On protein
“30% More Protein” the packaging reads. “How the fuck can uncooked pasta have protein in it?” i think to myself.
“30% More Protein”, the packaging reads. “How the fuck can uncooked pasta have protein in it?” i think to myself. I know it does, because just two weeks ago, M was standing in my kitchen, asking a similar question as she read over the nutrition label. She is much better at taking the whole food thing seriously, it seems everyone is. She knows her proteins, fibres and other things i cannot list off by memory. She taught me how to ride a bike, and I trust her that this pasta has an abnormal amount of protein in it.
I measure off two portions by hand, and the texture feels off, each strand looks like it has been covered in some sort of powder, making the colour appear more bland than i am used to. D says the more yellow the pasta is, the more terrible the quality is. He taught me things i am not willing to exchange for a story, and i trust him that this pasta could be worse. The protein is the deciding factor though, it has been since I have come back home to a familiar fear that I am losing my hair.
A few years ago, I was standing in a chipping bathtub of a St. Petersburg kommunalka (a Soviet apartment with an endless amount of rooms each occupied by a separate family unit or a random person with one shared bathroom and a spacious kitchen), running my hands through my hair repeatedly until I felt the squeak of cleanliness against my pruning fingers. The bathtub was almost humiliating in size, deteriorating walls around it draped with colourfully patterned rags.
With each pass of my fingers, a worrying amount of hair would come out. Worrying enough for me to start counting the individual hairs by hand until I hit the threshold of the average number all humans lose throughout the day (from fifty to a hundred, if you are curious). The moment I did hit the threshold and still had more strands to sift through, I would start weeping out of despair, incapable of acknowledging the fact that I was not eating enough. Each second that wasn’t filled with my first out-of-uni office job would be crammed with a blooming obsessive-compulsive episode.
After yet another incident of counting a hundred hairs one by one, I walked up to the mirror, still wet, and lifted up my newly trimmed bangs to be met with something unfamiliar. My scalp was covered with a noticeable layer of yellowish dead skin. A pang of embarrassment hit my chest, i knew exactly what had caused it.
When i was around 14 years old, i begun anxiously picking at my skin. What started as a need to eject a clog from every single pore on my face has turned into my hands wandering into my hair and searching for spots with uneven dead skin to scratch at. That had jump started a vicious cycle: I would scratch, it would scab, it would be more satisfying to rip off, it would scab and over and over again. As I am writing this, my finger hovers over one such scab. I am doing everything I can to not separate it from my skin.
Sharing this ignites the need to have a cigarette. Oddly, I never feel that way as I watch the TikToks that crack open a specific disappointment you experience when you lose a freshly picked scab in strands of your hair and fail to examine it with a sick satisfaction. I usually just huff out a weak laugh and feel normal. Not now, though, and not then.
What was looking back at me in the mirror was the physical effect of my inappropriate brain chemistry. It awoke a particular kind of fear in me. How easy it is to pretend that a thought can be confined to a skull. Just like I pretend that my jaw does not crack every time I carelessly fling it open or that I do not rely on nicotine for emotional regulation. What I’ve learnt is that most of adulthood is pretending until it becomes too unnerving to do so. Which is why I booked an appointment with a dermatologist that same day.
Nervously shifting in a chair of a doctor’s office i expected the worst, i always do when faced with any kind of authority. Do doctors count as authority? Either way i braced for a look of disgust on the face of a woman i was paying to tell me whether i was balding. I had my excuses apostilled with DSM5 and ready to go. Yet, as i listed them off, she softened. She was never hardened to begin with, but i could sense a switch. She took a thoughtful pause before sharing her own experience of medicalising her suffering, which i no longer recall the details of. She was trying to relate, telling me through her own bared struggles without saying the actual words: “i was there too. touch it (the feeling). there is no need to be scared.”
She examined my scalp with a ridiculous piece of technology that zoomed in on every follicle and revealed the severity of my condition. Not balding. Although i did critically lack protein and iron in my blood tests, reducing the amount of hair per follicle. It turned out to be a fungal scalp infection. I must have introduced it through one of the many wounds i opened up with my nervous fingers. At the end of the appointment, before i managed to get through the door, she stopped me.
“If they ask at reception what you saw me for, don’t mention trichology, they will charge you more. Dermatology is fine.”
I was grateful to her. Grateful to the animal in her for seeing the animal in me. She had shown me compassion i yearn to grow inside of me, and pick when it is ripe, and hand out to people around me, and watch the juice of it drip down their faces as they bite into it unapologetically, hungrily, as I did that day.
Now, whenever the skin picking cycle reaches its peak, and i suffer the consequences of flaky skin pieces nestling themselves in my hair, i buy the shampoo she prescribed to me that day. And i think of the animal in her to soothe the one in me.