It was 2003, I was 8 years old, and during a time of instability in my childhood home, I developed a habit of playing with my eyelashes. I remember being in orchestra practice in the morning before school, trying to crimp my lashes with my fingers because I wanted to curl them, and finding an overwhelming satisfaction in the “crunchiness” I felt. Even as I write now, there are remnants of that feeling as I imagine the sound and the texture.
Whether it was a response to environmental stress, genetic influences (my dad has his own rituals… I’ll leave it at that), and/or a secret third thing, the behavior became compulsive. It evolved from touching my lashes, to crimping them, to picking at my lash bed, to yanking out the “loose” ones. I did it when I was bored, when I was watching TV, when I was dissociating during class, reading, any moment I had idle hands — only for my vacation from reality to be interrupted by the ring of my mother’s voice scolding me for touching my eyelashes again.
That was the whole intervention. Being yelled at. Nobody asked why, or if they did, they didn’t really care to discover the answer with me. The why was more of a “Why are you making my life harder by doing this weird thing?” The concern was never what was happening to me. It was what people would see. I don’t blame my parents for that. They didn’t have the language, and honestly, neither did I.
At 10, I moved from Long Island to New Jersey, which made everything worse. Somewhere in that first year of 5th grade I started picking at the skin on my face too, and gave myself a big dark scab on my chin that looked like a mole — which did not help the bullying I was already receiving for being a nerdy, chubby, Chinese new girl missing patches of her eyelashes in a very red, very white part of the Jersey Shore.
This is when the picking crystallized as a source of shame. The move introduced me to bullies, racism, and isolation, and I fell into whatever gave me relief. Vanilla Coke was my shit. I dissociated into MapleStory and the internet. I could confidently say I had no friends, aside from some nicer classmates whose efforts amounted to pained smiles when we made eye contact, and my Chinese neighbors I hung out with because our parents were friends, who called me fat. (I told them they could be honest with me. They were, and brutally.) So, no friends.
Trichotillomania became an undercurrent of my life for the next two decades. And so did something else, though I wouldn’t see the pattern for a long time: I got very good at hiding, and very good at leaving.
At 22, I left to Boston and started therapy for the first time, to navigate some rage I was feeling. I ghosted the therapist (Nick, a social work intern) after a month, maybe less. A few years later during my grad program, I actually looked him up to write him a note of appreciation for our work together and apologized for ghosting. He was the first person to say out loud that being the only nonwhite person in every room was, itself, the problem.
In 2019, at 24, I went back after my grandmother passed away and I wanted to end my relationship. I ended it, quit a dead-end receptionist job, and then ghosted that therapist too, after a handful of sessions. I treated therapy the way I treated my lashes — I’d reach for it in a moment of stress, get some relief, and then disappear before anyone could look too closely.
Then COVID hit. I was in Boston, alone. Life hit me like a truck. When I think about that time and that place, it’s still the lowest low of my life. I can’t even tell you if I was picking then. Days felt like a dream. Time blended. Hearing TikTok audios from 2020 brings me back to the trance-like feeling I felt at the time. I adopted a kitten, and taking care of another living being helped me more than I can explain. And I started therapy again — my third attempt.
Around this time I had a fleeting thought that I should become a therapist. I hadn’t been able to truly connect with any of the white therapists I’d seen so far, and after all the racial bullying that colored my preteens and adolescence, what I actually needed was to feel accepted by my own community. I wanted to become the therapist I needed. In my grad school applications, I called this a “lightbulb moment.” It sounds tidier that way than it felt.
That third therapist was white, by the way. I saw her (Jessica, also a social work intern) for maybe two months before moving back to New Jersey to live with my parents, and I tried to ghost her, too. Old habit. But she kept following up, and some part of me felt like I owed her a response — I had shared part of an incredibly difficult and isolated chapter of my life with her, in addition to sharing my stream-of-consciousness musing about maybe becoming a therapist, and it felt wrong to vanish on someone who knew that about me and seemed like she kind of sort of cared. So I called her back. Her last words to me on the phone were, “I think the field would be lucky to have you.”
If I let myself really sit with that moment, I will start crying, so I usually don’t. But I’ll say this: I had spent my whole life being told to stop — stop touching your eyelashes, stop picking, stop being the way you are — and here was someone telling me, essentially, to start. She was the first person I couldn’t ghost, because she was the first one who came looking. I spent the next few months applying to grad school.
Here’s where I put on the therapist hat for a second. What happened to me is called natural recovery — the behavior remitted without any formal psychological or pharmacological treatment, which occurs in about a quarter of adults with a history of the disorder. Through my two years of grad school, I had a long-term therapist (an older Chinese woman, Elaine), and we never once focused on the trichotillomania. But she gave me my first real safe space, and I stopped needing to leave. Somewhere in there, I also stopped pulling. I started wearing lash extensions after my first full cycle of not pulling, which wasn’t a perfect solution — I’d still pick here and there, but I’d lose an extension instead of an actual lash. We can call it harm reduction.
I’m 31 now, four years “clean.” Since 27, the only force behind my lashes leaving the follicle is the natural growth cycle. There’s no single identifiable reason I stopped. Life got better, I grew up, I got a kinder view of myself. All of it contributed, probably. Recovery is annoying like that — it rarely hands you a cut-and-dry story. The timing is a bit suspicious, though.
So now I’m the therapist. And when a client sits across from me hiding a part of themselves — a habit, a history, a language — they’ve only ever been yelled at for, I know exactly what it costs them to stay in the room. I know because I left so many rooms first. Nobody asked 8-year-old me why. It’s not lost on me that asking why, gently, over and over, until someone stops disappearing, is now my entire job.
The field would be lucky to have you, she said.
I hope she was right. Either way, I stayed.