That pre-operation summer was the last time I wore a swimsuit for many years. Anything short sleeved or too low necked was likewise unwearable. It was vital that I cover the damage. I thought that the appearance of my skin must be as revolting to others as it was to me, both in itself and also because it gave my disgusting habit away, revealing to the whole world that I was in some twisted sadomasochistic relationship with myself. After the picking spread to my face, I started using spot cover, to which I am still nearly addicted. Nowadays I have recourse to concealer which matches my own skin tone; as a teenager and in my early twenties, when I professed to despise anything that actually called itself make-up, all that was available to me was a gungy orange-tinged Clearasil cover-stick, which probably drew far more attention to itself on my fair skin than the picked spots – real and imaginary – ever did.
I didn’t know what the marks on my skin meant, but I knew that, like the Mark of Cain, or Job’s boils, or a duelling scar, or the psoriasis in The Singing Detective, they had to betoken something. As one of the many doctors in Fear of Flying insists: ‘Ze skin is ze mirror of ze soul.’ When I studied psychoanalytic theory in my twenties, it only reinforced my writer’s sense that a symptom was something to be read. It also seemed thrillingly probable that the meaning, when found, would be a dramatic revelation. When stories about self-harm began to appear in newspapers and magazines, I read them intently, studied the profiles of the sufferers, and almost came to the conclusion that I must be repressing some memory of horrific abuse. Almost – but not quite: I always felt that there was something empty about the behaviour itself, empty and passionless. Only after I’d spent twenty years picking and covering and trying to stop would I come across the concept of ‘compulsive skin picking’ or ‘dermatillomania’. Like trichotillomania (compulsive hair-pulling), or canine acral lick, it is sometimes described as a ‘grooming disorder, the result of the inappropriate and repeated triggering of an instinctive fixed-action pattern’7 which leaves the sufferer stuck in a behavioural loop. There is something very appealing about an explanation like this: viewed from this perspective, it is not ‘I’ who picks but ‘it’. There is no meaning to ‘its’ behaviour: it is like a pianola following the notes on a punchcard, just because that is what it does. It’s a practical sort of view, a good rationale for behavioural or pharmaceutical treatments. And it lets you off that exhausting quest for meaning.
That is, if you’re not enjoying the quest too much to accept it. The teenage me would probably have had no truck with such a pragmatic view. I was committed to making a drama out of my picking, and perhaps I could have chosen not to. It became a means of offering intimacy, a terrible and exciting thing to reveal or not as the mood took me. There was my disfigured soul mirrored in my skin, and if anyone could see it and accept it, then they would accept and understand me totally and utterly, something I truly believed, in my adolescent naivety, was both possible and desirable. Now and then I would tell another girl about the picking, for attention, and for sympathy, and to be told that I shouldn’t do it. I also hoped, I think, that perhaps they would say that nobody as beautiful as I should despoil herself in this way – which of course they never did. But I had to keep trying, to make that comprehensive confession and get my complete absolution. Perhaps I was barely more in control of this than I was of the picking itself.
The picking was also something I could fling at my mother, who had the nerve, the absolute stinking nerve, to think that I was a pretty girl who should be going out and enjoying herself. I remember one particular Saturday morning some time in my late teens. My parents were soon to go on holiday to the South of France with my brother and his friend, leaving me at home, at my own suggestion. They went out shopping with my brother, for holiday things perhaps. Meanwhile I drifted round the house until I found myself standing in the bathroom in front of the mirror, where I started picking my forehead, then carried on picking it. The sound of the car arriving back woke me out of my picking trance. I suddenly saw my face in the mirror – not just the square centimetre of skin I’d been working on but my whole face – and was dismayed, as usual. So I ran straight down the stairs, opened the front door and lifted my fringe to show my mother the torn, lumpy mess I’d made.
‘Look what I’ve done!’ I cried.
‘We can’t go on holiday!’ she wailed.
That afternoon, I laughed about this little exchange, and told my mother we’d been playing ‘guilt tennis’. We used to play it a lot.
