As strange as it may sound, I truly owe a majority of the health issues I faced when I was young to an episode of Spongebob Squarepants. Picture a carefree 10-year-old girl slumped on the living room couch, pink iPod Nano in hand, staring intently into the TV screen with wide eyes. The shrill sound of Spongebob’s constant laugh that brought adults to reach for their aspirin brought little 10-year-old me immense joy.

Spongebob giggles as he plucks his eyelashes one by one, an animated popping noise accompanying the removal of each one. His characteristic goofy smile is still bright as he proceeds to magically spin his freshly plucked eyelashes into a sweater for his good pal, Squidward. (You, reader, might feel quite disturbed after hearing about this scene from the show, and that is completely understandable. As I look back, I have come to realize that Spongebob Squarepants probably tops the charts as the most bizarre kids’ cartoon in existence). Anyways, being a silly 10-year-old, of course I found this eyelash-pulling scene absolutely hilarious. Little did I know at the time that this scene from one of my favorite childhood shows would soon become a significant part of my late childhood and early teenage years; a source of distress, tears, and countless therapy sessions.

So how did this weird scene from a cartoon prompt major distress? Itching to draw a similar laugh out of my little brother, I immediately scurried to the living room mirror and plucked a single eyelash from my own eye, mimicking Spongebob’s course of action. Giggling, I placed the eyelash on the tip of my finger and waved it in front of my brother’s tiny face. “Did it hurt?” he asked with wide eyes, super-impressed by his fearless sister’s act of courage. “Nope,” I reply with a smile, although it did hurt just a little bit, and with swollen pride I slumped back onto the couch.

Now, I did not fully recognize at the time of the incident, but the slight pain that accompanied the removal of the single eyelash brought upon an inexplicable feeling of comfort. This one innocent occurrence rapidly escalated into an impulsive habit of eyelash pulling, which soon became rampant and spiraled into an impulse disorder comparable to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Trichotillomania, an impulse disorder characterized by the compulsive urge to pull out one's hair, held my hand throughout my early teenage years, while simultaneously stabbing me in the back. I found great solace in my disorder, constantly picking at my eyelashes and hair as a mechanism for coping with stress, but I also found it to be a massive hindrance in my mental clarity for years and years, leading to future issues with body image, depression, and anxiety that controlled my mind throughout the beginning of high school.

Although it may seem like a harmless disorder, "oh you just pull out your hair?", the implications of Trich (as many refer to it) dig much deeper. There were times where I felt like a slave to the disorder; where I needed to focus on doing schoolwork but the voice in the back of my mind yelled at me to stop everything I was doing just to tend to the compulsion - it was almost like an alien force had complete control over my hand. Medical doctors would tell me to "just stop pulling my hair out," which was incredibly frustrating because if taking control was that easy of course I wouldn't still be doing it. Really, that's like telling an addicted smoker to "just stop smoking" -- these types of mental fixations result from a chemical change in the brain, never by choice of the affected individual (yet another shameless plug - stay tuned for an article coming up in which I rant about the stigma attached to mental illness!).

It is also important to recognize that Trichotillomania typically falls outside of the mental illness category of "invisible disorders," or those that manifest themselves internally rather than externally. Because those who have become captive to Trich wear their disorder on the outside (i.e. bald spots, obvious lack of eyebrows/eyelashes, etc.), comments from friends, family, or even strangers can arise and cause horrible embarrassment. "Wait, why don't you have eyelashes?" kids would ask me out of childlike curiosity, to which I would hesitantly reply "I don't know... I was just born without them." Addressing these questions and being constantly forced to confront my disorder was debilitating and caused massive insecurities; there were times when I would not even look people in the eye for fear that they were silently judging my lack of hair.

So, you might be thinking, you have hair and eyelashes now, what changed? To be quite honest with you, I don't really know. It might be that the most significant anxiety-causing agents in my life have dampened, or maybe just that I got over it with age. That's not to say that I still don't get occasional compulsive urges -- because I do -- but to a much lesser extent. And it sucks. But hey, although looking like a bald weirdo for a pretty large portion of my life was not ideal, I am proud to have gotten through my bout of Trich, as it shaped me into the person I am today. More than anything, it taught me to be sensitive to those around me, because as "okay" as someone may seem on the outside, you never know what kind of crazy stuff is going down in their heads -- be kind always.