Dealing with Stress

Fun fact: The more necklaces, chokers, scarves, etc Leo is wearing around her neck directly relates to how emotionally unstable she is feeling. She always wears a little choker that is basically just a wire, thin and unnoticeable, as a comfort thing. However, she has recently been wearing other things as well because she needs them as a shield. It's one of the ways she handles stress. Leo is in her last year of high school and there is a lot of pressure. This year is the year they decide where the next step of their life is going to take them.

Everyone is tense, they all have very short tempers and get upset very easily. It's scary.
Leo's patience has been reduced, but she mostly shows her stress by getting horridly depressed. She's been holding in tears for the past few weeks and it's entirely unfun. Stress always does this and her dance class is a good outlet, but it only happens once a week. This year has been driving her insane.


Leo handles it by pulling at her hair. She has this lovely little OCD-type thing called Trichotillomania, which is basically where the person who has it obsessively pulls out their hair. Leo hasn't seen her eyebrows fully grown out since she was nine years old, which is when she started.

It's not a big thing for her, since she is able to rein herself in enough to keep most of her hair...some people who have it are totally bald and she's not nearly that bad, she just doesn't have many eyebrows or eyelashes. She used to be super ashamed of it though, because in her nine year old head something was Terribly Wrong with her and if any of her friends found out they would think she was insane and not want to talk to her again. She also sort of blames her skewed perception of her appearance on her hair pulling, because the mirror in her house was covered by construction paper for years so that she couldn't see herself, because her parents thought that would discourage her from pulling at her hair.

The whole thing was really handled quite badly by her family. They tried so many things to get her to stop, which did absolutely nothing and helped reinforce the idea that something was Wrong with her. She had a therapist for a while, and they tried bribing her and there was this weird medicine thing that her doctor said sometimes helped people with OCD and even though Trich isn't really OCD it's similar, so the medicine sometimes helps but not a lot (it didn't help). There was also the whole covering up the mirror thing. A few years ago she told them to cut it out, and she's been working on figuring out that there is actually nothing Wrong with her.

What angers her the most is when people assume it's some sort of self-injury thing. Like she does it because she hates herself or something. That's not it at all; it calms her down, helps her when she's stressed out or about to cry. She doesn't hate herself at all; she has the standard self-esteem issues one would expect from a teenage girl, but nothing major. She sees herself in a better light than most people her age see themselves.

Leo once heard Trichotillomania described like this: If you show a normal person two individual hairs and ask them to tell you the difference between the two they would look at you like you're crazy. They're just hairs, right? A person with Trich would describe how the colors are different, how one might be crinkled, one might be straight, one is thicker than the other, etc. And on top of that, they would be able to tell you which one is "wrong." 

Leo has found, however, that if she tries to get rid of a hair that is "wrong", it makes the ones next to where it was look "wrong" too, and so on and so on. She can't stop though, the feeling is hard to explain. There's this need that builds up and builds up and she can fight it for a while but eventually it snaps, and when she starts pulling out her hair there's this huge feeling of relief. It doesn't hurt, it feels good. It lets out her stress and anxiety and puts her into a sort of trance: calm and focused. She has to fight her way back out if she wants to keep her hair looking normal, so she's sort of given up on her eyebrows and eyelashes; those are small, and she likes the hair on her head better.

She decided to dye her hair pink in 9th grade as a way to sort of take ownership of her hair, and she's found that if she takes care of it and makes it how she likes it, she's less likely to pull at it. So her hair is her one vanity, and she dyes it strange colors all the time and she loves it. It's one of the best ways of expressing herself that she's found, because no matter what she wears she always has a bit of color on her just because of her hair. It's a very personal thing for her and not just a fashion thing, she doesn't care if other people like it or not because it genuinely makes her feel better about herself.

So that's her weird little trait, and if anyone actually reads this, she would love to hear about yours because it's kinda fun to take ownership of the things that make you imperfect, isn't it?