Sometimes my mother would ask me, tentatively, if I would like to ‘talk to someone’. I always said NO, as I took great pride in my deep, dark and interesting sufferings and was appalled by the thought of someone ripping them away from me. I believed my fears and my depression: they were there to tell me that I was living in unacceptable social and cultural conditions and that only when these were lifted could I experience any real happiness. I was unhappy because I saw the truth, because they had failed to conceal from me that life was rubbish and that I was oppressed. As Morrissey said, ‘To pretend to be happy could only be idiocy (de dah de dah de doo dum day).’ Morrissey had some of the answers. Simone de Beauvoir provided a few others in The Second Sex.
The young girl may gash her thigh with a razor-blade, burn herself with a cigarette, peel off skin; to avoid having to attend a tiresome garden-party, a friend of my youth cut her foot with a hatchet severely enough to have to stay in bed six weeks. These sado-masochistic performances are at once an anticipation of the sexual experience and a protest against it; in passing these tests, one becomes hardened for all possible ordeals and reduces their harshness, including the ordeal of the wedding night. When she puts a snail on her breast, swallows a bottle of aspirin tablets, wounds herself, the young girl is hurling defiance at her future lover – ‘you will never inflict on me anything more hateful than I inflict on myself’. These are proud and sullen gestures of initiation to the sexual adventure.
Fated as she is to be the passive prey of man, the girl asserts her right to liberty even to the extent of undergoing pain and disgust. When she cuts or burns herself, she is protesting against the impalement of her defloration: she protests by annulling. Masochistic, in that her conduct gives her pain, she is above all sadistic: as independent subject, she lashes, flouts, tortures this dependent flesh, this flesh condemned to the submission she detests – without wishing, however, to dissociate herself from it. For she does not choose, in spite of everything, really to repudiate her destiny. Her sado-masochistic aberrations involve a basic insincerity: if the girl lets herself practise them, it means that she accepts, through her repudiation, the womanly future in store for her; she would not mutilate her flesh with hatred if she had not first recognized herself as flesh.8
It was the 1980s, the decade when Andrea Dworkin published a book in which she argued that sexual intercourse was a form of violence practised by men against women. That made sense to me at the time: sex seemed terrifying – a violation of my physical integrity, of my fragile personhood. Besides that, it was grossly unfair: unfair because losing one’s virginity hurt girls and not boys, because women got pregnant and not men, because it was men who bought sex and women who sold it, because there was one standard for boys and one for girls. The asymmetrical nature of sex between men and women was somehow offensive in itself. And if all that wasn’t reason enough to be repulsed, this was, as I’ve said, the 1980s, when television regularly broadcast pictures of tombstones to remind everyone not to have sex if they didn’t want to DIE.
Perhaps my picking was then a ‘proud and sullen gesture of initiation to the sexual adventure’. I would be defiant. My clothes would be my armour. I identified with the school as a venerable nineteenth-century proto-feminist institution. I even dressed like the proponents of late nineteenth-century ‘Dress Reform’, in long skirts and boots. When I was in the sixth form, Hobbs came out with a pair of flat-heeled, lace-up boots which were on plenty of other girls’ feet as well as mine, so I was even fashionable for a
while. A few years earlier, I had asked my mother for DMs, but she wouldn’t let me have a pair, because, she said, they’d make me look like Minnie Mouse, and as I didn’t have enough money of my own to buy a pair – and I never bothered with a Saturday job – that was that.
My need for heavy-duty footwear was, as you might expect, more symbolic than real. Outside of my family, I hardly saw any men, so I invented my own version of what a man was, made up of paranoia and desire in equal parts. The men I imagined were colossi, with the power, on one hand, to break in and tear me to pieces, and on the other – if they were, say, John Lennon or Morrissey or whoever else I happened to have a distant crush on – to save me and my miserable soul. The Plastic Ono Band album with its primal screaming was a favourite soundtrack for my pacing. Meat is Murder was another. My enthusiasm for that particular album led ultimately to my only teenage appearance in the medical notes.
