The Hardest Habit

No, it's not going to be some deep emotional treatise on my drug problem or a chronicle of my promise to get some kind of rehab.

As far as I'm concerned, there's a rather more detrimental self-harming habit I have that's much harder to kick.


I don't know whether I'm just a glutton for punishment or an emotional masochist or if I'm just not very bright, because for as long as I can remember I have had this incredibly stupid but ultimately impossible to quit habit of repeatedly doing things that I know never end well for me. And I don't just mean that I'm absentminded and consistently make the same mistakes over and over without meaning to--well, I am, and I do, but that's not the point--but rather that I will consciously, deliberately, and WILLINGLY do shit that I know from experience never goes well for me. I just have NO impulse control to speak of.


For one thing, I bite my nails and I have for probably as long as I've had teeth. I don't enjoy doing it, I think it's gross that I do it, I'm embarrassed at how it looks, and sometimes I bite them down so far they bleed or become extremely tender for days. I can go for quite long stretches without biting them--a year or two at a time--but always eventually go right back to it even though I know it's going to look terrible and hurt again. Similarly, I constantly bite at the inside of my lips and cheeks. Again, I don't know why I do it and don't like doing it at all and sometimes I'll do it to such an extent that I bleed uncontrollably and have huge open mouth sores for a week or more at a time.


For another thing, I'm a horrible procrastinator. Actually, scratch that--I'm a really GOOD procrastinator, that's the problem. Even when I know I'm going to do myself a huge disservice in putting things off (like I'm going to get at trouble at work for arriving late so much or that my car is two months overdue for an oil change), I still do it. I don't like doing this, either, and never do anything productive, interesting, amusing, or at all important with the time I've wasted. I just spend it staring at a clock as the minutes tick by. But I still do it, no matter how consistently I end up in trouble because of it.

Like I said, I don't know if I'm a glutton for punishment or just too dumb to do any better. My worst habit along these lines is, I constantly watch and read about scary shit even though I am the biggest sissy who ever broke wind. I don't like horror movies or novels or survival horror video games. Not only can I not watch any horror flicks, I can't even watch the ones that are overtly bad (the kind where you can see the sipper on the monster costume and the hands of the crew darting in and out of frame to apply more fake blood), or even obvious parodies and spoofs. I just can't do it. It gives me nightmares, and it is absurdly easy to scare me into sleeping with a light on. I've gotten myself into this state by merely reading a movie's PLOT SYNOPSIS--and I have done it TWICE.


I don't watch scary movies or read scary books because I don't in any way enjoy them and I don't play horror-genre games because it's hard to play a video game when you have your eyes shut in terror. Plus, I know--IT NEVER GOES WELL. Even so, I still manage to expose myself to things that scare me by ultimately not being able to resist it.

When I was young and VHS were still around, I had this weird practice of selecting a movie I actually WANTED to rent, and then hanging around in the horror movie section and browsing the fabulous, cheesetastic bad box art for every home video produced from the 70s to the 90s. And--even though I knew I would freak myself out and would end up sleeping with the light on again--I would go around and fucking read all the plot summaries on the backs of the boxes. For movies I never wanted to see at all in a genre I hated and that my mother would never have let me rent to begin with (she knew I couldn't handle scary movies).


Not only this, but up until I was a startlingly advanced age I would cruise late-night TV stations for 'documentaries' (and I use that term here very loosely) about alleged hauntings and ghosts and spirits and the paranormal and other such cleverly-worded bullshit capable of convincing an other wise fiercely skeptical little girl that ghosts might possibly be hanging out in her bedroom all the time. I just could NOT help it, even when the specials I watched were all re-runs and I knew I was going to get scared.

And yes, it always ended badly for me. I went through an awful lot of light bulbs as a kid and STILL have a bedroom night-light. I tell people it's so I don't hurt myself traversing my flat in the middle of the night, but really it's because it makes me feel slightly more protected from the Bad Guys.


I have no fucking idea why I do any of this. I hate when I do it, I always warn myself that I am going to regret it pretty much as soon as I do it, and I'm well aware that I can't handle any of these things. Yet I keep doing it. And will probably continue to do it until I finally fall off my perch.

Keep my light on, though. Just in case?