Backsliding

They say it takes three weeks to break a bad habit, and three more to replace it with a good one.

I'm sitting here at six weeks, and apparently have done neither. I don't know what happened (really, that should be _why_. 'What' is obvious if you look at my hands). You'd think that spending the weekend at grandma's, around her and my mom, and being so proud of how far I've come with my nails, would be the _one_ place and time I would be certain not to mess up. Maybe it's _because_ I was showing off my nails; maybe I was paying closer attention to them, myself, and thus found weak corners and unevenly-shaped edges that just _had_ to be picked at/smoothed.

Maybe it's because I forgot my cuticle oil, and after three days of handling material while working on my NAAMA dress, my fingers were all dried out. Maybe it was the stress of doing my homework on grandma's dining room table where _everyone_ could see whether I was being a good kid or not. I dunno.

Anyway, the long and short of it (heheh, I know) is that I took three more nails down to the two-week level, which left only four nails on _both_ hands intact this whole time. Well, that disparity would have driven me crazy, so before it got to that point, tonight I filed those four down to match all the others. *sigh*

The only good news is that none of them are completely down to the quick. So it's three steps forward and two steps back, but that's still progress, right? And they still click when I drum my fingers (with no exaggerated over-bending, either), which I don't remember happening when they really _were_ at two weeks, so I guess overall they're really longer (because the quick is growing out), but when the most visible sign of growth is the whites, and those are tiny right now, it's still sort of depressing.

Backsliding

They say it takes three weeks to break a bad habit, and three more to replace it with a good one.

I'm sitting here at six weeks, and apparently have done neither. I don't know what happened (really, that should be _why_. 'What' is obvious if you look at my hands). You'd think that spending the weekend at grandma's, around her and my mom, and being so proud of how far I've come with my nails, would be the _one_ place and time I would be certain not to mess up. Maybe it's _because_ I was showing off my nails; maybe I was paying closer attention to them, myself, and thus found weak corners and unevenly-shaped edges that just _had_ to be picked at/smoothed.

Maybe it's because I forgot my cuticle oil, and after three days of handling material while working on my NAAMA dress, my fingers were all dried out. Maybe it was the stress of doing my homework on grandma's dining room table where _everyone_ could see whether I was being a good kid or not. I dunno.

Anyway, the long and short of it (heheh, I know) is that I took three more nails down to the two-week level, which left only four nails on _both_ hands intact this whole time. Well, that disparity would have driven me crazy, so before it got to that point, tonight I filed those four down to match all the others. *sigh*

The only good news is that none of them are completely down to the quick. So it's three steps forward and two steps back, but that's still progress, right? And they still click when I drum my fingers (with no exaggerated over-bending, either), which I don't remember happening when they really _were_ at two weeks, so I guess overall they're really longer (because the quick is growing out), but when the most visible sign of growth is the whites, and those are tiny right now, it's still sort of depressing.