Extract from dietician’s letter to Dr R, 18 August 1986
I have advised her on a generally healthy vegetarian diet including wholegrain breakfast cereals and wholemeal bread. We explored ways of including pulses in the diet without her tasting them too much. I have also given her a list of foods high in iron and suggested she picks on things like fruit and dried fruit which is rich in iron instead of all the crisps.
Somehow it never occurred to me to draw on the men I knew best – my father, my brother, my grandfather and uncles – for evidence about what kind of beings men really were. My father was a gentle soul, and never violent towards me in any way; at a time when smacking was still perfectly uncontroversial, he never smacked me once. There was one occasion though, when I was fourteen, when I hit him. He was teasing me and I didn’t think it was funny, so I smacked him on the arm and told him to shut up! We both stopped short, and stared, shocked, at the place on his arm which my open hand had slapped. He held it delicately. I muttered something about being sorry. Then Dad called out to my mum: ‘Ruth – Joanne’s hit me! What should I do?’ That should give you some idea of how oppressed we were by the patriarchy in our house.
I still call myself a feminist, but these days I take a more nuanced view. The books I was reading – most of them – were best understood by grown-up women, who could relate what they read to experiences they’d already had, not by sheltered and frightened little girls who hardly left their bedrooms. Looking back, I don’t think I really appreciated the difference between a polemical text and a set of instructions, so I wound up taking the political somewhat personally. I was a teenage fundamentalist.
Reading over the last few pages, I realize I’ve made it sound as if I never left the house for four years. That would be my negative filter again. If I try to conjure up memories of myself elsewhere I remember that, for example, I went to see Another Country with my friend Mina and we were all of a flutter because we’d managed to get into a 15-rated picture when we were still only fourteen. I remember the synagogue youth activities I attended – the discussion group for serious youngsters, the editorial committee that wrote the young persons’ page of the newsletter, the local youth branch of the Reform Synagogue Campaign for Soviet Jewry – where I failed to get in with ‘a nice crowd’ or to hit it off with a pre-approved boy. I remember the Russian course I did one Easter where I met one of my favourite ever people, a bohemian girl from Kentish Town who wore vintage sixties dresses with her big boots and practised Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism alongside her mother. She was into early vocal music but also knew My Bloody Valentine personally. She stayed with me for a week while my parents and brother were in France, and she let some much-needed air into my life.
The difficulty was that all these places and people had to be reached somehow, and teleportation wasn’t an option. (It still isn’t and I’m still waiting.) I felt safe enough, if increasingly ridiculous, in my parents’ cars, so the Saturday visits to my grandparents were no problem. These visits were both comforting and depressing, because they were always the same: we would eat liquefied cauliflower for lunch and then go out hunting in Brent Cross, before returning to eat Tunnock’s tea cakes and display our purchases. Their house was so familiar to me that I could treat it as another branch of my own, often slipping upstairs with my Walkman to pace around the spare room for a while.
My extended family took the piss out of my eccentricities, but I could handle that: mockery was the accepted family currency, and I dished out as much as I took. They might find me ridiculous, they might have failed to understand me as completely as I felt I deserved, but I knew they loved me. Similarly when my Kentish Town friend told me that I was ‘ignore-ant. You’re really intense about some things but then you completely ignore the others,’ I took it in good part, because I understood that despite my exasperating ignore-ance she had chosen to be my friend.
In the wider world, I was learning that ignore-ance could be dangerous. Sometimes pacing around my room just wouldn’t do it for me and I needed fresh air, so I would go for a walk around a block or two. I must have looked funny when I was doing it; maybe it was my heavy, earnest gait, maybe my facial expressions were all wrong somehow, maybe I just looked like someone who was walking for the sake of walking, and that in itself was weird enough in the suburbs, where there’s neither enough scenery or enough activity to justify it. Maybe it would have helped if I had given over and worn my glasses all the time; as it was I either peered at people or looked right through them. It was probably for all of those reasons that I looked mad, and different, and was therefore fair game for ten-year-old boys.
