Since as long as I can remember, I have been biting my nails. My mom said I was biting my nails as a baby. Before I was even talking. Although apparently I didn’t talk until I was 3 years old and that is long enough to cause some worry in the parental units around. People thought I was going to be a mute. And then one day I just blurted out a whole sentence, none of this “mamma” bullshit. But I digress…
I have always had success not biting my nails when I was traveling. Not sure if it was due to the dirty conditions I was living in or the fact that I had other things to keep me occupied. I never really could figure out when I bite my nails. From what I can gather it is a matter of imperfections. I feel the slightest thing sticking out and then I need to smooth the nail down. Which then causes another imperfection. And eventually I get to this point where I have somehow destroyed my nail bed and I have these large pieces of regular skin in fornt of my nail before the end of my finger. I use these as grippy points to be able to pick up things. Dimes have always been my worst enemy as far as picking them up and I will often just leave a dime on the ground or need to slide it all the way over to a crack.
Here is a picture of them as they have always been prior to this cold turkey effort.
The history of my attempts have gone somethin like this… First attempt was to by the “No bite” stuff which I eventually began to grow fond of and would go through bottles daily and asking my dad to keep buying more. The next was to buy this stuff which was to stop horses from chewing on the wooden posts in their corrals. This was extremely effective and worked into my college days. However this tactic came to an end when my neighbor and good friend played the best practical joke of all time on me. He and I were both playing sports at school, he swam and I played soccer. He would have early morning practice and then come back and want to sleep. I would just be waking up when he was sleeping so I would sneak into his room and spray this shit into his mouth while he was sleeping. I would get such a rise out of watching him first lick his lips, and then start to wriggle and squirm, and then eventually leap up spitting and gagging. I always wondered what that did to his dreams at that point. So Geoff, being the smart guy that he is, dumped out the entire bottle one day and filled it with water. When I would subsequently spray this stuff into his mouth, he would act out his reaction enough to make me feel satisfied, and then go back to sleep. Meanwhile I was biting my nails more and more and thought I had built up a tolerance even to the horse repellant.Since then there have been small bursts of weeks of no biting but never anything to write about.
A week after that last picture, they look like this.
And now almost a month later they look like this.Look at that pinky!
So the problems I am and will run into are these. I cant help but get large amounts of dirt underneath the nails. I am just a dirty boy. So I then use my other nails to pick the dirt out from underneath them. Which in turn weakens the nails. So I just wash my hands more. Another problem is that they grow really long but are not that thick so they can brake easy creating these imperfections that taunt me oh so much. Not sure how to solve this one other than to cut them and then file them to be short again but allowing the underneath part to slowly grow until the end. The next is just maintenance. The skin around the outsides needs to be taken care of all the time it seems. What a fuckin hassle! I also find myself flicking the nails probably weakening them as well.
I will admit that I do not really have the urge to bite them anymore so maybe I have crossed the hump. But if I were to bite them, oh man what a feast that would be.
If you are wondering if I bite my toenails the answer is I used to when I was little. But now I cannot reach them anymore so I dont have that problem.