I’m a compulsive journal writer but I’d never mentioned my secret on paper. Writing helped me regain control

‘Feelings of intense shame, a hallmark of this illness, mean people will often hide their pulling, even when it becomes debilitating’: Adele Dumont, author of the book The Pulling. When I began to pull my hair out as a teenager, I didn’t conceive of it as a problem, let alone as an illness. It didn’t occur to me that anyone else did what I did. I couldn’t have known, then, that over the coming two decades this seemingly innocuous gesture would come to define and consume me. From the start, I kept my pulling secret, though that word suggests something duplicitous, or at least intentional. My secrecy wasn’t a conscious decision: it was simply the way things were, in the same way that selecting which individual hair to pull next wasn’t considered or calculated but something more like instinct; a knowing. The removal of individual hairs always felt insignificant enough that there was mostly no visible change perceptible before and after any one episode. But over time, whole startling zones devoid of any hair would emerge. I didn’t like the way my pulling made me look, nor the lengths I was obliged to take to conceal the damage I’d done. But if my appearance or my growing sense of isolation triggered any anxiety, my hands had only to flutter upwards and, in seconds, I could find reprieve. Because when I pulled, these worldly concerns dissolved. Time itself dissolved. My usual jumpy thoughts could settle and I could be calmed. When eventually I learned that what I did had a name, I don’t remember feeling much comfort or kinship. Instead, I was annoyed, as though I’d been cheated. How dare these other people intrude upon this space of mine and claim it as their own! More and more, I think of recovery as a myth: perhaps there are no lines to be crossed In the coming years, I read my way through the clinical literature, becoming a clandestine scholar of my obscure affliction. “Trichotillomania” is derived from the Greek words for “hair”, “to pull” and “madness”, and the behaviour has […]

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