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Shedding Skin - Confessions of an Itchoholic
Episode 4 (out of 10) - Conspicuous A.K.A High School Part 1
Subheadings with durations
Colourblind (6.05)
High School (7.00)
OCD (4.17)
Cate’s OCD (5.39)
Religious Allergies (5.58)
Bodies (5.10)
Nipples (1.42)
Teenage Relationships (2.03)
Steve (0.38)
Running (2.58)
Shedding Skin - Confessions of an Itchoholic is my memoir of growing up with a body that was not east to inhabit. It will be released an episode each week for a few months. Citing neuroscientists, philosophers and modern-day poets (rockstars) and exploring the 90s popular culture that shaped me (its music, movies and video games), Shedding Skin is a rollicking, humorous ride of self-analysis about the confusion and alienation of growing up with chronic health battles, the disorientating effects of coping mechanisms (like alcohol and drug dependencies), and my eventual flailing attempts to understand how to live a deep life whilst struggling with new parenthood.
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Shedding Skin was long listed for the Richell Prize for emerging writers in 2023.
Chapter 4 – Conspicuous (High School p. 1)
Try to be different
Well get a different disease
Seems it's in fashion
To need the cold sore cream
Yeaaaa-aaah I'm a freak, Of nature
Yeaaaa-aaah I'm a freaaak
If only I could be as cool as you
Freak by Silverchair (1997)
Sung by Daniel Johns,
Colourblind
When I tell people I have red-green colour blindness (like roughly 8% of all men and 0.5% of all women), they invariably point excitedly at something, like the green leaves of a nearby tree, and ask:
“Does that look red to you?”
There is no easy way to explain to them exactly what the colour of the leaves looks like ‘to me’. I can use words to explain their green-iness, such as “those leaves look green”, but they are just words. Whatever colour is seen by whoever’s eyes, the brain containing those eyes has learnt one word to describe it – green. Does my green look the same as your green? Of course not. The colour is filtered through my specific biology, but this is not easy to comprehend. Without the impossibility of others seeing the leaves through my exact eyes (with my specific mutated and deficient cones causing my colour ‘blindness’), any differences of interpretation of the colour are simply the processing of sense data in our respective heads.
Neuroscientist and Author Anil Seth in his book Being You speaks to our experience of colour being “phenomenological”, meaning the greenness is no more true than the leaves being 'ugly' or 'old'. Colour is the “subjective phenomenological aspect" of the surface of the leaves "having a particular property”. (31)
Basically, colour is a subjective experience, it doesn’t exist out there in the world fully formed and then register equally in our heads.
The colour-blind scenario is a perfect analogy for how much we cannot easily know another person's experience, because as Anil Seth continues in regard to the subjective, phenomenological nature of perception in general, “this applies far beyond the realm of colour experience, it applies to all perception”.
Imagine for a moment you could ‘see’ the world through the entire physical and mental scape of another person and how the physical reality of their specific body and genetics and the mental reality of their specific mind would change everything that you perceive. You would be ‘seeing’ the world ‘through’ their particular and uniquely individual traits, beliefs, desires, expectations, values and morals, feelings, compulsions, cravings, frustrations, memories, and cultural programming (learned patterns of thought and behaviour). It would be quite the trip to inhabit another person’s perceptions for a day, Being John Malkovich style.
We can’t, however. We get ourselves, all to ourselves. As Glennon Doyle puts it ‘Me and myself: We are till death do us part.’ This one life of this one person. We could have been somebody else if another sperm had reached the egg, or if something else had happened to any one of our ancestors along the way, but it didn’t, so we are exactly and precisely us.
Our lives are experienced in ‘first person’ view – an inescapably subjective and relativistic phenomena. Life is happening to us, and we are processing it through our singular set of biology (our body and brain). Fortunately, we have the important human trait of empathy, which is a sort of mental ‘model of mind’ that allows us to imagine what another person’s experience is like, but we can only metaphorically, not literally, walk in their shoes.
If I have no idea what anyone else’s nervous system feels like, it stands to reason that I should have a great knowledge of what mine feels like. No one should be able to come close to the mastery that I have in knowing what it is like to be me.
There were periods of time however, great epochs of my life, when I could only experience my life as a never-ceasing first-person event, and I didn’t have the faculties to self-reflect and break that first-person stranglehold. I was simply reacting to confusing forces that felt larger than me. In childhood, almost all forces are larger than us. It’s possible, as was the case for me, to have very little mastery in knowing and understanding what it is like to be ourselves.
