”Once Bit”

~ Elizabeth

There was never a time in my life that I didn’t bite my fingernails. As a nervous habit it worked pretty well, at least for my nerves if not my fingers. I accommodated for this nail deficit and never really missed the usefulness they provided. At one point in fifth grade I decided to stop the habit and bought Thum, a nasty tasting brush-on treatment said to use aversion therapy to stop the habit. It didn’t.

But one day my ten year old granddaughter looked at me quite intently and said I should quit biting my nails because it was unhygienic. In all my nail biting years I had never even considered that. (Denial is a powerful thing!) She was right and I told her I would stop. And I did.

It took many months for my nails to heal. Even after eight years, two of the nail beds are damaged a little. Still they did grow back. Inspired by my daughter I began to get manicures from a local Vietnamese salon. When my nails grow too long to type easily, I sit down with Julie(a truly Americanized name)for a trim and gel polish called Bubble Bath. Above is a photo of the results.

While it turns out fingernails are quite useful for things like prying lids, I still have to find alternative methods. It turns out those same tasks destroy the lovely newly regrown gel covered tips!


27 thoughts on “”Once Bit””

  1. I have bitten my nails all of my life, almost subconsciously. But I allow my left thumbnail to grow just a little, otherwise I cannot pick up anything flat, like a bank card, or flick up lids and covers.

    Best wishes, Pete.

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  2. I, too, am a lifelong nail-biter. I grew them all to get married in 1974, then bit them again. I grew 9 nails for my mother’s 80th birthday, then bit them again. Currently, I am a 40% nail-biter, having grown 6 nails with a self-pledge to grow them all before I am 80. A work in progress!

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  5. They look so good! I actually picked up the habit from a classmate, and then ended up dropping it. But it’s such a strange thing, isn’t it? How easy it is to start biting them. I ended up stopping because as a teen, I wanted long nails. Go figure. Now I’m older and have short nails. And still bite my left thumb nail for some reason. I’ll need to go through the stopping the habit again! Oh, no! 🙂

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  8. I made quite a lot of money from biting my nails in the 1940s and ’50s. My Aunt gave me half a crown (one quarter of £1 sterling – a goodly amount for a child in those days) each time I stopped – it made good sense to start again.

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  11. I love that came from your granddaughter Elizabeth, out of the mouth of babes can wisdom come.

    I remember when my eldest granddaughter was four years old, she had come to stay for a fortnight & a week in it was the first anniversary of my late husband’s death. I was sitting on the lounge with tears in my eyes & she turned, looked me straight in the eyes & said;
    “You can’t be sad forever!”
    (quote taken from ‘A Time to Mourn & A Time to Dance’ by Jennifer M. Ross, 2006 p.91)
    And of course she was right!
    Blessings, Jennifer

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