An Unexpected Discovery

I don’t remember when I started to bite my nails. I was that young.

But I do remember when I started getting comments about it; it was just after I’d started school. By third grade, I knew it was a bad habit, but I had no idea how to break it. I’d tried simple things like sitting on my hands, and my mother had let me borrow her clear nail polish to see if that would help. Nothing worked.

As a teenager, when I was in and out of foster care, the nail-biting got worse. The reasons why were obvious, but some of my foster families actually punished me for biting my nails. They didn’t understand how much I disliked it, until I asked for a bottle of Bitter Bite. Even that didn’t work; despite claims that it didn’t, it did wash off and I went right on biting. The bitter taste hadn’t stopped me for even a moment.

Toward the end of high school, I decided that I was done trying to quit. Interestingly enough, while I didn’t stop biting, after that decision I did stop going down to the quick. I haven’t forgotten that lesson: eliminating a source of nervous tension can actually lead to a reduction in a nervous habit. Eventually, I got to the point where I sometimes could avoid biting for a few days. But that was about the longest I could manage.

My nails were never pretty, but they were there. I occasionally got infections in the bitten area, but once I was an adult, people stopped talking to me about them. That was how I came to understand that most people don’t even notice tiny details like that. It came up every once in a while, but only as a comment or two that I could easily brush off or explain away. I never painted them. I didn’t want to draw attention.

By the time I was forty, I was bluntly telling people, “love me, love my bitten nails.”

And then, when I was forty-one, I received the gift of a professional manicure. I’d never had one before; I’d seen no need to spend money on something I figured I would end up destroying within a week or so. But this was free, and I was lucky enough to have a nail technician who explained each step in the process as she did it. That first manicure, with regular polish, didn’t last very long, but I did go longer between bites than I had before.

Apparently, I had found something that might work to stop my nail-biting after all.

A few manicures later, frustrated at the length of time it took to dry my nails, even with quick-dry drops, I asked the tech about “that thing that uses light to dry your nails.” That was how I learned about gel polish.

The first color I tried was a light beige, and to my surprise, the harder finish of a gel manicure kept me from biting. For the first time in my life, I was able to keep nail polish on for longer than a couple of days, and not too long after that, I got to experience seeing my own nails with some actual length.

I had stumbled into the solution without meaning to.

But gel polish manicures aren’t cheap, and they can damage both your skin and your nails. Finding the money and time in my budget to have a manicure every two weeks took some doing, but fortunately, I was finally at the point where I could do it. There was a salon right around the corner from where I worked, and over time they got to know me. They also got me to try a few other things such as pedicures and skin waxing. I got into a habit of having a pedicure twice a year: once in the fall, with a bright color that would make me smile every time I took my shoes off, and once in the spring, with a more muted color that I wouldn’t worry about if I was wearing sandals.

Nothing lasts forever, though, and I did eventually leave that job which meant I was no longer commuting past that salon. My budget also got tighter as I was now heading into midtown Atlanta for work, which carried extra cost. (I had previously been a reverse commuter, going from a close-in suburb to one further out.) I would keep my manicures on for as long as I could, but not even gel manicures last forever. Over time, I began skipping my manicures more and more, and to my dismay I went right back to biting my nails.

I tried to take comfort in the fact that it wasn’t as bad as it had been before I started getting manicures, but I was still frustrated. When I wasn’t busy being frustrated, though, I had a good laugh: given that I’d eschewed nail polish for the first forty years of my life, it seemed faintly ridiculous that I had begun missing it. That’s not something I would have ever expected to happen while I was growing up.

Recently, I bit the bullet and went back to the gel manicures. By now, I have a good idea of what colors I like most, and I’ve gotten to the point where I prefer purchasing my own bottle instead of using the one at the salon. (It doesn’t save me any money on the manicure, but it does address the fact that nail salons can’t possibly carry every color of every line of nail polish.) I’ve also purchased a set of my own manicure tools that I ask the salons to use; this is for hygenic reasons.

I’m loving it. I hadn’t realized how badly I’d missed it, even when I was laughing at myself for doing so. Even more, though, I’m beginning to love the way my hands look. That’s new. I’d always felt like they detracted from my appearance, but now they’re one of the best aspects. While I’ve continued to wear my nails short — I can’t stand feeling them when I’m typing — even a short manicure looks better than bitten-off nails.

If you had told me, back when I was a teenager, that I would come to love having manicured and pretty nails, I would have laughed in your face. But now, I find I do, even though I’m not the kind of person who spends a lot of effort on my appearance.

And that makes me wonder if there aren’t other ways I can easily fix up the way I look. Is it superficial? Yes. But does it make me feel better about myself? Yes. And for that reason alone, I’m going to keep right on getting them, even though I know they’re damaging my skin and nails. The way I look at it, it’s no worse than the damage caused by forty-plus years of biting.