"More, now, again" ... obsessive hair plucking

A couple weeks ago, I bought a copy of Elizabeth Wurtzel's book "More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction." Well actually I sort of traded a few old books for it at a second-hand book store. I've read "Prozac Nation" and excerpts from her other books, plus some articles she's written for magazines, and I've loved everything I've ever read.

I'm about 1/3 of the way through the book, and it's shocking me just how much I have in common with Elizabeth, or at least the person she was when she wrote her books. I knew we had a lot in common just based on what she talked about in "Prozac Nation." I've always felt a strong connection to her depression, self-harm, and other various issues, but I'm now learning that we have even more in common.

No, I've never been addicted to illegal drugs, like cocaine, as she talks about in this book, but I have really abused prescription drugs. She talks about how she became addicted to Ritalin and it almost killed her. It totally strikes a chord inside me with everything I've went through since I first got prescribed anti-depressants as a teenager.

Also in this book, she talks about she would spend hours at a time plucking hairs on her body, to the point where she would get sores all over her legs and she'd let them get infected. I never really realized before that other people did that. For years, I'd sit down somewhere and pluck hairs with tweezers for hours at a time. It started with my fingers because I'd get stray hairs on a few fingers and that would drive me crazy. Then I started plucking arm hair, then leg hair, then foot hair. Eventually I was plucking hairs all over my body. Forget shaving. I just plucked. I even plucked all my pubic hair. Can you believe that? I was totally obsessed with never having any hair anywhere on my body.

The problem with doing this is that you constantly start getting in-grown hairs, and of course I'd have to start digging into my skin to pull out the hair. I would basically cut into myself just to get down to the in-grown hair. I'd leave sores up and down my arms and legs. No matter how much it hurt or how bad the sores got, I couldn't stop.

I would get scabs on the sores and pick at the scabs over and over again. Nothing would ever heal. I even got three staph infections, which I'm fairly certain stemmed from picking at the sores.

Earlier this year, I was sitting at a Dairy Queen eating ice cream with my mom and brother, and suddenly my mom looked down at my left arm. "Oh my God," she said. "When did you stop plucking your arm hair?" She was utterly shocked that there was visible hair on my arm. I didn't really have much of an answer. I'm not sure when I stopped it. With my current stage of depression, I've become so lazy that I have stopped caring if I have hair on my body. I told her that the laziness has overtaken my obsessive compulsive disorder.

I then suddenly said, "If you think that's bad, you should see my legs." I jumped up, threw my leg up on the chair and pulled my pants up. I had a forest of leg hair. My mom started choking on her ice cream and somehow choked out the words "oh my God" again. I sat back down and said that my armpits were even worse than my legs, which was totally true. She begged me not to show her the pits.

Since that day in Dairy Queen, I've gotten a little bit better about things, well at least at shaving my armpits. Having a boyfriend that I actually see several times a week has gotten me to keep my armpits pretty much in check, but even my legs still get pretty bad unless I think I'm going to be wearing shorts in public.

Anyways, it's cool to feel yet another connection to Elizabeth. I feel much less alone in the world with my issues when I know other people have dealt with the same problems. I don't feel like quite so much of a freak.