it enough. You can pre-order it here.

-Jessica

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Lash: A Brief History Of My Life With Trichotillomania

by

Emily Van Duyne

I hate writing this essay. But I am compelled to finish it, a compulsion that feels markedly different from the one that calls me to pull the hair out of my head. Putting this onto the page soothes nothing; instead of turning off the fear and anxiety that tend to rule me, it ramps it up: my hands drag the past from its simmer on the back burner to the front, full boil. I hate the length of this essay, its meandering and inescapable history. I am 44-years old. Thirty-nine years ago, in 1985, the year I started kindergarten, I began to pull my eyelashes out.

The author in first grade

I wanted this essay to scorch the earth, but the metaphor collapsed before I typed the first word. In considering the act, I saw that my body would have to be the earth; saw, further, that when I feel carefully around the back of my head, top left, for a single hair with the right texture to pull out, I am not trying to set myself on fire. The right hair pokes me. Or else it crinkles, despite the fine, straight quality of my hair. Sometimes it stands up and demands, Out — Now. Sometimes my arms do take on the quality of fire, the muscles burning as I hold them up for hours, pulling one hair, pulling the next, pulling another, pulling the last — no, not the last — it’s never the last, although my internal dialogue on this question resembles the alcoholic at the bar. One more, no more, as though one last beautiful snap of the hair, the lash, the brow from the follicle, root intact, can finally satisfy me. As a young girl, alone in my bedroom, I sometimes spoke aloud: No more, no more, the panic entering my voice, soft so as not to wake my parents or my smaller sisters, the adrenaline generated from hours of quietly mutilating my face making it shake ever so slightly. Sometimes I talked to God as I stared into the mirror at my eyelids: exposed, half-bald, red and swollen. Just one more, God, and then, I promise, no more, as I reached up and yanked a half-grown lash out of the top row above my root beer-brown eyes, its root still clinging to it. What else, I wondered, lay inside me? What else could I unearth? 

My body didn’t burn then, either. It stung, in the spots where my child’s fingernails had missed their target, and pinched or torn the skin, instead. My body lived in a state of constant repair in and around that most delicate organ, the eye. Sometimes, I scratched at the tiny scabs that formed on my eyelids. It exacerbated the injury, but in picking at a scab, I felt the trace thrill of pulling out an eyelash and stripping it of its gluey root. Loosed from their natural homes, I smeared the roots onto whatever surface was handy. As a child, this was my bedroom mirror, which I stared into as I pulled, watching the abandoned lashes collect in the gap between the looking glass and the dresser. Later, I smeared them onto magazines, my diaries, the heavy-backed books I favored, then and now. Once, in college, I opened the library’s copy of Robinson Crusoe, and was stunned to find a series of dried-out roots decorating its opening pages. I did a double-take; I had only just opened the book for the first time — those weren’t mine, and yet, the nature of my strange disease had for years seemed so singularly mine, that they must have come from me. If they weren’t mine — as I knew, logically, they were not — they must have come from my ghost, my double, some past version of me telegraphing — you are not alone. 

But I couldn’t hear her. To date, writing this is the first time I have ever described the strange rituals I undertake when I pull out my hair, my eyelashes, my eyebrows, and the occasional pubic hair, although the latter hurts so badly, it’s a rarity. I have plucked out my arm hairs, dug, with queasy pleasure, the ingrown hairs out from the ashy skin of my knees and elbows, the sweaty dermis of my underarms, squeezed, in a prescient moment, the pores around my nipples so that the tiny black speck of a hair I could just make out beneath the surface of my skin popped out like a baby blackhead, not knowing, at the time, that this skill would come in handy when I was breastfeeding my infant son, and stuck in traffic without him or my breast pump, and had to hand-express my milk. I have a single chin hair which has periodically breached the skin of my jawbone since college, which I will catch between the nails of my middle fingers and thumb until I finally unloose it; it can take days, and in the time that lapses, I sometimes pinch and scratch the surrounding skin until it reddens and scabs. 