This brings me to my high school years.
Much like my mutated cones presented to me my own personal version of green and red, the reflex of embarrassment and shame that I had long ago developed to hide my diseases from the external world became my first person cocoon, a fundamental, subconscious part of the way I experienced my life as a teenager, especially as I waded through the muddy waters of high school.
I was becoming evolutionarily adapted as a master at concealment. Which, it turns out, is the opposite of acceptance.
The author and addiction specialist Dr Gabor Mate explains how we take our past hurt and roll it forwards into the future, creating our lives through the filter of our suffering. “The long-term distortions” that challenge presents “induce in the way a developing child will continue to interpret the world and their situation in it. All too often these ill-conditioned implicit beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies in our lives. We create meanings from our unconscious interpretation of early events, and then we forge our present experiences from the meaning we’ve created. Unwittingly, we write the story of our future from narratives based on the past.” (32)
High School
I went to St Peter's Lutheran College for the 5 years of my high schooling. At the time there were 1500 students attending this gigantic University sized private co-ed school in Indooroopilly, a suburb of South-west Brisbane.
St Peter’s was always referred to as ‘the college’ (not a school) as a grandiose attempt to gesture towards its monolithic size and desired sociocultural stature. All students wore a formal uniform with blazers, hats and ties and very specific socks with very specific rules about said socks. If your socks happened to fall more than an inch or so down from just below your knees, you'd be lining yourself up for a detention. If you were outside and not wearing your hat, you'd be lining yourself up for detention. If your tie wasn't done up fully to your neck and neatly under your collared shirt, you'd be lining yourself up for detention. Wearing your sports uniform outside the school grounds? Detention. Untucked shirt whilst waiting for your train after school hours? Detention. It was unclear to me how the strictness in relation to uniforms translated into the healthy development of growing minds. In this way, St Peters was no different to any other private school – incentivise certain behaviour by enforcing punishments for disobedience.
The weight of the strictness and the arbitrary nature of the rules they deployed at the college, the way our behaviour was corralled and incentivised, and the mind-numbing repetition of the seemingly low-resolution instructions on how to behave as humans was too much for me to ignore. I felt the low-level hum of oppression vibrating though my pale skinny body in the first week of high school, and it never truly faded through the long, exhausting 5-year journey to graduation.
It wasn't my intention to exist in opposition to the ways of my school and I certainly didn't set out to become bitter about it because I really loved high school, felt reasonably open minded and didn’t consider myself a whinging pessimist. I had a cynical streak, sure, and was ever vigilant for hypocrisy (which I found in every corner) but I was willing to allow myself to be positively altered by school because I enjoyed learning and for the most part loved the social environment it provided. I had some terrible teachers, and I had some life changing ones, and the balance ended up being about right.
Nevertheless, here I was, attending one of the finest private schools that my parents hard earned money could afford, all tarted up in my Akubra hat, a starchy collared shirt and grey shorts with a formal black belt pulled tight around my meagre waste to ensure the entire enterprise didn’t collapse off my skinny frame, very much struggling to make sense of it all.
It was the certainty again. The rules. Like a scarred knee that prevents a leg from stretching out flat - the rigidity, the restricting inflexibility.
My cultural allergies raged as the formality, and the etiquette, was drilled into us. This was a way of signalling to others - society - of our ‘betterness’ (which isn’t a word, but seems to perfectly describe the elite striving). “The way you act is the way you are. And the way you are is civilised. Ordered! Obedient!”
A legitimate question could be asked if any of this is even true- as in, unquestionably drilling into confused children strict rules of etiquette and formality makes them better people. (Maybe it does, I don’t know.) It wasn't just that we were presented with 'here are the set of norms in our community hence this is how we do things’, it was 'these things are the *correct* ways to do things'. And if things are not done this way - there will be consequences (like expulsion and being cast out of the community – which you are paying for the privilege to access lets not forget), but more importantly, you will be a lessor person in society! It's a claim to the top spot of human hierarchy - your etiquette shows how morally virtuous you are.
I do get it – there has to be rules. There has to be enforcement. There can’t be chaos. I simply couldn’t access an understanding of any of this at the time.
