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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.
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.
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Pick at one edge? Both upper and lower teeth involved? Is it sore when you do it?
Just curious.
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If the other nails are long enough (= have any edge at all), then I use those to pick at the others. Usually, though, this isn't the case and I just go for teeth. Umm, generally just my bottom teeth, and it's like... well, the reasoning behind it is like using a plane to smooth irregularities in the surface of wood. Only these are teeth and thus it's a much less accurate process, which usually means I cause an even bigger problem in trying to fix the first one.
I've been biting for long enough that I know when I'm getting too close to the quick, and I stop before it starts hurting and long before I draw blood, at which point if there are still rough spots that snag on my clothes (which is generally how I discover them in the first place), then I use a file. Which, I know, I should have done in the first place, but for some reason I always think that I can do just _this_ much, you know, and it's hardly worth finding a file when it's just a tiny thing that needs fixing.