Some hairs are stubborn. They cling to their individual homes. The human body hosts about five million hair follicles, which is to say, each of our approximately five million hairs have their individual homes, all of which we are born with; we don’t develop more as we age. Each time you — I — pull a hair from its follicle, we run the risk of damaging it. Pull it out enough times, with enough force — with fingernails, hot wax, threads, tweezers — you can kill the follicle altogether. The hair will never grow back.

I learned twice about these countless little deaths. Once, on a therapist’s couch, when I was 23-years old; but first, from my mother, sometime in my adolescence, when she told me, her voice marked with that unmistakable combination of menace and fear, what my aunt had told her: that she, my aunt, had a friend who had also pulled her eyelashes out as a child, and now she, my aunt’s friend, couldn’t pull them out any longer, because guess what? She no longer had any eyelashes to pull.  In a state of sullen silence, I stared at the reflection of her eyes, shielded by Vuarnet sunglasses, in the rearview mirror. I stared at the back of her head, cushioned by the driver’s seat of our Nissan Pathfinder, sunk in my own unmistakable combination: shame and rage. 

I wasn’t sure I believed her. By then, my eyelashes had staged so very many comebacks. Still, I felt my stomach turn, imagining myself bald-eyed, lizard-like. Ugly, which was, then and now, the heart of the issue. I was a pretty girl, and therefore on a path. You don’t just maintain your looks, you enhance them, with pastes and creams and metal curlers which trick your lashes, intended by evolution to protect your eyes from dust and debris, into curling up and out, and looking twice as long. Pulling mine out made me an active destroyer, a purveyor of ironies: I was born with extra-long, double-thick lashes, the kind my students, and my daughter, now pay money to glue delicately onto their eyelids. As a child, people stopped my mother on the street to comment on them. It was akin, then, to trashing my greatest gift: imagine Picasso cutting off his own hands, Hemingway torching his manuscripts in a rage. That was me, to my mother: killing the inky darlings of her darling, lash by lengthy lash. 

The therapist who explained the process of killing the hair follicle to me was the very first therapist I saw, right out of college. He was a white man my parents’ age who looked uncannily like the poet Larry Levis. I had seen him once, at the age of 19, when I was still a svelte, beautiful thing, before college, with its grief and depression and quick fix of booze, packed twenty pounds onto me, and he was visibly shocked when he saw me again. He did not try to hide his shock; it made its way into all of our sessions, during which he admonished my attempts to embrace my body as foolish. I should lose weight. I should work harder. He had noticed, by the way, that I was pulling my hair out in sessions, and I had a small bald spot on the top of my head. By my early 20s, I had moved from pulling my eyelashes out to pulling out my hair. There was more of it to pull from, and it was easier to mask in public. You can give someone the illusion, with your hair, that you are merely twirling it, especially if it’s long. Easy enough to convince an onlooker or a loved one or the other kids in trigonometry that you’re just lost in a daydream, or engaging in feminine wiles. But the therapist knew what I was doing, and he wanted me to stop. He asked if I wanted to stop, and I said yes, of course I did. And could I talk about it? About why I did it, and how?

Okay. 

And so I told him, as I have told you, about the way I went about it: the particular hair with its particular crinkly texture that called to me to pull it out, and felt, when I found it, like a discovery and its prize. He stared at me, stony-faced. “You know,” he said, “or perhaps you don’t. The crinkly texture results from damage to the hair follicle. You’ve pulled out the same hair too many times. Eventually, it will stop growing back.” It was his big move, his checkmate. I reached back and up to grab any hair I could find, and pinch it between my index finger and thumb, and then, in quick succession, pass it, one! two! three! from my ring finger to my middle finger and back to my index finger, using my thumb to pull it taut and then, boom, snap it out and then, probably, use the nail of my middle finger to press the hair against my thumb and curl it, like scissors on a ribbon at Christmas. 

The author at 12, about to pull her hair out

But he said, “Stop that!” so loudly, I winced, did a double-take, dropped my hands into my lap.

