Priya, 29

I was about fourteen. I started with spots on my face, picking the dry skin around them, then the spots themselves. The thing is, my skin took a long time to heal even then. I'd pick at something and the mark would last for months. I had no idea at fourteen that this was anything other than my skin being slow. I blamed my skin. Not my picking.

I was a studious, anxious teenager. A lot of pressure at home around grades, a strong sense of what I should be and should look like. I think the picking was somewhere to put that. And it happened quietly, privately, in the bathroom. By the time I was at sixth form I was picking my shoulders too. Back home from school, shirt off, standing in front of the mirror. It's almost ritualistic to think about now.

For my face it usually starts with touching. I'm thinking about something else and my fingers are feeling the landscape of my cheeks or forehead. When they find something raised, that's when I become aware of it. Then there's a period where I'm deliberately looking, usually with a mirror. And that's when it escalates. The closer I look, the more I find, and the more I find the longer the episode goes.

For the shoulders it's different - that's more automatic, more like something I do while reading or marking. I'll be at my desk with papers and realise I've been picking my shoulder for the past twenty minutes without noticing.

The aftermath with my face is the hardest. Because it's not over when the episode is over. The mark is there every morning. Dark post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation that, because of my skin tone, takes months to fade. I look at my face and see evidence of something I did six months ago. That's an unusually long consequence cycle and it creates its own ongoing relationship with shame.

The lasting marks. I've had people say, sort of kindly but infuriatingly, "at least spots heal quickly." They don't, for me. The picking causes hyperpigmentation that takes six months to a year to fade, and that's if I stop picking and wear SPF every day. If I pick the same area again before it's healed, the clock restarts. So my face carries a visual record of months of behaviour, not days.

There's a specific thing that's hard with my family. My mum will make a comment about my skin and she means it as concern, but it registers as criticism. And the comments actually make things worse - they increase my preoccupation with my face, which increases the mirror time, which increases the picking. I've tried to explain this. We're not quite there with the conversation yet.

Also the teaching context. Managing thirty teenagers while wearing full coverage foundation every day and being very aware of your face and whether anyone's looking at it is exhausting. You have to be a performance every day. There's nowhere to rest.

Yes. I've avoided photographs at events - family occasions where someone's going around with a camera and I'm calculating whether I can be in that one or not. I've worn high-neck or sleeved things at the beach when I'd rather have worn something else. I've cancelled things when my face was particularly bad and I didn't have the emotional energy to manage both the event and how I felt about being seen.

The wedding is the big one right now. We're getting married next year and I want to feel good on the day. Not perfect, because I've given up on perfect, but good. I'm starting to work more seriously on this partly because I have a specific date to work towards. Which is both motivating and terrifying. The pressure of the wedding is also a stress that triggers more picking. So it cuts both ways.

Reading about post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation in darker skin tones. Finding out that what I'd experienced my whole life - marks lasting many months - wasn't my skin failing me or some personal inadequacy. It's a documented dermatological reality for people with more melanin. PIH lasts longer, spreads wider, and takes more time to fade. This is known. And nobody had ever told me.

Something about that shifted the shame. I'd been blaming myself for having skin that "couldn't heal properly" when in fact it was healing exactly as it should, and I'd just never been given the right information. That reframe helped me feel slightly less broken. And feeling less broken made it marginally easier to be kinder to myself when I picked, which made the shame spiral slightly less severe.

SPF every single morning. That's become non-negotiable. Not because it stops me picking, but because it means the marks I do make have the best chance of fading before I make new ones nearby. It's harm reduction at the skin level - even when I can't stop the episode, I can slow the long-term damage.

I've also been working on the triggers. Marking and planning at work are the big ones. I now try to have something in my hands when I sit down to mark - a pen I'm actually using, a cup of tea. Anything that gives my hands a job. It doesn't always work but it helps enough to be worth doing.

I'm seeing a therapist who knows about BFRBs, which has been genuinely useful. We're working on the emotional stuff underneath - the pressure around appearance, the family dynamics, the anxiety that looks for a physical outlet. The picking is the surface. We're looking at what feeds it.

I want to be honest about where I am: recovery for me right now means reducing, not stopping. I still pick. But I pick less, less severely, and with considerably more self-compassion than I had two years ago.

If you have a darker skin tone, find out about hyperpigmentation specifically. The healing timeline is different and that difference matters. Wearing SPF is the highest-leverage thing you can do for your skin right now, even before you've addressed the picking itself. It doesn't feel like recovery but it is.

And please don't let the length of the healing timeline make you more ashamed. I did that for years. "My marks last so long" became evidence of how bad I was at this, rather than a skin biology fact that had nothing to do with my character. The body keeps the record - that's not a moral statement. It's just physiology.

Find your triggers. Mine are stress, mirror time, and family comments about my appearance. Knowing them doesn't stop the picking automatically but it gives you something to work with. You can reduce the triggers before they become urges. That's earlier in the chain, and it's more manageable.