It was the summer after my O levels, and I was following my usual route, down a side street, then along the road past the primary school I’d been so glad to escape, and finally back up the main road towards home. As I rounded the corner between the two, a group of ten-year-old boys came up to me, one of them holding a football.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, in a sickly sweet voice that reminded me of Donna. ‘Could you tell me the time?’
I looked at my watch, told them and then they started. They all clustered round me, laughing, discussing me loudly, as if I weren’t there: ‘She’s ugly, ain’t she?’ ‘She’s got big tits, ain’t she?’ Then in the Donna voice, one asked me, ‘Are you mad?’ They bumped into me as I tried to walk away, ran up behind me and pulled my bra strap, then threw their football at me – why were people always doing that? After a minute or two I tried to get my own back, wrenching the football out of its bearer’s hands and making as if to throw it into the road, growling, ‘Get off the streets!’ But they just went: ‘Ooooh, temper!’ and carried on jeering and bumping. When I got home and had finished crying, I decided that the best solution to my problems with the world outside was never to leave the house again, and resolved to develop agoraphobia, which everyone had heard of and would understand. Fortunately my friend Jane phoned to invite me to go and see a film with her in the West End, and I went.
Teleportation was out – so was agoraphobia – how about invisibility? On the day of my humiliation I had been making an effort, wearing a fashionable egg-yellow Top Shop dress with tiny white polka dots and a pair of white pumps. On my more wary days, and especially if I had to walk down the stretch of pavement where I had been subject to sexual ridicule by children, I dressed down as far as I could go, hoping to escape notice. On the last day of my Kentish Town friend’s stay, I walked her to Canons Park station and then returned home. I was wearing one of my long, baggy dresses, with my feet peeping out of the bottom in their clumpy lace-up shoes. My hair, now long again, was pulled back into a low, dishevelled ponytail. It was a cool summer day, so I was wearing my baggy shapeless navy jacket buttoned up over the skirt. In this way, I had managed to get as close to formlessness as a solid object could. As I approached the cul-de-sac where I lived, I passed a couple of boys, my age or slightly younger. They looked me up and down with self-righteous disgust and one of them yelled ‘Dog!’ It felt like a punishment, as if these boys’ proper and just purpose in life was to patrol the streets, handing judgements out t
o any woman who dared to enter their sight looking anything less than primped.
I understood that I was supposed to be ashamed, and I was. When I got home I looked at myself in my parents’ full-length mirror, without changing my clothes, and thought that perhaps I ought to have made more of an effort to make the best of myself, to be less of an affront to decent eyes. I had been whistled at plenty of times, and smiled at, and ogled, but surely only by men of peculiar and even perverted taste – that they did not see that I was a dog said nothing good about them, and I would certainly never want to be with a man who was so desperate as to want to see anything in me.
I overheard someone in the sixth form common room telling her friends about a girl she’d met who went to some other private establishment and had alluded to ours as ‘that place where all the sixth formers have long flowery skirts and hairy legs and hate men’. As you’ll have realized, this was not an entirely inaccurate description of some of us – or of one of us, anyway. Plenty of other girls shaved their legs, wore the right clothes, went out and got themselves boyfriends. To them, girls like me – poorly dressed, boyfriendless and ‘innocent’ – represented precisely what they did not want to be. We were each other’s shadows. A friend once told me how her mother, who counselled teenage girls, had explained that, as she saw it, there were two paths through female adolescence: a girl could either ‘climb a tree, or stand around at the bus stop with her tits hanging out’. I stood on the side at the school ball, with my tree-climbing set, all of us in the wrong sort of dresses, watching the bus stop girls strutting their strapless stuff amidst crowds of hair-gelled boys sweating into their rented dinner jackets. It was a strange and discomfiting sight. Later that year, when one of our group managed to get herself down from the tree and find a boyfriend to swoon over and sleep with, the rest of us were horrid about it – I’m rather afraid we said things.
Woman Who Thought too Much, The Page 7