He raised his eyebrows at me — a straight man’s eyebrows, a Boomer’s brows, untouched, ungroomed. He had never even thought — he had never had to think — he had never been required to consider — an arch or a trend or the economics of the southeast Asian woman standing above you, wearing a paper mask decades before Covid-19, pasting hot wax onto the thin skin covering the pit in your skull that grips your eye tight — but he knew it was my job to think of these things, and more, and his to reinforce them. Not one of the Vietnamese women who hovered above me with their popsicle sticks covered in hot wax ever once burned my skin or dripped a drop in my eye or onto my lashes, despite the burning history — Agent Orange, napalm, Thich Quang Duc, Phan Thị Kim Phúc — that brought us together, her above and I below, in that most temporary subversion of power.

My body is no scorched earth, but there are so many men I should incinerate.

*

The body may not be an apology, but it is the problem I face, writing to ignite and destroy a shame so long-hidden. When I write, My body, I feel I must be writing of something deeper, on the inside, gristle, bone, flesh, and not the hairs that sprout from it. Surely these are superfluous, as trivial and ephemeral as the baubles that dot my ears and neck. Although I am more versed than most in the necessities of eyelashes — when you go without, you learn quickly why you should go with — they are staunchly categorized in my psyche as decorative. Considering this further, I see how much of my body feels external, on display. Not essential to much, if anything, and in need of constant maintenance, tricked out with creams and colors and the thick black paste that grants me, and the world, the delusion of my normalcy. Nothing to see here, because what you see here is a middle-aged white woman whose eyelashes and eyebrows look, from even the slightest distance, intact, as she ages into invisibility.

Nonetheless, I cling to the metaphor of scorching the earth, which is really to say, I cling to the genre. I like the concept of burning everything to the ground, of smoking out the world until even the bulbs beneath the bed of the earth are ash. Nothing can grow here. Is this because of how much time I have spent waiting for tiny hairs to breach the delicate skin of my scalp and face and prove I am a good girl, again? 

Is this because I know, now, that someday my body will lie beneath the earth, too, or else be torched into flame and ash? Is this because I know, now, that I am not a good girl; I never was; I never will be.

*

Like all scorched earths, there was a time before, a brief blooming, lush with sunshine, the sea, furry dogs wandering the yard that linked our home to my grandparents’, with its crumbling, hand-hewn wooden fence, painted apple-red. I remember a friend, Alyson, whose mother kept a vegetable and herb garden, a square of soft green vines free of bright color or flowers; Alyson plucked a scattering of leaves from the tangle and instructed me to eat. Like a girl in a storybook, I gnashed the tiny shoots between my milk teeth, and tasted fresh mint for the very first time. A child of the 1980s, of Wrigley’s spearmint gum, Fruit Loops, New Coke, I entered the garden, conversely Edenic.

There were fairies there. Or rather, one fairy, who I see through the scrim of my blunt-cut bangs, which grew, as my mother said, like wild weeds. Thumb-sized, she is back-lit by gold light, as though the whole world is underwater; she holds my lashes in her hands. You know this little ritual: each time a stray lash makes its way onto my face, my mother plucks it, gently, with her two fingers, holds it out in front of my face and implores me: Make a wish. 

So, I do. I wish never to die, the way my mother’s father has just died, horribly, throat cancer, pressing his right index finger against his trach to speak in a machine-rasp. I wish my mother never to die, because I love her above all things, a love that binds me together and could tear me apart; I wish my mother never to die, because then I will be left with my father, who finds me alien and strange; at home, we circle one another like wary sharks, with my mother our prey. During our long days alone together, my mother lays her head on the table and weeps. When I ask her, as each day comes to a close, Was I good, today? she says one of two things: You were as good as gold, and I see myself, a goldfish, scales glinting, swimming happy circles in the dappled light-on-water.

Or—

You were a real treat, and I know I am as rotten as Hansel and Gretel, gorging myself on the spun-sugar lattice of the witch’s house. Or am I the house, rotten with sugar, housing the witch within? 

I learn the difference, before I turn five, between words and tone, their inextricable ties; in any case, I begin to wish — let me be good, I want to be good, and with each wish, I pluck a single eyelash from my eyelid, lay it flat against the tip of my child’s index-finger, and wish it away with two pursed lips. Each time I do, the garden fairy catches it; each lash carries its own unique wish scribbled upon it. Like God, who I am told lives in the sky, she is tasked with the keeping and granting of everyone’s wishes, but also knows and loves me well. When my lashes arrive, she holds them up to the light. In her lush garden, against the sun’s gold, she reads the handwriting of my tiny heart. 

