When you hold out your hand and the whole world stops and you find yourself looking at the back of your hand, which, the longer you look at it, looks starved. —Cole Swensen
I am in a theater. Illuminated by stage light, the graying novelist leans into the podium as she reads, rocking the audience back in time, across the Midwest, to a little house in a nothing town where a family plays checkers. In one of the back rows, I lean into the plush chair, holding one hand to my side and out into the aisle as I peal back the loose skin once rooted at the bed of my thumbnail.
My mind wanders. I am rapt. My index and middle finger dig, pull, and tear at my thumb. The author flips the page and turns to the subject of home—what it means, how it morphs and eludes us—and I abruptly recall the world around me, the rows of seats behind me, the people everywhere who could be watching me. This, not pain, stills me, though not before teeth have torn flesh. By the end of the night, as hands meet each other in applause, my thumb gleams soft pink, a throbbing corona of what look like stretch marks around the nail’s edge.
The first comprehensive analysis of the human hand came as a proof of God. Francis Henry Egerton, Earl of Bridgewater, on his deathbed in 1829, commissioned a body of work meant to prove that the universe came with a celestial design. In life, the bachelor earl was a careless, jovial man known for hosting canine dress-up dinner parties and insisting on a different pair of shoes each day. But in death the Earl wanted to leave a legacy of teleological proof of the Divine. One such proof was a tome devoted solely to the human hand: “The Fourth Bridgewater Treatises: On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation. The Hand: Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments, as Evincing Design.” Its commissioned author, Sir Charles Bell, produced 428 pages of analysis, methodically leading the reader through the curve of the human shoulder to the tips of the fingers, all the while comparing the shape and utility of these parts to similar structures in elephants, sloths, camels, cows.
“(I)t is in the human hand,” he wrote, “that we perceive the consummation of all perfection, as an instrument. This superiority consists in its combination of strength, with variety, extent, and rapidity of motion; in the power of the thumb, and the forms, relations, and sensibility of the fingers, which adapt it for holding, pulling, spinning, weaving, and constructing; properties which may be found separately in other animals, but are combined in the human hand.”
Reading Bell’s encomium to hands, you cannot help but pause every now and then and look down at your own. Those ten digits. These tiny tools. Hands are not only mechanically perfect, Bell argues, they also possess “the property of touch, by which (the hand) minister to and improves every other sense.” It is touch that does me in. If I only looked at my fingers, I would never bite or tear at them again. It is when I am not thinking but feeling, when my fingers sweep check one another for loose or uneven skin, that I feel compelled to trim. I want to fix the errors of my skin, and so you might say that I, too, believe in the perfection of the human hand. The only problem is, I don’t know where to stop. In trimming, I inevitably leave a scrap of unevenness, some unruly skin or nail bit that then forces me to return, readdressing the issue again and again. And with this I am Sisyphus. My hands, my boulder.
I had a lover once who winced when she looked at my hands. We might be in the car, and she would glance over as I shifted from second to third. Or maybe when making dinner in her cumin-scented kitchen, me chopping carrots and she stirring lentils, she would lean over to share some endearment but get distracted by the injuries lacing my fingertips. In these moments, she covered my habit from her eyes, her hands encasing mine.
With her, I tried for the first time to stop. I bought Band-Aids, cycled through packs of gum. She gave me organic ointments, with which I rubbed my fingertips to a shine, and when spotting signs of healing, she complimented my hands with a mother’s pride. For a while this worked. I stopped biting and tearing in her presence. And when we took a road trip one June, the three-week abstaining period allowed my fingers and fingertips to heal and my nails to grow thick and white-tipped. I chose to see this as a personal triumph, an evolution of self—until months later, that is, after I’d moved across the country and broken off the relationship and suddenly, almost without even noticing it, began attacking my hands again.
When I try to identify how all this began, I remember when I was seven or eight and my neighbor, a towheaded girl named Stevany, began to bite her nails. She nibbled at them with bravado for nearly a week before I finally asked what she was doing.
“Biting my nails.”
“But why?”
“Because that’s what people do.”
Stevany was two years older than me. She and her even-older-sister Dee taught me to play Spades and told me my first sex joke. In the winter, they give me their hand-me-down clothes, and in the spring, they showed me how to drink the beads of sweet in the honeysuckle. After Stevany explained nail biting, I spent days mulling over its potential, waiting until a moment when I was alone to try.
The initial bite came off, I realized later, much like a first cigarette, everything unnatural but exciting, as if my body had a voice and that voice proclaimed: “This is not right.” But then a whisper urged more convincingly: “Do it again.”
And just like that a habit formed. Then it progressed. Until one day I realized it was less habit and more disorder. Dermatophagia is the technical word: skin eater. Another term for people like me is wolf biter, although no one in the medical literature explains why. Are fingers like wolves? Does biting and tearing flesh make me wolf-like, make me wild?
