I just picked my skin

An essay on anxiety, avoidance, and the skin I can’t leave alone.

Hi everyone! I needed to use this space to write about something I’ve wanted to explore more meaningfully for some time. This post is a little different from what I usually share, but I hope some of you find something in it that resonates or feels useful. <3

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I first remember picking my skin when I was fifteen. I was obsessed with this boy, as I often was at that age, and had been agonizing over a specific party I knew we’d both be attending. He was two years ahead of me (practically an adult in my eyes), and I fell hopelessly in love the moment I watched him use a fake ID to buy a six-pack of Modellos and some Camel Blues at the gas station near our school. I was behind him in line, getting an Arizona iced tea with the spare change my parents had given me for lunch. I was captivated by how nonchalantly he navigated the dangerous transaction, the confidence with which he asked for the correct cigarettes from behind the counter as if he’d done it a hundred times before, and the faintest smile he cast in my direction as he walked out. That’s really all it took.

I’d been planning my outfit for weeks and would lie in bed night after night, fantasizing about how it could all go—what song would be playing, what his deodorant might smell like, how close he might stand if the room was crowded. Maybe at the party we’d speak, share a swig of some kid’s stolen vodka, or, even more exhilarating, maybe we’d touch. At that point, this party felt like the only thing that mattered.

The party was on a Friday, so I only had a few rushed hours after volleyball practice to get home, shower, change, and walk to my friend’s house nearby, where her sister would illegally drive us to the event with her provisional license. I couldn’t eat a thing all day, but I was practically bouncing off the walls with excitement.

That evening after practice, I stepped out of the shower, wiped the fog from the mirror, and leaned in to examine my face. The intention was to quickly check if the unibrow hairs I’d been diligently plucking all week needed any more attention. That was the last thing I remember before I was overtaken by what would become my first-ever picking trance, a term I would later coin with my therapist to describe the blackout and dissociation that accompany the onset of a picking episode. I can always remember the first squeeze, usually a small and satisfying extraction of something minor like a blackhead, but after that, I’m no longer in control. And once I start, it’s nearly impossible to stop. I often liken it to a kind of possession—I imagine my eyes turning black or rolling back in my head like a shark in the throes of a feeding frenzy.

The moments immediately following a picking trance are steeped in shame, when I finally come to and am forced to confront my red, swollen, and bloodied face staring back at me. I remember feeling it especially deeply that first time, as it was an introduction to a new, seemingly evil part of myself I hadn’t yet met, one capable of so swiftly betraying my judgment, not only sabotaging my confidence and derailing a carefully planned evening, but also inflicting real, physical harm. I attempted to use my small arsenal of drugstore foundations and powders to fix the mess, with no luck. After my third attempt, I called my friend and told her I’d randomly come down with some sort of sickness and couldn’t make it to the party. I remember her repeating, “Are you sure?”, confusion threading her voice as she tried to reconcile how I could have become so unwell in the two hours since we’d last seen each other. I cried all night, and even harder in the morning when the marks on my face had crusted over into scabs, my skin looking even worse than it had the night before.

It wouldn’t be the last time a picking episode sabotaged a night out or deflated my confidence to the point where I canceled plans. The cycle of picking, feeling anger and shame, then healing, only to start picking again, would follow me for years. At one point, my picking episodes became so frequent that before any big event, I’d find myself begging, sometimes out loud, Please don’t pick, before I’d enter a bathroom. I began to notice that I picked most often when I was anxious, which I could somewhat rationalize, but what unsettled me more was how frequently it happened during moments of anticipation, when I was genuinely looking forward to something. It was as if, on some level, I was trying to prevent myself from enjoying my life.

By my mid-twenties, the behavior had taken on a strange kind of comfort. I began to feel a disturbing sense of attachment to picking, almost as if it allowed me to reconnect with a younger version of myself. It started to feel like a familiar, mindless, nostalgic ritual, like filling in a coloring book or hanging out with old friends from high school. I didn’t understand how something that literally caused me harm could simultaneously give me a sense of safety.

Given my career, my skin picking also felt like this dirty little secret I was keeping from everyone, as if it somehow discredited the legitimacy of my work writing about skincare. For days after episodes, I would hide in my apartment, waiting for my skin to heal so I could emerge and “be seen.” After all, how could I claim any authority on skin health when my own skin looked terrible and worse, when I’d grown so used to harming it myself?

When I worked at The Strategist, I remember reading a New York Magazine cover story by Tavi Gevinson at my desk. I found myself welling up over a quote where she tried to untangle how her relationship with skin picking, in some strange way, allowed her to stay connected to her youth:

“The longer I continue to pick at my face, the longer I feel less like a participant in the adult world and more like a teenager who is still just visiting. I imagine that the day my skin clears will be the day I become a woman, greeted by new forms of sexism and ageism. With scabs and pimples, I am not taking any of this too seriously; I am dodging certain expectations before I can fail to meet them.”

I started to wonder if, like Tavi, I too used picking as a kind of psychological loophole. If I was still stuck in a cycle of adolescent habits, then perhaps I was exempt from the expectations that came with being an adult: rejection, failure, emotional or online exposure. As long as I was picking, nothing was that serious, therefore, nothing could hurt me… besides myself.

It wasn’t until my thirties, when I began seeing a psychiatrist and therapist more regularly, that I finally started to gain some control. My psychiatrist diagnosed me with dermatillomania, a compulsive behavioral disorder that involves repetitive picking at one's own skin, and I started treating it not just as a bad habit but as a legitimate medical condition. I have certain rules now: no magnifying mirrors, harsh lighting in bathrooms, or extraction tools, and I’m also on medication. One of the simplest yet most helpful tools I’ve ever learned is that the moment you catch yourself, even for just a split second, becoming aware of what you're doing, leave the bathroom immediately. That brief moment of awareness during a picking episode is your exit cue, and it’s quite honestly your only way out once it’s started. The longer you stay, the more likely you are to cause damage, and repeated trauma to the skin is what leads to lasting consequences.

Once I began treating my dermatillomania with a doctor, I started to reflect on its potential ripple effects. I had always thought of myself as someone with fairly moderate acne, but I began to question how much of it was truly due to genetics or hormones, and how much came from wounds I had caused myself. When I looked back on every so-called "bad skin day," I realized I had quite literally never left my skin alone. I had always poked at it, prodded it, or even scratched it open, turning tiny bumps into wounds that would take weeks to heal. I began to wonder what my skin might have looked like if I had never touched it at all. As it turns out, picking was at least half the problem.

As I write this now, I have just emerged from the bathroom after a mild picking episode. I had a small, completely unnoticeable bump on the side of my face, which I dug into in an attempt to yield an extraction. I now have two stinging, crescent moon-shaped scratch marks on either side of the blemish, where my nails punctured my skin. It’s been a while since I’ve done this, and the familiar wave of guilt, shame, and embarrassment came rushing in, just like it always has. But this time, I stopped myself sooner than I ever have before. And while that might not feel like much in the moment, it’s real progress, and that does matter.

I often write about the products that have helped my skin, but the truth is that no exfoliating toner or serum has made as meaningful a difference, for my skin or my overall confidence, as learning to treat my skin picking with the seriousness I would any other anxiety disorder. For me, that meant seeking professional help, but it could also mean simply finding solidarity in online spaces like this one, or communities such as r/CompulsiveSkinPicking (heads up, images shared there can be graphic sometimes), where reading other people’s stories or sharing your own can be deeply cathartic. If you’ve just had an episode, know that healing is rarely linear. And I hope that by sharing my experience, you’re reminded that you’re not alone in yours.

<3