If this story has an origin, this is it: a magical time before my mother, reading to me from Shel Silverstein’s Where The Sidewalk Ends in her queen size bed, leans in close and says, What happened to your eyelashes? And though I know the answer, I can’t speak. The fairy flies off, never to return. How can I say, I made too many wishes. How can I describe her wings buzzing like dragonflies’ as she sifts through the pile of lashes that made their way to her by the wind of my breath? It was stupid; my goodness was never gold. I am a real treat. I say nothing back to my mother, because I can think of nothing to say. And then, she cries, harder than I have ever seen her, or will ever see her. She holds her face in her hands, her shoulders slumped beneath their white cotton sleep shirt. She says Why, why, your beautiful eyelashes, why, and tells me I can never do it again.

The next day, I return from kindergarten to a new doll: Glitter ‘n Gold Jem, an embarrassment of riches, given the gravity of my crime, a mysterious thing I can only measure by the weight of my mother’s sorrow. She tells me, Your grandmother bought it for you when she heard how upset you were, as though the news reached my grandmother by telegram, from a stranger.

I thank her. But, I think:

 I wasn’t the one upset.

*

Between kindergarten and the summer before the third grade, I stopped pulling my eyelashes out, cold turkey. It felt simple. My mother said no, so I stopped. And then, just as easily, I began again. Except from then on, I couldn’t stop, and since that summer — 1988 — I have never stopped. There is no remission for trichotillomania, just occasional grace periods. By the middle of my third grade year, my lashes are sparse and my eyelids swollen and a terrible cycle begins. I pull out my eyelashes; my mother notices and, now, she no longer cries. She yells, or maybe pleads. She threatens me with loss: slumber parties, new shoes, art supplies, the Baby-Sitters Club novels I read in one sitting. Periodically, she hits me, a quick, stinging slap across the face. Often, she “checks” my eyelashes’ progress by pressing her forefinger against my eyelid so she can see if new lashes have breached the skin. She does this at home; at church; in the alcove at the local JCC where I take gymnastics classes, and am allowed to hit the vending machine afterward, to buy Skittles or a bag of chips. Once, she does it while I am reading in the bathtub, and I feel so violated and sad that I shout, Why don’t you leave me alone?! And she hits me  hard across the face, with an open palm. 

She reads an article about trichotillomania, and that becomes a new threat. If I don’t stop, she will take me to the doctor. Doctors — then — had always been kind to me, so I can’t tell you precisely why this felt like a threat. Maybe because by early adolescence, I had read enough to know that any doctor who treated this thing I did was not a pediatrician, but a head-shrinker, someone who trafficked in weirdos. So I railed against the idea and my mother dangled it over my head and I found a middle posture, somewhere between terror and fury, and always drenched in shame. And the doctor — what should have been a lifeline, what should have been offered to me as help — became a thing I would have to do, if I wouldn’t just stop.

*

Like many stories, this one has two origins: the mythical burning tower and the archaeological site of Troy. Yeats’ Leda is like this: a real, raped woman carrying inside her the roots of the burning wall, the burning roof and tower. I wonder, had she been able to pull them from her body, roots intact, if she would have smeared them across desks and books and the ornate looking glasses dotting her Spartan home, bloodying mythological Greece with an ash mixed from stone and the bones of men. I was here, I must be trying to say each time I smear the root of a hair or a lash or an eyebrow onto the pages of Plath, of Morrison, of Lorde. I am here, I imagine Leda shrieking as she finds Menalaus and paints him red with his brother’s blood. Leda’s mythological rape begins like so many actual rapes, with A sudden blow. It is true that the word lash is also defined as “a sharp blow… typically given as a form of punishment.” I may have conjured the wish-granting fairy, but my child’s brain was onto something. As I had branded my eyelashes with wishes, trichotillomania was burned into my genetic code.

*

When I was 15, my mother’s brother, John, died of brain cancer. At his funeral, as I stood by his open grave, in the cornfields of Amish Country, quietly crying, my mother’s first cousin, Cathy, approached me. She peered closely at my face, saying nothing. After a moment, I said, What are you doing? 