The crux of it, for me at least, is this: I either see, or with my other fingers feel, a loose piece of skin dangling somewhere around the nail. I am then aware of this flap and yet for some time avoid it, avoid thinking about it, a challenge I meet with success until that moment when I fool myself into believing that I am acting subconsciously, and then I pull, I rip, I tear. Skin removed from flesh. And what do I accomplish? Order. A sense of serenity. Satisfaction.
It’s not the act of tearing or biting I crave beforehand, nor is it the pain afterward. What I want is the satisfaction of a desire filled. The forcing of errant parts of myself into submission. The belief that I am the maker of my hands. This is textbook obsessive-compulsive behavior. I know this. And yet, if we’re going to use labels, I prefer wolf biter.
Another lover bit her hands even worse than me. A jet mechanic in the Air Force, she worked graveyard shifts, would drive to my bedroom at dawn, her uniform baked to a metallic sheen, her fingers washed in grease that collected near nubs of nails where years of biting had inflamed the tips so much they splayed. After a shower, her body lowered into the bed beside me, still smelling slightly of hot coins, the creases of her hands shaded bluish-gray. Waking, I would hold her fingers against my palm, mesmerized by the brutality.
“Why do you do this?”
“Why do you?”
By comparison, my hands gleamed porcelain, but she had a point. When our habits deform our bodies, we can’t hide the proof of what we do. Still, I wanted a distinction, a hierarchy of disorder. Even today I can see her in my mind, the way she would chew at her fingers with a determined cock of her head, a slight clench of the jaw. Her eyes always looked out in the distance, as if meditating or remembering.
“Jenn,” I scolded. “Stop.”
And then her gnawing would cease for a few moments or hours, but at some point fingers always returned to mouth. This is a position of comfort for babies. I wonder now if loving her made me worse.
Our naming of the fingers is, perhaps, aptly, wrapped up in the act of destroying them. King Æthelbert of Kent first listed names for the five fingers in the sixth century when devising a system to compensate his subjects for accidental amputations.
“If a thumb be struck off, twenty shillings,” he declared. “If a thumb nail be off, let bot [sic] be made with three shillings. If the shooting finger be struck off, let bot be made with eight shillings.” And on he went from there: the middle finger worth four schillings; the “gold finger,” six; and the “little finger,” eleven.
Later, King Canute of Denmark developed a similar system of value for our fingers, but with different names. He, too, declared the most valuable the pollex, or thumb, and the least valuable was the middle finger, which he called the impudicus. Impudicus, meaning unchaste or immodest. The little finger, under Canute’s rule, was called the auricularis, referring to the ear, because, at least in some theories, that finger is the perfect size and shape to remove sticky wax from that part of the body. The small finger later came to be called the pinky, it is said, because the pinky was once the name for a little boat in Scotland—the logic being, I guess, that pinkies are like little boats. Though what would this make the rest of the fingers? Tankers? Arks? Or, perhaps more fitting: pirate ships.
When I think about it, the desire began earlier than the biting. It started in second grade. One of my classmates wanted to teach me a magic trick. “Squeeze a blob here,” he instructed, holding up the Elmer’s and demonstrating on his palm. “Now let it dry.”
We waited, waving our hands around in the air like acrobats.
“Now,” he said. “You peel.”
And with this, he pulled layers of dried glue off his palm in large snowflakes. I followed his lead, exalting in the illusion of skin removed from skin, in the tickly feeling it created. The rest of the day, I tried the trick again and again in the back of the classroom, making and removing skin while everyone else glued Pluto and Mercury to cardboard rendered starlit. Desire preceeded the act. There was satisfaction in so succinctly removing a part of what seemed like myself without pain.
The problem now is that it hurts.
This is not about self-pity—at least I hope not. It’s about why any of us destroy our tools. It’s about hands and what they are worth to us now. It’s about the disconnect between our hands and survival, between our fingers and how we eat, between our thumbs and our reign over everything else living among us.
Isaac Newton once said that, absent other proof, thumbs alone should be enough to convince us of the existence of God. Perhaps fittingly, the thumb is also an appendage whose evolution no one can quite explain.
One theory is that the thumb developed after the threat of giant rodents forced our primate ancestors into the trees. Opposable thumbs helped those evacuees clutch branches, swing among the canopy, grab bundles of leaves for lunch. And when we eventually grew tired of the arboreal life and landed back on the ground, our new thumbs allowed us to grip tools, wield weapons, protect and feed our families and tribes. Our lives became less peripatetic, our tools more complicated, and our hands evolved with us: squat and square in early humanoids, longer and leaner in our parents and grandparents. And for most of these years, our hands were our most important tools; they were the weapons with which we battled the wild, the bowls and plates in which we cradled our meals. The phrase living hand-to-mouth originally characterized one major distinction between the rest of the animal kingdom and us. We don’t bring our mouths to our food like dogs; we ferry the food to our mouths with our hands. Only recently has it been equated with poverty. You live hand-to-mouth when you are barely surviving. Something about our relationship with our hands has shifted. And here—finally—I am no longer talking just about myself.