To navigate this overwhelmingly huge social landscape I resolved early on to deploy my ‘primary survival technique’ which was to make myself comically indispensable, so satirically razor sharp that I could cut through any awkwardness with lightning speed before anyone noticed my defects.
“If you can make people laugh, they will like you” my brain seemed to intuit. This technique largely worked – that and of course eternally hiding the truth of what was happening with my body.
I used to wonder if all teenagers were chameleons like I was, shape shifting creatures collecting (and rejecting) other people's views as they move through different environments trying to figure out who they are whilst avoiding the pitfalls of social ostracisation. High school, like navigating allergies before it, felt like a video game, a bit like Donkey Kong. We were all scrambling up a maze of academic and behavioural ladders and ramps, ever more exhausted, our goal to commandeer and best the tyrannical culture at the top of the hierarchy (in the shape of an angry gorilla), all the while leaping over (and smashing into) the barrels of social humiliation, teasing and endless comparison that were relentlessly hurled at us.
Back at home, my sister was more of an enigma to me that ever. Gone were the days we would endlessly browse the video store shelves together before rushing home to watch Indiana Jones and Last Crusade, Flight of the Navigator or if we wanted to freak ourselves out, The Dark Crystal, spilling our big bowls of popcorn all over the place. Gone were the times she would play The Bangles Eternal Flame to me in her bedroom, prancing around as we jumped up and down on her bed laughing. She was in senior school, and was becoming, to her own admittance, completely obsessed with boys - which meant her annoying, scrawny little brother had become, well, just that.
My sister lived in the room next to me in our house, she was right there. But I missed her.
Couldn’t we go back to laughing our asses off at Weekend at Bernies and rewinding over and over the bit in A League of their Own where Tom Hanks says “You can all kiss my ass, that’s right, kiss my big hairy ass.”?
There was no going back.
OCD
At some point during my high school years, I developed, what felt like a split personality. This is a perfect example of the ‘long-term distortions’ that Gabor Mate referred to. This was not a medically diagnosed personality disorder by any stretch, and no one even knew about it but me, but it was my own subconscious mechanism to survive in my body during this challenging period of adolescence and puberty.
I would build myself up during the school day, whipping myself into a happy energy, laughing and joking with my mates, thriving on social interactions with a sort of unnatural manic energy, all the while trying to ignore what was coming just down the road - the facing once again of the chaos of my body and the obsessive thoughts it created once I got home.
Every night I would sit in that chaos, trying to ‘control’ and ‘obsess’ my way through, whilst having my ego and sense of self ground into dust, crushed repeatedly. Then each morning, once I'd processed the pain of showering and putting on my lotions and creams, I'd suppress that chaos and emerge into a different version of myself - a version that was completely unable to hold my physical state but was at least able to interact in the social world. My home didn’t feel safe, purely because it was the place that I had to face my body. School was a great escape and I genuinely loved it, yet it was a faux sense of reality because I constructed a version of myself that relied on the biggest concealment of all – keeping secret from my friends what was really happening to me.
My obsession started as a natural desire to 'tidy up' and clear away any dry skin and scabs in order to exert some control, however futile, on how the skin appears. Oh, the endless hours of picking scabs. This was the only response I could muster to its ultimate control over me with its explosive reactivity and the immense power of the itch. Eventually there was a point where I couldn’t even think of my skin without the intrusive desire to obsess over it emerging – so I would have to block any thoughts about it completely for a time (like during school hours) to avoid being seen obsessing out in public, before eventually collapsing back into the compulsive scratching and picking (home time) for hours once again.
It’s impossible to recognise how unusual it is to be obsessing over yourself in this way unless you can somehow reframe your actions in comparison to someone who isn’t experiencing obsessive thoughts – and this is very hard to do by yourself because as we’ve seen, it’s not possible to step out of your own mind into someone else’s experience. Your obsessiveness is subjective, like colour-blindness, it happens to you, and it is not easy to comprehend it from within the obsessive entity.
You cannot see the green leaves through anyone else’s eyes.
Perhaps this is why OCD is such a sleeper mental health issue. We struggle to stop ourselves from obsessing, we think our thoughts are just the normal way of things, and even when we know they are negatively affecting us and we form a desire to heal, the obsessive thoughts still arrive and shape reality.