And she said, I’m looking at your eyelashes. 

My whole body bristled, in its cheap black dress.

Well, they’re all there.

(They weren’t all there. By the age of 15, I mostly pulled my hair out, but still was occasionally called to pluck out my lashes, in long, lonely nights which, for the last decade, I had referred to in my head as sprees, instinctively adopting, as the child and grandchild and great-grandchild of alcoholics, the language of the drunk. By 15, I was allowed to wear make-up, which my parents had forbidden in early adolescence; although I was crying it away, I was skillful with charcoal eyeliner and mascara, able, finally, to cover up my crimes, which I feared Cathy would see. I liked Cathy a lot. She was a more droll, relaxed version of my mother; their mothers were sisters.)

Yeah, I see that, Cathy said, before telling me that her own daughter, about six years my junior, was also pulling out her eyelashes. She wanted to make sure mine had grown back, which is to say, she wanted to make sure her daughter’s would grow back. In the August heat, surrounded by pockets of crying, chatting, solemnly hand-shaking family, we talked briefly of this strange affliction. As she looked into the crowd for her daughter and her husband, I said, Please don’t—

and stopped.

And Cathy said, Please don’t what?

And I said, Please don’t yell at her, as the language of my life’s brief history failed me. And she said, Of course not, and looked at me as if for the very first time.

That afternoon, at my uncle’s home, I sat on the front porch swing, rocking alongside my first cousins, Annie and Marnie. They were older than I was, the oldest daughters of my mother’s oldest sibling, my Aunt Janie. I had never felt cool enough to be noticed by them in any real way. They lived in New York, made brilliant art and did competitive gymnastics, had platinum blond hair and striking blue eyes, and usually brushed me away at family gatherings.

But earlier that day, Marnie, the younger of the two, had pulled me outside of the church before the funeral began, with tears running down her face, and said, I can’t go in there, I can’t, this is my third funeral this summer, I’ve lost two friends to car accidents and I can’t go to another funeral. And so, I walked outside with her and listened, not because I had any great wisdom to offer, but because she was talking to me, and I was grateful that someone older but also young and hip was doing so. I was grateful that someone seemed to need me. She must have been out of college, by then, almost ten years older than me. But she said, Can you hold my hand? I’ll go back in, if you can hold my hand, and so I did.

On the porch swing, I told Annie and Marnie the story of Cathy, and Cathy’s daughter, spurred by the warmth of the sun and their bodies, so close to my own genetic code, so shared in our histories, to let them in on my darkest secret.

I don’t know what I expected. But I know I didn’t expect them to tell me, We all pull our hair out.

All of us. All of them. Or, if not all, most. Most of the female cousins on my mother’s side of the family have trichotillomania. In Amish Country, in the late hot summer of 1995, Annie and Marnie describe to me how, since time immemorial, they have pulled out their eyelashes, their hair, their eyebrows. I don’t have to ask if they have rituals, a word I am sure, then, I didn’t even know to use — Annie tells me, cackling, sipping a Miller Lite from the bottle, I feel around for the dead ones, describing how she decides which of her eyebrows to pluck out, and Marnie rolls her eyes, giggling with recognition. 

*

I wish I could say that from that day forward, everything got easier, but the truth is, it’s still hard. Haircuts are hard. As of this writing, my hair nears my waist. My good friend who used to cut it at her house moved away, and I am leery of a new hairdresser: the looks, the squints, the leading questions. Do I have alopecia? Am I stressed? Did I just have a baby? Sometimes after you have a baby, you shed a lot of hair… I know so many possible reasons we lose our hair, have told so many lies to so many women as they stand behind me, asking the right questions, scissors in hand. Never once have I said: It’s me. I pull my hair out. I have a disease, trichotillomania, whose name, since my first encounter with it in 1990, calls to mind big black spiders, crawling with hair, crawling all over me, crawling into my mouth so I can’t even scream. 