One day, in the late 1960s, my mom decided to sign up for the Air Force Reserves. She was young with long blonde hair, fingers stained yellow from nicotine, and nails bitten to the quick. A recent college graduate with experience as a chambermaid, she was directionless in that way many people are when they open the front door of a recruiting office.
Vietnam was in full force then, so they should have embraced her, but something interfered. Fingernail biting is a sign of a personality disorder, they told her sternly, and turned her away.
Or so I remember the story. When I asked about it recently, though, my mom said she doesn’t recall any of this. Perhaps trying to assuage, she added: “I do remember a therapist I went to once when I lived in Boston. I told him that my fiancé was really pressuring me to stop biting my nails, and I resented his implication that it was a sick habit. The therapist said, ‘Well, it is a sick habit.’ I never went back to him.”
Another mom memory: I am very small and my mom asks me to help her weed between the bricks in our front walkway. “I need your tiny hands to get in the cracks,” she says, and I look down, realizing that I, in fact, have tiny hands, and that, in this context, they are an asset; my hands are a tool.
Yet as adults we rarely contemplate our hands for longer than a few seconds. We look at them as we slip on rings, rub in lotion, grip a shovel, hold someone else’s hand in ours. But it is rare just to stare at them. I can remember only one time I did so, at least in public, with other people around me. It was at a dinner party, and everyone at the table started talking about tricks of the body. A young guy there, fresh-faced, just out of college, halted the chatter simply by holding up his hands.
“I can’t touch my thumbs to my pinkies,” he said, modeling this disability, so odd that several of us protested:
“But wait!”
“No, of course you can.”
“Just do this.”
Suddenly we were all raising our palms up as if in prayer or praise, reproducing together the action he couldn’t. We all stared at our hands then, thinking how easy it was for our little fingers to touch our thumbs, looking back at him with a tinge of pity, a hint of horror. In that moment I swear we all felt gratitude. For our hands.
I pause when writing this to trim the nail of my index finger with my teeth. The noise sounds like the knocking of tree branches against windowpanes. I pull and chew until I bleed. My thumb throbs, and yet I can’t stop thinking about another bit of loose white skin protruding from a spot on my right pinkie that I tore at last night. I want to remove it, too. But I stop.
I am in seventh grade, and a girl named Brittany has everyone’s attention.
“Did you hear she let a boy finger her during a movie in Mr. Adams’s class,” Amber whispers in the locker room as we change from jeans to sweats.
I already know about Brittany. She’s tall and has long acorn hair that never looks fully brushed. Her chest is round and matches the pendulum swing of her hips when she passes me in the open-air hallways in our Florida middle school. She never talks to me, but I can’t stop thinking about her.
Fingering was a word we learned in sixth grade. But this is the first time a story has attached itself to the act. Hearing it makes me feel uncomfortable—imagining a boy pushing his fingers into Brittany beneath the ambient light of a projector screen—and strangely nervous. Amber tells me the boy used two fingers, which also means something, I’m sure of it, though I didn’t know what. Except that two is more than one but less than three.
What I didn’t know then was that a year later I, too, would go the way of Brittany. Those were the 90s. I permed my blonde hair and started wearing shorts that stopped far short of my knees. I met a boy named Shawn who told me I was sexy, which I decided was a compliment. I agreed to go to his friend Jason’s house one day after school. And there, in a bathroom, Shawn touched me in the same way that boy touched Brittany in Mr. Adams’s class. I didn’t ask how many fingers. I didn’t say a thing, in fact. Not even “this feels good,” because it didn’t. It felt gross, but it also felt grown up.
And several years later, I knew what it was like on the other side. Lesbians, many of us at least, make love predominantly with our hands. We eye one another’s fingers, the strength of wrists, the muscularity of a thumb with an unspoken foresight, as if divining an experience in bed through the curve and bend of an index finger, a middle finger, the impudicus. Of all lovers, then, we are the ones who should be the most fastidious with our hands. I know this.
The woman I am dating now used to do palm readings. She tells me she has forgotten the details, so I try to refresh her memory with facts. “The life line is the first formed in the womb,” I say, holding her palm up for inspection. We are alone in my kitchen, miso soup reheating on the stove. “And then the destiny line. It’s second.”
She holds up my palms, inspects them, tracing these pathways, which, on my hands, ramble and digress but on hers run deep and uninterrupted from wrist toward thumb.
“In primates the heart and head line run as one,” I say. “We are the only ones with lines that separate.”