My first little compulsion, developed whilst I was a mere few years old, was running the edge of my yellow blankie (nicknamed 'blankie') along the skin through each of the 4 gaps between my 5 fingers. Blankie's edges were a bit knotted, and the bumps felt good when dragged across one of the few parts of my skin that was always smooth - the webbing in-between my knuckles. Of course, I had to drag blankie an exactly even number of times through each finger. The feeling of relief to be able to do something, take some action of comfort, however small, was something that I intuitively grasped for.
Years later in my twenties I would visit a new GP and he would spot the obsessiveness inherent in my battle with my skin and prescribe me anti-depressants. These had the effect of placing a wet blanket over my sensations, dulling some of the obsessiveness, but most everything else too. This smothering blanket garnered some relief from the obsession, but the cost of being so mentally dampened wasn’t worth it especially considering the cause of the obsession was going untreated.
Cate’s OCD
As I was writing this book my wife Cate (who I met when she was 22 and I was 23) would ‘discover’ that she suffered from obsessive thoughts during her entire childhood and young adult life. For 30 or more years she endured constant, intrusive, and negative self-talk arriving into her head as thoughts that she was worthless, that she was unlovable and that ultimately, she would be abandoned. Cate never developed any great ‘compulsions’ to go along with these obsessive thought (other than ‘people pleasing’).
When we think of OCD most of us picture people switching off lights 17 times and washing their hands frenetically. These are compulsions (actions taken) and they emerge as an attempt to ‘control’ the obsession (which arrive as thoughts), but compulsions don’t always present in people who have OCD. People like Cate have what is referred to as ‘pure O’ – the obsessive thoughts that you cannot control are the extent of the problem.
Her own ‘discovery’ that she suffers from OCD was a monumental awakening for her and helped her to understand immense portions of her life experience including large parts of her formative years that she doesn’t have memories of (loss of memory can be our bodies’ response to highly stressed states).
Hang on, surely, she knew she had obsessive thoughts when she was younger?
Surely, she was aware that they were negatively affecting her throughout the years.
How could she not, and then how could she ‘realise’ this years later?
Part of my long winded and amateur attempts at philosophy and psychology in this podcast about how our minds frame our experience of the world – and there will be more of that) until you can step outside of your own experience and frame it with a healthier perspective, until you can gain some relief from your own mind, it is simply what is happening to you. There is no ‘normal’, only what you experience inside, and your self-critical but ineffectual comparisons to others. At various points during her formative years she knew that she was suffering and that something wasn’t ‘right’, but the full extent of how disruptive it was and how it shaped her life was never going to be clear to her until she reached a point of healing these thoughts so she could more easily reflect back on and compare the unhealthy state she lived in for so long. Suffering, like any experience, is inherently subjective and the burden of it cannot be shared in many ways. In her case, this awakening required decades of healing to separate from the unwell mental mindsets of her childhood, the breaking down and shedding of the ‘usual’ patterns of understanding her own sense of self, and the rebuilding of a new, deeper connection with herself.
Anna Spargo Ryan again, on OCD. "At its worst, OCD can restrict a whole life. The obsession and the compulsion become the life. Time consuming, debilitating."
Author Penny Moodie released her book The Joy Thief: How OCD Steals Your Happiness and How to Get it Back as I was recording this podcast season, and her book has been a revelation to Cate and to other members of my family who also suffer from OCD. 1 quick quote from Penny before we move on from OCD, as I’m going to do a dedicated episode on this topic another time. This quote is the 1st line of the Preface of her book. “The only thing worse than suffering a mental illness is suffering a mental illness without knowing what it is.”
Back to the 90s: for me, the similarities here are striking, except the root of my obsession was my physicality. I want to be clear though - I did not and still don’t have OCD as I understand it via Penny’s and Cate’s experience. But I now know that the obsessions I was gripped by have similarities to OCD as a mental illness, as I was wedged in a cycle of obsession and avoidance, ignoring, and then capitulating, escaping, and then compulsing, trying to control.
I missed a lot of school, especially in the last few years of high school, because often I would wake up and the burden of recreating myself once again was too great, the energy cost was more than I had saved up overnight. I would beg and plead to my Mum to let me stay home because I felt 'sick' - even if I couldn't pinpoint the exact symptom that should prove to her that I should be absent from school, it was a general collapse into 'I can't do this today'.
