It is not pleasure, it is pain

When you want to pull out your hair, when you are feeling that itch, the urge, just think about it. Think about it rationally. How would you feel if you were made to pull out someone else’s hair? Would you like it? Would you feel pleasure in that? Imagine someone close to you. Your loved one – partner, spouse, parent, child – anyone who is close to you. Can you pull out their hair to feel better? You cannot. Because you don’t feel the sensation. So, it is not the hair that is your focus. Although you do love your favorite type of hair, don’t you? For me, it was short white hair. That was my type!! I would even get excited at the thought of pulling out a thick white hair out of my scalp. I just thought about it, but today I am not getting that feeling that I used to get.

Last night something changed, maybe just a little bit, but it did. It at least gave me perspective. When I was lying on my bed thinking about how I could stop this, why did I feel this urge to pull out my hair, I suddenly got a thought – it is not pleasure, it is pain. That is the reason, you cannot pull out someone else’s hair. Because you know it will be painful for them. Also, you won’t feel that pleasure that you feel when you pull out your hair. That’s precisely the problem then, I guess. I feel pleasure in something that I should feel pain in.

Come to think about it – it starts with spending hours to find out the perfect hair that fits your preferred type. I spend hours running my fingers through my hair to find out anything that is short and thick. I guess that is the one which will cause the maximum pain – or for me, maximum pleasure. I know all this sounds weird. But that’s how my brain has been wired now. It is not weird, it is wired! Anyways, I apologize for the stupid jokes in each paragraph (I can’t help it!). So, coming back to the topic, I spend hours searching for that specific type of hair. Once I feel like I have something that I can pull out, I analyze it using my fingers. I feel the way it feels on my scalp. Sitting there, short and thick and probably white.

If I did not have trichotillomania and if I had to ever pull out my hair, I would feel pain. Normal people feel pain when they pull out their hair, that’s why they don’t! Even I cannot pull out a bunch of hair at once. That would be enormously painful. When I pull out my hair, the actual feeling should be pain. But, my brain, due to some reason, has replaced the feeling with pleasure. If I think about it rationally, if I try pulling out my hair, especially the short thick one, I should feel immense pain. I should feel the pain of the follicle being pulled out from below the scalp skin. Since the hair is thicker, maybe there is a tiny hole or dip that gets created. It should pain like hell.

So last night, I deliberately started imagining this pain that I should be feeling and could not help but cry. I cried my heart out. Because I kept running this scene over and over in my head. The scene where my short white thick hair is getting pulled out. I imagined feeling immense pain as the thick cuticle is pulled out from beneath the skin. I imagined the point on my scalp from where I pull out this hair to be extremely sore. It was a feeling that disgusted me. It made me want to puke.

It is not just the hair pulling. I even pick the skin on my scalp. On a perfectly normal scalp area, I start digging with my nails. I keep striking and striking until there is a small portion of skin, tiny one that come out. There was a time when the skin would have tiny amount of blood too (due to the scratching). But now, I have stopped doing that. I rather just pull out some skin. I keep picking my scalp skin. The skin that comes out is in rolls. It was not supposed to be picked out. It was normally sitting there on my scalp perfectly healthy. I also imagined last night scratching the hell out of my scalp skin and analyzing it. Again, the normal brain would feel so much pain on the part of the scalp from where the skin was picked. It should be very sore. I need to imagine the pain right now. I start imagining the normal condition. The skin that I pick is disgusting to look at. It is my scalp skin. It should be on my scalp. But it is on my fingers and I am feeling it. I should feel disgust that I picked my scalp skin and the spot from where I picked it feels so sore.

The pain is the normal reaction that would happen if my brain did not mislead me with wrong information. Instead of keeping "hair pulling" and "skin picking" in the "PAIN" box in my brain, my brain decided it should go into "PLEASURE" box. Maybe, it felt that the PLEASURE box wasn’t filled enough. So, my brain thought why not put some things from the PAIN box into the PLEASURE box – after all, the source was my own body. I could control it, I could do whatever I wanted to and then feel the pleasure whenever and wherever I wanted to. My silly brain thought it could fool me into thinking that the pleasure was real.

Last night was a revelation. I have not pulled out a single hair since then. In fact I don’t even feel like running my fingers through my hair. All I did was see the real picture – I had been fooled all this time. I still feel a bit sore, but it is not an itch or urge to pull. I think it is the soreness of the four hour long session of skin picking that had happened the day before.

Today is the first day, after I suppose fifteen years or so, when I don’t feel any affinity towards the thick short white hair. I don’t know about tomorrow. I don’t know if this will continue or not. I don’t know if my brain will again be able to mislead me with the pretend pleasure. I want to find real pleasures and put them in the PLEASURE box. Hair pulling and skin picking – like it does for all normal people – will go into the PAIN box. Maybe, initially, I will have to do this deliberately. Until my brain finds peace with it. It is not pleasure, after all, it is pain.

