‘This girl eats her own flesh’: A Pakistani woman’s battle with dermatillomania

I don’t remember the first time I bit my fingers. Maybe I was six, maybe younger. I just know it started with nails, and then one day I picked at a small piece of skin. Since then, it’s been part of my not-so-sophisticated palate. I’d bite my fingers the way Gollum clutched at his “precious” in The Lord of the Rings: hungry, desperate, almost feral. It isn’t a habit. Not really. It is a compulsion. Like being pulled by an invisible thread I couldn’t cut, or maybe, a noose around my neck I couldn’t break free from. I’d sit there, digging into my skin, waiting until there was enough flesh to tear off, then bite down until blood came. I hate myself for it, but I can’t stop.

The Daily Cycle and Hidden Shame

Most days it starts without me even noticing. I’ll be reading, writing, scrolling, and my fingers will wander to the edges of my nails. It’s almost automatic. A pinch here, a tug there. Before I know it, there’s a little flap of skin and I bite down. It’s like my brain switches off for a moment. Relief floods in, but only for a second. Then there’s pain. Then the shame.

People think it’s a bad habit, like biting your nails. They don’t see the way my heart speeds up, how my stomach twists before I do it. They don’t see me hiding my hands under the table in meetings or pressing my fingers into my palms to stop myself. They don’t see the bathroom trips at weddings or public places so I can wrap a tissue around a bleeding cut.

At school, the shame had teeth. Girls would point and whisper. Boys would say things loud enough for me to hear. “Yeh apna gosht khati hai.” [This girl eats her own flesh]. Some even said my prayers would never count because of what I did to myself. I was a child hearing that. I wanted to disappear.

My mother tried everything. Aloe vera. Cutting my nails short. Nagging. Wrapping my wounds in bandages. Later, my husband took over that job. Cleaning me up with alcohol swabs, applying ointment, taping bandages around every finger like I was a broken doll. He even bought cartoon plasters to make me smile (those were cute though, I must admit). He went overboard by buying boxes upon boxes of them and then stacking them in our home, like he was preparing for war. And maybe he was. Because living with me, with this, is a war.

The Toll Beyond My Hands

Living with dermatillomania isn’t just about bleeding fingers. It leaks into places you don’t expect — banks, hospitals, paperwork, relationships; you name it.

When my husband and I tried to open a bank account in my name, what should’ve been a simple formality turned into a two-year marathon. Each visit meant new questions, new documents, more explanations about why my hands looked the way they did. Skin specialists wrote letters. We stood in long queues while people stared at my bandaged fingers like I was contagious. We left exhausted every time. By the end of it, the account was open, but I felt stripped bare, like my private struggle had been turned into public evidence. It was an extremely embarrassing ordeal, to say the least.

And through it all, my husband carried the weight. He never said it out loud, but I could see the tiredness in his eyes, the way he wiped down my wounds late at night, the way he argued with bank clerks while I sat silent. Sometimes I think my disorder has made him a caretaker more than a partner. That thought hurts almost as much as the wounds themselves.

This condition doesn’t just mark your body. It marks your life. It changes how you hold hands, how you type, how you greet someone new. It even changes how you think of yourself like you’re not a whole person, just a set of broken habits.

Finding Others

For most of my life, I thought it was just me. Some ugly, shameful thing only I did.

Then one night — I must’ve been in my late teens — I was down another Wikipedia rabbit hole about human behaviour, disorders, compulsions and I saw it – “Dermatillomania”. A long, clinical word sitting there on the screen.

I clicked it open and read every line. People pulling at their skin. People biting until they bled. People who couldn’t stop. I remember staring at the page and whispering out loud: It has a name. It sounds small, but it changed everything. It wasn’t just me. It wasn’t a curse. It was something other people lived with too.

I joined a Facebook group the same week. Hundreds of strangers posting pictures of their bandaged hands, their scabs, their shame. They spoke about hiding at weddings, about bullying, about trying to explain themselves to doctors. Some even spoke about gnawing at their partners’ skin or nails, which, initially, I found extreme, but then I put my judgemental side to rest and thought to myself, “for some, my behavior would also be extreme.”  And for the first time in my life, I didn’t feel like a freak. Reading those posts felt like someone was breathing with me, saying, “Me too.”