Weddings are hard. In October, I stood by my younger sister’s side as she married the love of her life. For months, I tried everything I could not to pull my hair out, knowing that a stranger would do my hair on that day. Sure enough, when I said, Just curl it, I’ll wear it down in loose waves — nearly choke-laughing on this ridiculous language, this femininity I long ago abandoned in my everyday life, which nonetheless rises to the surface with ease — she said, Well… it’s a little… thin… on top.

Do whatever you want, then, I said, and ended up with my hair wrapped around a mesh donut and looped on top of my head like it was the 1994 eighth-grade dance. I paid her $100 for the privilege.

But there is one feminine trick I can’t let go of, having discovered, last year, brow gel.

I have left them until the end, the eyebrows; they were the last frontier in my struggles with trichotillomania. Because I was a pretty girl, but not a girly girl — girly girls were forbidden in our house — I left my thick, black eyebrows untouched and unwaxed until I was 16-years old. For whatever reason, I never wanted, or tried, to pull them out. So when, my junior year of high school, my friend Molly said, Can I pluck your eyebrows? I said, Sure, why not? In the 1990s, everyone wore thin eyebrows. Mine, which looked like Brooke Shields’, were hopelessly out of fashion, and I was eager to comply.

Unbeknownst to me, this was the beginning of the end for my brows. Molly plucked them into oblivion, with a high, thin arch; they would have grown back, I’m sure, but once they began to — once I felt the prickly hair break the skin above my eyelids — I couldn’t resist plucking them back out, with the tweezers Molly had gifted me the day she plucked them for the very first time.

Unbeknownst to me, Molly also had trichotillomania. As she was plucking my eyebrows, sitting on her twin bed, her boyfriend, a few years our senior, pre-med at a nearby university, popped over. This is HORRIBLE, I said to him, in genuine pain, and he said, Oh, I know, she did mine a few weeks ago. As she plucked my eyebrows, I felt like a liar and a fraud. It did hurt, badly, but the pain was more familiar than any pain I would ever know; my eyes watered, I sneezed, and as she laid the smattering of black brows from her tweezers onto a waiting paper towel, I sat on my hands to keep myself from picking them up, one by one, and stripping them of their gluey roots. It was the following year, our last in high school, when the pre-med boyfriend broke her heart, that I realized why she had so badly wanted to pluck out my eyebrows. She showed up in school with her face red and swollen from weeping. Where once, she wore a crown of thick brown bangs, her hair was gone. A full-inch of scalp revealed. Our friends whispered quietly behind her back; some laughed. I said, to at least one person, But you know… I mean, I have that, too. And they said, Not like SHE DOES. And what could I say, back? The mascara and eyeliner had done their work; 90s brow-fashion sanctioned my continued mutilation of my once beautiful eyebrows.

I looked normal. Molly looked nuts. But written on our bodies, at the molecular level, was the same damn story.

*

Molly became an esthetician. As of this writing, she is considered the top-brow stylist in the greater Philadelphia area, having put her mania to its best possible use. And I became a writer, and a professor of writing, chronicling my own small miseries and joys, teaching others to try and do the same. And before each class, as I pull up to campus in my minivan, littered with my kids’ detritus, I stare into the rearview mirror, brushing my eyebrows with the dark brown gel that gives them the appearance they once had, when I was a child.

This feels so good! I am normal.

Except I am not.

My eyebrows are a lie. Normal is a lie. But normal was always a lie — my whole life was built on a deception, and that deception became the norm. It is strange for me to walk through the world with the little patches of scalp and brow and eyelid that I have stripped of their hairs on display for the world. It is strange — no, impossible — to go one single day without pulling the eyebrow, the eyelash, the hair. So I cover it up; I tie up my hair. I  glom what remains with gel dyed to match my missing lashes and brows, and smile as I meet the world, which as ever does not allow me to want too much; to wish for too much; to imprint my wishes onto each lash that falls from my eye and blow it back into the sky, to a beautiful little woman waiting to grant it. 

The hair on my head calls to me, like it called to my cousin, Annie, who felt around for the dead ones. Whereas I am looking for a prize, Annie was trimming the fat. Were we making excuses for our disease? I don’t know. What I remember best from that day is this: Annie and Marnie were unbothered. They thought it was funny. As the sun burnt the cornfields in the distance, they laughed and laughed, and the fading light burned the sky.

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