A quick word on ‘School nick’ who was a constructed identity, sure, but he was funny, reasonably astute academically, he was cheeky and subversive with a razor-sharp wit and quick to drop jokes for laughs. Humour and particularly satire and sarcasm felt to me like they pierced the veil of reality, as if an unbearable force field of seriousness and formality, the heavy weight of being itself, needed to be breached in order for actual meaningful life and play to happen. It was Freud that said that jokes are a good root into the unconscious and that was true in helping me make sense of my life. I read every copy of Mad Magazine I could get my hands on in the 90s. Through the years this love of the subverting piss-take has evolved to a love of The Onion, The Chaser, and eventually The Betoota Advocate.
When I would head home, all of that constructed ‘Nick’ would evaporate, and I wouldn't know who I was. I would sit in my room, the quiet night hanging around me, the rest of my family asleep, and I would tear myself apart, physically and mentally.
The ‘outwards facing Nick’ was on top of things and doing A-ok. But he was in some ways a fraud, the epitome of the inauthenticity that I felt in others. ‘Inwards facing Nick’ regularly visited the hellscape flames of suffering and was burned in the fires there, couldn’t make sense of his life and was generally a confused person.
Religious Allergies
I don’t believe in an
Interventionist God
But I know, darling
That you do
Into My Arms, by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (1997)
St Peter’s, sorry, the collage, was quite religious as far as private schools go, so during my 5 years there my fellow students and I absorbed a large amount of religious doctrine. I am no more illuminated as to what Lutherans believe about the Bible and Jesus in comparison to any other Christian denominations (other than some sort of protestant opposition to the might of the Roman Catholic Church, but wasn’t that all of them?), despite having to sit through a full chapel service every single day for those 5 years.
We would file in silently to the huge chapel building and sit on the rock-hard wooden pews under the shadow of a life-sized statue of Jesus being crucified on the cross, and we would hear about God and we would hear of the travails of Jesus and we would hear about sin and we would hear about hell. My sister came home one day when I was still in primary school upset and crying that she had been told that she was going to hell if she didn't believe in Jesus. Tough crowd.
And we would hear that all we needed to do in order to save our wretched selves from the suffering of this life (and by gosh, the next!) was to believe in God. It was simple. Believe in God, and 'he' will forgive your sins and welcome you into the 'kingdom of heaven'.
Something occurred to me quite early on in regard to this (it was something that I wish hadn't occurred so early as I set myself up for a near half decade of mental torture by realising it) - it doesn't seem to be possible to make yourself believe in something if you don't believe in it ‘naturally’. Belief isn't something you can force per say - it's more like an organic, emergent intuition.
I would sit there day after day, compulsed with the thoughts ‘This cannot be right, these biblical stories are full of holes and these rigid belief systems seem to be built on a foundation of hypocrisy and structures of authority that my rebellious nature cannot abide!’ Every cell in my body screamed I don’t believe in this. No one would take the time to explain to me that the bible stories could be seen as literally false but metaphorically true. This simple statement, deferring to the allegorical nature of the tales of morality in the bible (or any other religious text for that matter) would have softened my growing atheist tendencies somewhat. Instead, we got bashed over the head with the literal stories and were asked to ‘believe in them’ over and over. That is why the repetition of religion grated me – it felt forced, as if to force my mind to yield and eventually ‘believe’ out of exhaustion.
The extreme focus on human sin was over the top – I already knew I was a piece of shit thank you very much so had no need for external reminders (I had my own interior voice for that). Plus, the singular salvation being offered for this embedded ‘faulty state’ of humankind to simply ‘believe in God and he will forgive you’ was a logical fallacy I could not accept – How to make myself believe in something if it was not my natural occurrence to do so? It’s not even possible to make yourself interested in something if this doesn’t emerge normally, let alone belief in something which is surely another level deeper than interest. And how to believe in a God whom if not ‘believed in’, would employ the most punitive suffering imaginable on the non-believer (for eternity no less) thereby illuminating said God as not worthy of belief in to begin with? Also, we were already suffering – would God’s punitive suffering be worse than what was already happening?
It became clear to me that the methods of indoctrination deployed by monolithic religions had some similarities to advertising – the main one being repetition. We sat in Chapel every single school day, and listened to the same stories, and sang the same hymns - themselves not much more than repetitive brainwashing devices with music as the delivery mechanism. Over and over again, the same things were said to us, a Groundhog Day experience of the same patterns washing through our little developing minds, desensitising them. This was abject torture to me. None of it promoted self-reflection or deep thought.
