It takes a lot of work to be Beautiful Still

(From left to right) Rose Lacroix, Anita Godin, and Gerald Stevens stand in front of the exhibit opening night.

I was standing in the gallery, cutting final invitations, talking to the gallery owner and guests who had arrived. As the sound of footsteps creep up the hall, I look up to the door. A familiar face, one I hadn’t seen in nearly a year, appeared. I put everything down and in a few long strides, made my way towards the door. Her arms wrapped around me. Tight, warm, familiar.

“I didn’t think you were coming,” I said as tears rolled down my cheeks.

“I told you, not even wild horses could keep me from coming,” said Rose Lacroix, my cousin and someone I consider my second mother.

Rose had driven four hours from Halifax to Fredericton in order to make it to the opening night of my first gallery art show, Beautiful Still. That single moment made all of the stress and preparation worth it.

Beautiful Still has been my baby for the past five and a half months. A collection of self-portraits, I had been working with Aidan Stanley, the owner of Floor Five Hundred Gallery in downtown Fredericton.

Aidan graduated from the New Brunswick Craft and Design College and opened Floor Five Hundred, located on King Street.

Visitors taking photos at the gallery.

Aidan and I met in November, shortly after the gallery’s inaugural show on Halloween. I had sent him an email asking what the requirements for getting a show in the gallery were.

“Not a lot, just good energy,” Aidan said.

I met him in the gallery with my portfolio, filled with a wide range of photos I had taken in my second and third year of university. The hallway leading to the gallery was long, mirrors on the upper-half of the walls. Before the door leading to the gallery space, pictures and biographies with the gallery’s logo adorned the walls. Inside, the space was bright and open,with floor-to-ceiling mirrors on a wall at the far end of the gallery.

“I opened the gallery as a place for emerging artists,” Aidan told me as I sat down on the edge of a small couch. “There isn’t a lot of space available for them in the city.”

Aidan flipped through my portfolio as I explained the different photos. Inside, there were photos from my trips to Prague and Paris, as well as some photos from campus events.

“There are a lot of different photos here,” he said. “Do you have an idea for a show or anything?”

The idea for the photographs came to me in the summer while watching an episode of A&E’s Obsessed. A woman on the show had something called dermatillomania, or compulsive skin-picking disorder (CSPD). She spent her time picking at her skin, using her fingers and different tools, and then trying to hide the scars, scabs, and marks left behind with make up.

As I sat there watching, I compared this woman’s behaviour to my own and decided I needed to research CSPD.

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Compulsive skin-picking disorder, according to the American Psychiatric Association, is an impulse control disorder, that may fall under the obsessive compulsive spectrum disorder. Compulsive skin-picking is a body-focused repetitive behaviour that results in the destruction of one’s own skin, often done as an unconscious form of behaviour. Skin-picking may result in bleeding, bruising, scarring, infections, and permanent damage to the skin.

Skin-pickers often feel a sense of relief as they pick. The more I read about compulsive skin-picking disorder, and the more I examined my own personal behaviour, I realized that I suffer from a mild form of the disorder.

I have been picking at my skin for at least ten years. It’s nearly impossible for me to pinpoint exactly when I began. It started as picking at blackheads and zits on my face, standing in my bathroom mirror, sticking my tongue into my cheeks to stretch the skin and reveal all of the small imperfections and bumps in my skin.

The first incident that sticks out in my mind happened when I was in the sixth grade. I had the chicken pox, for the second time. I remember sitting on the couch, picking at one little pock in particular. Eventually, I had made it scab over and I tried pulling the scab off. I couldn’t get a good enough grip, it was caught on something.

I had the overwhelming need to get whatever it was out of my face. I had to go. I got up, grabbed a pair of tweezers, stood in front of the bathroom mirror, and pulled the scab off. There’s a scar there now that I tell people it’s from when I had the chicken pox, leaving out the part about the tweezers. I often use tweezers when I can’t get a good enough grip with my fingernails, two of which are permanently bent from the pressure of picking.

Pickers find the behaviour soothing, stimulating, and because they’re very often perfectionists. When I was younger, my family always joked about me having obsessive compulsive disorder. Everything had to be just so. The sound of a dripping tap would drive me to check every single tap in the house until it stopped.

“Chelsea’s room is the museum,” my mother would say.

The overwhelming feeling to get whatever it is out of my skin is the hardest part to explain. I feel like if I’m able to get it out of my skin, somehow it’ll get better. Somehow, I’ll feel better, and I do for a little while. There’s a sense of relief, taking my brain’s focus from whatever is that’s bothering me. When I’m anxious or upset, I have picking episodes, and the picking relieves some of the stress.

I feel better until I start to feel ashamed and dirty, like I have a dark little secret that I don’t want anyone to know.

