I’ve been biting my nails lately. A lot. At least that’s the thought that occured to me just now as I sat hunched over chewing on my right thumbnail.
Truth be told, there isn’t a time I remember when I didn’t chew my fingernails and pick at my toe nails. When I was a child my mother would coat my fingernails with an allegedly foul tasting liquid meant to curb my appetite for fingernail.
Alas, I came to like the taste so much that it had the opposite effect. Rather than put me off biting and chewing, this strategy simply served to make me want more.
Thinking back on it now, that liquid was likely some kind of poison. Not much health and safety oversight in those days. But I’m still here – and still biting my nails.
Why? It is actually a very good question. I know it’s very often looked upon as being a ‘bad habit’. Especially if youv’e left childhood behind and are still chewing. To me nail biting has been a response to anxiety, worry, fear and uncertainty.
Maybe as children we find comfort in biting nails at those times of trouble, and it doesn’t take long for the habit to become ingrained and we have turned into nail biting adults – perhaps still finding the same comfort.
Actually, it does seem to me to be a habit I would like to leave behind: nails made deformed, ragged, and unsightly from a lifetime of chewing.
‘Stop biting into yourself’, my mother would constantly remind me. ‘Stop chewing on yourself.’
Maybe it’s a self esteem thing, a means of self harm in a sense: ‘I don’t feel good about myself, so if I start eating bits of this ugly thing, I might eventually erase myself completely.’
Mmm. Perhaps. It’s a clue. Headed in the right direction, But what if it’s not an attempt to erase ‘this ugly thing’, the physical body, the thing we mistake for ‘me’ and with which we engage with the world?
What if, instead, it is some kind of misguided or unconscious way we try to dig deeper inside of ourselves? Could it be an attempt to get past the physical and right to the core of the ‘real’ me? To our ‘inner’ Self?
After all, I’ve often discovered myself happily chewing nails while thinking hard, deep in reverie, reading intently, or trying to get ‘to the root’ of something. Sound familiar?
Mind you, I’m not saying now that chewing nails is a ‘good habit.’ As a strategy to strip away the physical body in order to get to the real me deep down somewhere there inside, it hasn’t proven particularly effective.
Perhaps there will come a day when I no longer chew my nails. Maybe there will be time when my other more legitimate self enquiry practice will allow me to access that inner Self, when I will finally realise my true nature and discover who I truly am.
First step on this path is to remember that there is no ‘good or bad’, no ‘one day’, no ‘future time’. There’s only what is and there is only the eternal now.
The other advice to give myself as I end this post is – when trying to change a behaviour – is don’t fight against or resist the behaviour itself. Instead I need to propose viable alternatives.
I need to make new habits.
Notes from the Hermit's Cave 