So I realised I didn’t have even the slightest foothold in the realm of faith, another monolithic institution I was on the outside of. I was a died in the wool rationalist, and ‘knew’ the following facts with all the certainty of a fundamental and righteous teenager – the universe was 13.8 billion years old and started with a bang, our planet was 4.5 billion years old and was created by converging asteroids. Life evolved here because of our planet’s perfect position in the ‘goldilocks zone’ (not too hot, not too cold), and eventually, humans evolved from apes via an ecological mechanism coined ‘natural selection’.
That was the story.
Much like the cold data we use to announce our newborn babies, as I wrote about in episode 1, these raw facts about the universe and our place in it ignored an expression of the magical, unexplainable essence that lies underneath. The facts I clung to for comfort neglected a sensation of wonder and awe that there was something, anything at all, instead of nothing. That I was alive at all, despite my narrow and restricting teenage-eye view of life, was a miracle of incomprehensible proportions.
People claiming to be ‘spiritual’ were as much a mystery to me as the mysteries their spirituality was attempting to illuminate to them. I wouldn’t be able to understand these people for another 20 years.
Eventually I would come to realise that religion isn’t required to gain access to divine states of awe and wonder, of transcendence of personal ego or suffering, that it can be done using the body. In fact it needs the body.
'Cause I'm just a teenage dirtbag, baby
Yeah, I'm just a teenage dirtbag, baby
Listen to Iron Maiden, baby, with me
Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus (2000)
Bodies
Speaking of bodies, if you meet a teenager and they seem mentally preoccupied, perhaps distant, often lost in thought or even moody, consider that they might be spending a disproportionality large amount of their mental capacity ruminating about very specific ‘teenager’ things, which may (as they did for me) include:
· Being petrified about the size of their particular genital endowment relative to their friends
· Being petrified that others would find out they had a strictly limited amount pubic hair
· Being petrified that no girl (or boy depending on your sexual orientation) would ever want to touch their body romantically in any way forever until the end of the cosmos
· Being as petrified that perhaps one day someone would
· Find themselves thinking about breasts an unusual amount
For a time not at all, and then suddenly all at once, bodies become socially important.
Extremely important.
How they look. How they’re groomed. How fit they are. Who is ‘going out’ with whom hence which bodies get to touch one another. They are talked about and judged and analysed and laughed at constantly. As the hormones began to flow and our awareness of our bodies increased, this seemed to increase my (already high) repulsion of my own body because I was seeing my own body much more as it was being seen by others. We all began to compare and arbitrate and compete in the dominance hierarchy of physical ‘fitness’ and attractiveness. This was yet another time that I required expert ‘fly under the radar and get the attention off you as soon as possible’ skills. When it came to bodies, ‘difference’ was the thing that sat above the ever-scanning radar beam of conspicuousness and derision, and similarity or ‘normality’ was the thing that made you invisible to this beam and safe from its gaze.
We, my fellow teenagers and I, were unconsciously searching for a bodily aesthetic, for ‘beauty’ – the same beauty that was beamed to us from the ads on our TV screens and gazed back fro the glossy pages of magazines. The thing about beauty is it can be and often is superficial, yet we are still guided and affected by it subconsciously if not explicitly. The same is true of 'ugliness'. The faintest browning skin of a fruit can often reveal the rotten core within, and we erroneously apply the same heuristic, at least subconsciously, to the human world. I felt guilty for noticing I had my own aesthetic and burgeoning judgement of the beauty of others, as if I had no right to such thoughts whilst being repulsed by my own physicality.
When your skin is ugly, it is hard not to absorb deep inside that ‘you’ are ugly, because that's what others are doing (you know this because that’s exactly what you do, to yourself and others). It seeps into your bones. You oftentimes get treated the way that you look on the outside, however superficial the ugliness may be, and if this happens enough you start to believe it.
I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the people all around me. It's perfectly plausible my friends and peers thought themselves as ugly as I did and obsessed over their own imperfections just as much. To me, they were gods and goddesses. Especially the girls, but even the boys. One of my best mates was a guy called Phil, and he looked as if he had walked straight down from Mt Olympus to play for a while with us mortals, chiselled out of marble like a renaissance sculpture. Every part of his tanned body was rippling with muscles, his square, jutting jaw, complete with a five o’clock shadow, exuded strength and he could run marathons without raising a puff.