I didn’t want anyone to know. For a long time, I hid it. The marks and acne on my face could be blamed on puberty. Skin-pickers

Make up used to hide the marks from picking.

often suffer from picker’s acne, however, which develops from the damage to the skin and bacteria on fingers or other tools used in the process.

As I watched that woman stand in front of her bathroom mirror, using a blackhead remover, I knew that it was something we had in common. I no longer felt alone, I felt less ashamed, and I began to talk about it.

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Talking about it, examining my own behaviour, and watching the people around me, their own weird behaviours and their responses to my own, I became interested in the idea of anxiety disorders and coping mechanisms. I felt like I needed to document it.

I explained vaguely to Aidan Stanley what CSPD is, and the history of my own behaviour. I tried not to tell him too much.

“I sort of have this disorder,” I said. “I pick at my skin.”

Standing in front of the bathroom mirror.

While my face is the main focus, it isn’t the only target. As I sat with Aidan, I ran my hands and fingernails along my arms, searching for any small bumps or scabs to scratch at. Often, I run my hands through my hair, along my shoulders, back, chest, and arms, looking for ingrown hairs or anything I might be able to pull out. I do it while I sit in class, or at home. Any time I get a minute and I’m bored.

I know people are looking at me. I feel disgusting when I do it. I can’t help it.

Aidan asked me a bit more about the disorder, and what exactly I was thinking of doing.

“I’ve really become interested in anxiety disorders,” I said. “I’d really like to do a series of self-portraits after a picking episode, documenting the damage I do to myself.”

Aidan liked the idea.

“We could have images floating over here on mats, or maybe some projected on this wall,” he said. “Do you have any publicity contacts? Someone’s going to have to issue a press release. You’ll have to keep in touch with me about the images, and a poster will need to be done.”

He pulled out his calendar.

“How does February sound?”

“Great, let me write it down,” I said.

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I began working almost immediately. I had four months at that point to get everything done, on top of working part-time and going to school full-time. The show ended up being pushed back to March, giving me an extra month.

I had to find a tripod and the right remote for my camera in order to shoot a self-portrait series. I ordered the remote, only to find out it was the wrong model after it arrived, forcing me to wait another two weeks for the right one. It was the end of November by the time I was able to shoot.

One of the images in Beautiful Still.

I set up my camera in my bedroom, doing several test shoots before taking the final images. There’s a small space right behind my bedroom door where the wall is empty, acting as a perfect, clean background.

By placing tape on the wall to outline the photo frame, I set the timer, and began shooting. I took close to 50 photos, and had to narrow it down to 20. Some were partial nudes, some weren’t. Initially, I had wanted to include the nudes to show how truly vulnerable the act of skin-picking is. The decision not to include them came after discussing the show with my boyfriend, Patrick Whidden. My worries came not from strangers seeing the images, but from my friends and family seeing them. He wasn’t comfortable with people seeing me naked.

“What are people going to think?” he said. “They’re going to think you’re egotistical, or what if they think you’re some kind of freak?”

That was something that I was willing to risk. The show became a sort of therapy for me, acknowledging my destructive behaviour and attempting to create a dialogue with others so they could potentially understand it while examining their own.

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I stood, arms wrapped around my cousin, for I don’t know how long. Large prints of the images and a definition of dermatillomania (CSPD) were up on the wall behind us. Aidan and I had set the gallery up the night before, putting on the last finishing touches just before the show.

I was still finishing up when the first visitors, when my cousin, walked in the gallery doors.

“See, this is what I love about opening nights,” said Aidan.

“I didn’t think she was going to come,” I said, wiping underneath my eyelashes, trying not to smear my make up.

“You look amazing,” Rose said.

“I look like crap,” I laughed. “I had to work, and I was so rushed getting here. It’s just been… Everything’s just been so overwhelming.”

Opening night poster.

I’d spent my week printing posters, putting them up around town and on campus, looking for silver thumb tacks (it took three stops to find them), and working out a way to print my photos large enough and how to pay for it. Being a student, money’s tight.

I brought a bottle of wine that I’d bought in Ottawa; Aidan provided another. I poured myself a glass of wine and waited for more people to arrive.

Friends and family slowly trickled in. My father came with his girlfriend. Several classmates came. Some people I didn’t know and had never met. A woman asked to take my photograph for her own personal blog. I forgot to get her name. Patrick walked in behind his sister-in-law, Anna. The last bit of stress I had was gone.

So many hugs. So many “I’m proud of yous.”

“These are beautiful,” Liz Whidden said. “You should be proud,” she told my father.

“I am,” he answered.

My cousin drove back to Halifax that night. Her husband had to work the next morning and she had to look after their two children. I sit here with tears in my eyes again as I think about everything. Not even wild horses could keep them away.

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Posted by Chelsea Stevens on Apr 4, 2010. Filed under Features, This Week's Edition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.