The dance of envy

It’s really hard to figure it out for me,
And I fail to understand how can she,
Occupy your mind, entire,
When I am here for you, dear
How should I make you understand,
How jealous I feel when you long for her;
Or ask me just if you can get her, whether,
I see you then,
holding her in your hands,
Gently pushing her towards yourself,
At your lips is where she lands;
That time I feel goosebumps running down my nerves,
As you seemingly enjoy her moves;
With a puff you take her away,
But she is still there with you,
Enjoying the swing and the sway;
Knows she, she isn’t for you,
Perhaps she is nobody’s, on this earth,
I really wonder why she is so tempted at;
When she should have been the property only of some spoilt brat;
I wish you or her,
Could listen to my prayer,
If only you could keep her away,
Or she would leave you on her own, and go her own way;
I promise, I would be the happiest
To get what I am trying for at my best!

I am leaving

21 years...It has been so long, that they have been with me,
they have stood by me, in my highs and lows,
in my joys and cries, in my ups and downs,
in everything, every moment.
They are the lap to lie on,
the shoulder to cry on,
I mean the world to them,
and they for me.
They are all ears when I want to share something,
And they will be the toughest wall if anybody should come to hurt me.
They are so special for me,
My world, my joys, they are my God.
And now, I stand on the verge of leaving them,
To start ahead on a new journey,
To enter another world,
A world, where everybody is a stranger,
In a world, where I have to look after myself...
I won't have the lap to lie down any more,
And nor would I have the shoulder to cry anymore,
The shoulders that were once slept on,
wept on and carried on, would now be all alone.
The eyes that could not bat a lid if I were in trouble,
those eyes now won't see me around every day,
And the ears that would get tired
listening to my teenage gossips and chit-chats,
would now have to turn on the TV to be occupied.
Ma, Pa, I am leaving,
I am leaving to experience the outer world,
to earn and live on my own,
to make myself a lady from the kid that I am.
You are the ones, I am living for,
And you are the ones, I am going to earn a living for.
I am your daughter,
I know you will get me married someday,
to give me away to strangers.
And it's not your fault at all,
'coz it's a tradition, and you will have to follow it.
A tradition that will make me farther from you both.
Still, I will keep loving you forever and ever,
and will always be thankful for all that you have given me,
For all my wishes that you made true somehow,
For all the love that you gave me, no matter I behaved how,
For all the time you gave just to listen to my little worries,
even though they were nothing before your own problems.
For the special place that you both hold in my heart,
And for giving me the privilege of being your daughter.
I can never say it enough,
Thank you for everything, Thank you for being there always.

ASL please

I am not really sure when or how we humans landed in a world where we all are so damn curious to know what goes on each others' lives. A stranger whom we come across in the elevator, in the neighborhood or  in the office, as soon as we get acquainted, we instantly jump into questions about their age, marital statuses or their reasons for something they do in their personal life. I wonder why we humans have this constant urge to know the 'ASL's of people around us. People of my generation who have entered chat rooms and chatted with strangers in a quest to find that perfect love, probably would know 'ASL' - the three things the whole human race is curious to know of each other - age, sex (this is in the virtual world; maybe in real world, this could be counted as sexual preferance or relationship status) and yes L for location - which part of the world/country/city they are from; so that we can relax about knowing everything about them. The irony is not that we ask about the ASLs to everyone around; but the irony is that we ask only these and judge the rest ourselves...

The Idiot-Box

Just another day at the week long training that I am going through, and I find it's still the mid of the week. Three more days to go, W-T-F ! Well, there was some discussion in my training session today around the kind of promises companies make to their clients and then end up getting sued, for not keeping them. It was a kind of learning in the session to not document such requirements that cannot be pragmatically met, and then I came to wonder what about the stuff that the Television shows all the time. The ad-making agencies that make false promises to us and we, the poor customers, believe all of that. Few months back I had come across some news about a guy filing a case against a well-known deodrant brand. According to him, he was using the product and expected girls around him to go ‘baahm-chikka-boom-boom’ over him. The poor guy had taken all the crap shown in the Ads too seriously! Whatever happened to the case, but the whole story made me wonder who is being foolish here? Are the Ad agencies silly and stupid in creating such Ads, what with all the talented Ad gurus working for them? Or are we, the customers, too gullible to be blinded? Looking at the huge number of Ads being created on this weird concept of guys attracting girls with their deodrants or their bikes or their fairness creams (!!), it seems like I am the fool here trying to make sense out of those senseless Ads. I agree that there still are, no doubt, few Ads that are creative and funny, and yet manage to convey the message. But, unfortunately, the number is still low as compared to the bulging list of Ads making no sense to the viewer. The winner definitely seems to be the deodrant! Oh yes, there is one more, which can claim to be the runner-up. There is this story of a teenage girl topping in her board exams because she uses a particular brand of a sanitary napkin! @#$%&@##$@#&% Give me a break !! The list is endless, if you think about it. Certain fairness face talcs that would give you instant fairness, you just need to pat your face with the powder. If only they would write some disclaimer, warning you not to go out on a rainy day with that patted white face! In fact, do you know that there is a lotion in the market that if you put on, it would not only hide all the marks and spots on your face, but, you cannot even put a spot with a marker, if you tried. What is it, some plastic sheet or something? Smudge-proof, water-proof and definitely ink-proof! I would never understand these Ads and the logic behind what is shown, but I definitely understand the reason why they call it an ‘idiot-box’!