In a middle-class household in Karachi, hands aren’t just hands; they are part of your presentation, your worth. They’re meant to pour tea when guests arrive, carry mehndi designs on Eid, serve food at weddings.

But finding a term for it didn’t make it go away. It still lives in my hands. The difference is now I know what to call it. And I know I’m not alone. That knowledge doesn’t heal the scars, but it does soften the loneliness, at least.

The Wider Picture

Dermatillomania isn’t just a “bad habit.” It’s a recognized mental health condition — part of what doctors call body-focused repetitive behaviors (BFRBs), alongside nail-biting and hair-pulling. Studies suggest it affects over 3.4% of people worldwide, most of whom are women (National Library of Medicine). That means millions of us are living with the same invisible tug, often in silence. And yet, the awareness gap is huge, especially in countries like Pakistan, where mental health still sits at the bottom of public health conversations. Here, it’s easier to be labeled “weak” or “dirty” than to be told you might have a disorder that deserves care.

And the stigma is not unique to me. Writers across the world have shared strikingly similar stories — from Refinery29’s account of a 13-year struggle, to Teen Vogue’s essay by a young woman avoiding beaches and eye contact, to HuffPost’ writer’s raw confession about hiding wounds with makeup, and even Business Insider’s story of quitting through manicures and self-tracking. Reading them, I realized the compulsion doesn’t care where you’re from — Karachi, New York, Boston, or London — it gnaws just the same.

However, being a Pakistani woman adds another layer of shame to this disorder. In a middle-class household in Karachi, hands aren’t just hands; they are part of your presentation, your worth. They’re meant to pour tea when guests arrive, carry mehndi designs on Eid, serve food at weddings.

My bandaged, scarred fingers never fit that script. Relatives whispered that I was careless. Classmates mocked me as though I were cursed. Even in adulthood, I felt my hands disqualified me from belonging to the category of a “respectable woman.” That’s the cruelest part of it: the disorder already gnaws at you from within, and society makes sure it gnaws at you from outside too.

I could never eat Pakistani food with my own hands. Amma or my sister would feed me, morsel by morsel. Cooking, making tea, and even washing dishes all were impossible when soap stung my open wounds. My cousin-cum-bully accused me of doing it deliberately, just to escape household chores. Over time, my fingers lost their grip, and I became clumsier, dropping plastic bags, struggling with pens. Even typing — the one skill I needed most as a writer — came slower.

Marriage proposals passed me by because I was not “bahu material.” A girl who couldn’t knead dough, chop onions, or scrub pots was seen as unfit for a home. I thank fate for that now — I am atypical in every sense of the South Asian mold — but the rejection still stung, making me feel I wasn’t good enough. In this part of the world, a large number of women are judged for their household skills before marriage, and that judgment can overshadow everything else: education, dreams, personality and maybe, even a gol roti. My fingers, raw and broken, became the excuse people used to measure me as less.

Coping and Self-Compassion

People always ask, “Why don’t you just stop?” If it were that easy, I would have stopped a long time ago. I’ve tried everything: willpower, distractions, keeping my hands busy. Sometimes it works for a few hours, a day, maybe two but the cycle returns.

While the orange finger gloves my husband bought me help put a thin wall between my teeth and my skin after I slip them on at night, other times, I forget to put them on. However, there’s one thought that I found putting a stop-gap on my habit instantly: “I’m eating myself”. When that flashes through my head, I pull my hands away. It’s a jolt, like waking from a nightmare but as soon as the feeling fades, the urge creeps back in.

I’ve learned small acts of kindness toward myself matter more than shame. Instead of hiding, I’ve started to tell my story. I’ve stopped calling it a “bad habit” and started calling it what it is: a disorder. I let myself acknowledge that I’m still learning, still fighting. Some days are better. Some days are brutal. But I’m here, trying.

Maybe that’s why I’m writing this. Because somewhere out there is another person biting their fingers until they bleed, thinking they’re disgusting, thinking they’re alone. And I want them to know: you’re not. It has a name. You’re not a monster. You deserve care, not shame.