1) My history
2) What I'm doing now
I appreciate now that not everyone is going to read the whole thing so if you skip bits I don't really care
I'm Jeanna and I've had trich properly since I was about 6 or 7 and I'm 17 now.I think I've always pulled scalp hairs and played with them but I've never had a bald patch (thank god). This is going to sound really strange but I saw that my nan had no eyelashes I wondered "what would I look like with no eyelashes?" And so that night in bed while going to sleep I proceeded to pull out my eyelashes. At that point it wasn't very noticeable because then it still really hurt to pull. Soon it snowballed and from being about 8 to at least 13 I had no eyelashes on my upper lids. I didn't feel the need to pull from the bottom lids strangely. My mum noticed quickly and did the whole "Stop pulling!" thing, not realising that it didn't work like that. She told relatives to tell me off if they saw me doing it. She did it while I was in the room though making me feel very embarrassed. She gave me a piece of fluffy fabric to pluck at and she taught me how to pluck eyebrows properly so I could pluck her eyebrows and not my eyelashes. She even once when I was doing really well in not pulling got her friend who is AWESOME at make up to do my make up nice one day and said to me "Look how pretty you look with eyelashes". The whole time she thought it was because I thought I looked better without eyelashes.
One day when I was about 11 or 12 I thought to myself that eyebrows have a lot more hair so it would be less noticeable if I pulled them out. Big mistake. That night I pulled out nearly my whole right eyebrow and hardly touched my left. Needless to say I looked a mess. That was definitely a very low point. I'd never really had friends at school anyway but then people definitely wanted nothing to do with me.
That being said my trich improved massively in Year 9 at school. A new boy (who became my best friend then later my boyfriend. We aren't together now but we are still good mates and talk every day) came into my class and didn't seem to mind sitting with me. Because his name was right before mine in the register we got put next to each other in practically every lesson so we talked a lot. The fact I had a friend and then later when we started chilling together at break when I gained more friends definitely lessened the urges I had. I still pulled every now and again in lessons for something to do when I wasn't interested. In school it was definitely more scalp hair than eyelashes. Around the same time we had an English lesson where we had to learn to spell really long words. Guess what word was on the list? Trichotillomania: an obsession with pulling out body hair. I felt so relieved that there was actually a word for what I was going through. Oddly enough knowing that I wasn't the only one lessened my urges immensely
When I was at home I started to try to divert my urges to other parts of my body where it was acceptable to be hairless. For example, if I felt an urge in my head, I'd pull from my legs. This worked very well for a whie, until it got to the point where I was seeking out the ingrown hairs and so was scratching the skin off my legs and pubic area to get them. Dermotillomania. Mind you I was just happy to have eyelashes and eyebrows for once so I didn't care about my scabby legs.
When I left school my urges decreased again because I didn't have to deal with all the people who thought I was a weirdo. But the urges are definitely still there.
My main problem areas now are my lashes and pubic area. I can't go to the loo without having the urge to grab some tweezers and go crazy. So thats all scabby and not fun.
I'm now on a "pull free" quest. To get rid of it once and for all. I started this about a week ago and am currently about 2.5 days pull free. I have three main goals
1) To stop pulling long enough so that I have no scabs
2) To truly have a full set of lashes, something I've not had since I was about 6
3) To be able to have enough brows to work with so I can get them professionally done for the first time.
Famous YouTuber with trich Beckie0 made a video about the pull free phenomenon here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg67sgUB6sU which I wholeheartedly agree with. So I'm going to go about using "pull free" differently.
1) I accept here and now that I WILL RELAPSE. I know now this isn't forever.
2) Every time I pull I am going to brutally honest with you guys and come back to this thread and tell you and if I can how many hairs.
3) I'm only aiming to be pull free until September. Maybe if I last that long I might extend it but I'm just being realistic.
If you made it this far, thanks I appreciate it. I hope that maybe some other people will take on this new take on "pull free" and stop the feeling that if you relapse you are a failure
. It's ok though, I'll get a new streak from here! I had 9 days before that happened and I think that might be the longest I've ever done 
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