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Hey! Let's Talk About Butt Stuff! *Content Warning Body Issues*




Hi, my name is Meghan, my bum bleeds when I am stressed out!

WAIT?! WHAT?!  WHAT DID SHE JUST SAY?!

OH MY GOD!! Becky, she's talking about her butt.

I’m going to break it down for you, don’t worry, I will actually keep the butt stuff pretty light. 

I have what would generously be called a serious anxiety disorder. I know, it’s so hard to tell right?  One of the ways that this anxiety manifests physically is that I am a picker.

Do you know what that is?

Someone who picks at their skin. Okay, that might be selling it a bit short someone who compulsively picks at their skin, sometimes to the point of causing injury, and is often associated with dermatillomania. I have a friend whose nail beds look like raw meat when she is stressed out. I don't remember when this started for me, however I will pick ANYTHING, but the parts of my body that gets “activated” can and do change. 

Picking is an act of self soothing, something we all do, often without being aware of it. But dermatillomania is a compulsive disorder.  It’s not that I don’t want to stop doing a thing, or that I have no will power, it’s that I CANNOT stop. 

Imagine the damage that can do to a body.

It was my scalp for a lot of my young life. I tore my hair out in fits of dysregulation and then would self soothe my anxiety for weeks by picking at the wounds. 

 

In my early twenties when I was doing too many drugs, it moved into my hands. My fingers would flare up so itchy, and I would scratch and scratch and scratch, ripping through layers while crying and making bargains with myself to stop.

For a lot of my 30’s I was masking SO hard I mostly had to rely on scrapes and cuts from my own clumsiness, fortunately I am VERY clumsy. 

As I entered perimenopause my anxiety was given a HUGE boost, and my body, the traitor that it is, started to develop acne on the underside of my breasts. Do you know HOW easy that is to pick at?!  The underboob soon became a bloody warzone, painful, embarrassing and eventually heavily scared. I would stand in the bedroom picking and saying out loud “Please stop now. Please, you are hurting yourself, you need to stop.”  but my hands would NOT stop.

And then one day my butt was feeling a bit itchy. 

Don’t get all weird, we all get itch butts from time to time.

I suspect that it is to do with the ever plummeting estrogen in my body, it is… dry.

And that itch has become the new compulsion. 

Can you imagine the humiliation of your asshole being so itchy it actually feels like BURNING, every time your anxiety flares? Imagine sobbing after you’ve gone to the bathroom because it’s been 20 minutes and you’re still wiping and you are bloody and raw, and you can’t stop. 

WHY oh why am I sharing this deeply painful, vulnerable, embarrassing truth with you?  Mostly because I am tired of feeling ashamed for a thing that is so utterly out of my control. You know what increases my anxiety? Shame. 

Shame is at the root of SO many of my issues. And probably yours too.  So here I am, telling you that my butt is really itchy, fuck the shame. 

FUCK the SHAME. 

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