Confessions of a Nail Biter
As someone who comes from Dallas, I’m quick to tell new friends that yes, I do judge people by their handshake. This has always made me feel a little like a hypocrite: though my handshake is firm and lasts for exactly the right amount of time, I’m usually trying to hide my ugly nails from the person I’m shaking hands with.
To clarify: I haven’t bitten my nails in a few years, but once you’re a nail biter, it’s part of your identity. I bit mine for over two decades. My habit was pretty extreme: I often would have to alternate between biting further down and blowing on the self-inflicted wound. I’ve chewed through a leather batting glove before to get to the nail during a high-stakes softball tournament. I’ve left someone’s office after a job interview only to realize that my fingers had been in my mouth.
Of course, I never did this on purpose. I had doctors speculate that my tendencies were everything from an anxiety disorder to a form of OCD. If I’m being honest, even explaining my habit disgusts me. I’ve never seen myself as anxious or compulsive, but I knew my nervous habit announced those things to the outside world. What I did know was that it was hard to feel beautiful when my hands were ragged and my fingernails were chewed.
From a very young age, I internalized the fact that beauty wasn’t for me — or maybe I didn’t deserve beauty. Obviously, I couldn’t paint my nails, so I rejected everything that went with it: no manicures, no girly lotions. As I got older, that reached into other parts of my beauty routine. I became the woman who wore her aversion to beauty as a mask of its own: I was “all natural.”
When I finally did quit biting my nails (who says New Year’s Resolutions never work?), the first thing I did was try to learn how to paint my nails, but I found I was clumsy at it. The fingernails of my childhood dreams — alternating neon colors, bright glitter — were never going to look right on my late-twenties hands. Through quitting, though, I found a new definition for beauty. I realized that so much of what I’d hated about biting my nails was the way it broadcast anxiety and insecurity to the world, whether I actually felt it or not. For me, beauty translates to self-care. Even when my nails are short and thin now, I carve out the five or ten minutes a day it takes to maintain them. Feeling beautiful is important, but only because it is so inherently linked to what a person feels they deserve. By putting on lotion and nail polish, I’m telling myself that even if I’m not perfect, I’m worth taking care of—and that, in of itself, makes me feel beautiful.
Related:
Why We Need to Stop Apologizing for Not Wearing Makeup
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