This fact seemed momentous to me when I’d read it a few days earlier. There is something special about us. Even without believing in God, I can see this. If it’s not our bodies, then it’s our ability to name them, to turn ordinary creases into metaphors and morph those metaphors into reasons to believe.
She holds both my hands now, and we look up, our fingers tracing each other’s palms, a slip of space between us. Closing my eyes, I can feel the spots on my fingers where the flesh is broken and raw.
“You know, only the foot has more sweat glands than the hand,” I say.
The soup has begun to boil, and its rumble soothes me.
“And at night the glands in the hand shut off. It’s the only part in the body where they do that—”
One of her hands leaves mine and traces the side of my face.
“—where they go to sleep.”
There is no space between us now, and my eyes are closed, but I keep thinking about hands. What I don’t tell her is this: in the womb, babies develop nails in as early as twelve weeks, and, although this is thought to have an evolutionary benefit, it can also be dangerous. Sometimes a baby is born with a battlefield of scratch lines across its face.
There are, of course, Tumblrs dedicated to wolf biters. I visit them and flinch. All the while trying not to compare myself or think: I am better; I am not that weird.
“This is how I keep my Dermatophagia at bay before a party,” a woman writes beside a picture of one hand, pink-painted nails peeking out from the Band-Aids wrapping each of her fingers.
“i wish i wish upon a star foR SOMEONE TO GET RID OF THIS STUPID OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDER THAT MAKES MY HANDS UGLY,” writes another. They hashtag wolf biter, picker, self-harm, and the technical term, dermatophagia. They talk about using their teeth, their fingers, and dad’s Stanley knife.
But, every once and a while, you run across the rare unashamed wolf biter: “I bear these fingers with pride. I don’t want to stop, I like the scars. I like the stares. It makes me unique,” writes a woman whose photos are among the worst. Red fingernail polish half chewed away. The flesh around the nails looks like snakeskin. I close the window and return to the page.
In 1908, doctors characterized nail biting and “finger picking” as a stigma of degeneration. In 1931, they called it an unresolved Oedipal complex. In 1977, a team of researchers released a paper on the “Relationship of Nailbiting to Sociopathy,” in which they determined that sociopaths are more likely than the sane to bite their nails. Only there was a hang up. Biters have long been thought to suffer from acute nervousness, and psychopaths are considered to be the calmest folks around.
In recent years, researchers have coined a new name for wolf biters, or at least for the action of biting: Body-Focused Repetitive Behavior.
“Some have theorized that there may be the same out-of-control grooming mechanism in the brain that underlies them all,” psychologist Fred Penzel wrote in a 1995 article on skin picking and severe nail biting.
The most credible explanation to me, though, shows up only briefly in the world’s first textbook on the subject: Fingernail Biting: Theory, Research, and Treatment by Norman H. Hadley. Forced stillness, especially in the context of the classroom, Hadley writes in his summary of popular theories at the time, is one explanation for why we do what we do to our hands.
“When we’re forced to sit still we have to reassure ourselves—play with our hair, scratch or rub our skin, bite our nails—provoke sensations that keep us aware of our body.”
In other words, we bite our fingers because, in stillness, we have no other way of proving the reality of our flesh. To stop biting, then, we would need to find another way to remind ourselves that we exist.
I read an article once about people suffering from Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, a debilitating affliction in which the patients, among other things, try to gnaw off their own hands. Doctors now believe there is a self-destruction instinct in all of us that ordinarily is topped by a stronger will to survive. Except in these people.
Perhaps, by this same logic, a wolf biter’s survival instinct is on overdrive. We want so badly to feel alive that we remove pieces of our own flesh seeking proof. Then Newton would be wrong and Sir Charles Bell only half-right. The hand doesn’t prove God; it proves us.
I took an art class recently, and the teacher told us: “You must be able to draw your own hand. This is where we all start.”
Listening, I stared at my hands and saw the skin peeling from fingertips, scars along the flesh edges. My ring finger bore a notch along its tip, a chasm in the fingerprint swirl that recalled farmers market beets chopped too quickly, their magenta flesh fusing with my blood in a wound that had only healed a day at most when my teeth started ripping at it. On my index finger was a rosy fissure, the remnants of a hangnail torn from its base—again by my teeth—that had rooted along the seam of my fingernail. Each finger bore a similar scar, so that, at that moment, only my left pinky remained unscathed. I looked at all of this as if it weren’t me, and then I began to draw, starting with my thumb and moving to my fingers, trying to copy perfectly the ridges and swells.
And for that moment, at least, I was still, making a replica of myself.
Sarah Viren is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and author of the essay collection, Mine, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She is also the author of To Name the Bigger Lie, out with Scribner in June 2023. She was a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and teaches in the creative writing program at Arizona State University.
Photo by Philipp Pilz