Many of my other friends by year 9 or 10 were also broad shouldered, stubbly chinned Adonis’s with pectoral muscles carved out of stone and voices dropping octaves by the month. My body was carved out of wet tofu, my chin stubble wouldn’t appear until my late 20s, and my high-pitched voice could shatter champagne flutes.
The hetero boys (which included me) began to be suddenly incapable of not noticing the girls – everywhere we looked there were breasts and nipples and legs and buttocks and bra straps and long, beautiful, flowing hair that defied gravity and the constraints of physics.
Thank the old gods and the new for co-ed schools.
The Adonis’s began dating the beautiful girls and everyone looked on in awe at how the beautiful people deserved each other and got to flaunt their beauty and their budding sexuality to the rest of us. It’s completely plausible that by year 10 and beyond some rare ‘couples’ were involved in full sexual relationships, but for the rest of us, we could only look on and wonder what that must be like, concerning ourselves fretfully that we may never get a ticket to ride in the pumpkin carriage to the ‘midnight ball’ of having a high school girlfriend or boyfriend to simply hold hands with. Or maybe, if the planets aligned, a peck on the cheek.
Nipples
Speaking of sexy, I found myself wearing band aids on my nipples each day for the last 4 years of high school. My poor, tortured nipples would become so itchy that even a few seconds of scratching and these sensitive little nodules would become raw and weep for hours. The only method I could concoct to avoid the excruciating scraping of these knobby flesh buttons on my cotton shirts was to cover them, but the band aids would kind of ‘heal’ onto the nipple throughout the day so removing them was akin to a form of ‘Brazilian nipple waxing’ each afternoon. Stripping my uniform off once home and shedding my ‘school-Nick’ skin, I would brace myself, then tear off the strips to let my nipples dry out, harden up and heal over, ready for the process to begin again once the itch returned and more damage was done.
It’s odd that these weird flesh nubs that we carry on each side of our chests caused so much pain for me during this period - of all the things that can take your attention as a teenager, there was a lot of ‘nipple head space’ taken up in my noggin. I was becoming more and more interested in the nipples of the opposite sex (not that that did me much good), but was repulsed by my own. It wasn’t even clear to me what the purpose of nipples were for boys – other than to ‘be sensitive’, and except to make the handsome gents more manly and desirable with their smooth and inverted areolas surrounded by dark, curling nipple hair, whilst I contended with my scarring and weeping ‘protuberances from hell’. It’s conceivable that the other boys were happily and completely oblivious to their own nipples whilst mine became a full-time maintenance requirement.
Teenage Relationships
I spent time trying to understood the girls that I fancied in high school, who quite understandably didn’t fancy me back. But interestingly they always seemed to be attracted to two types of guys (neither of which I represented):
1. The type that treated them like shit, or
2. The type that consciously and overconfidently ‘tuned’ them in some obvious (to me) ploy to get in their pants
These boys, immature and naïve as they were, didn’t want relationships nor connection as much as they wanted sex and conquests. The objectification of the girls was an inherent part of that desire. I suppose the first type, the ‘treat them mean, keep them keen’ boys, were signalling their desire for someone by pushing them away, in the same way that we get angry and frustrated by what we can’t have. The second type were just testosterone fuelled players – to me no different to con men, ever sharpening their manipulation techniques to get what they wanted with no regard for the other party. Pure extraction.
Then there was me – the nice guy, the ‘friend’, the guy too puny to feel confident of physical contact and too scared to be honest out of fear of offending, getting it wrong or misreading signals that seemed impossible to decipher. Hyper aware of the possible discomfort of others, it was easier to stay quiet. More than that, I wanted a relationship, I wanted mutual respect, I desired intellectual closeness.
There was a ‘toughness’ that was lauded by many girls that I simply didn’t possess. There was an overconfidence that seemed beneficial to dating someone that I couldn’t muster. The bigger, stronger, more confident guys would of course be more attractive, I get it. But there was a conquest and objectification mentality that my low testosterone body didn’t share and couldn’t understand.
Steve
There was a guy in my grade called Steve, and he was the only person out of 300 students in my year level that also had eczema. I knew this because he got special permission to allow him to have long hair so it could hang down slightly mullet-like and cover the red skin on the back of his neck.
I took one look at his matted, dirty hair (mine was no better, just shorter) and the way he would self-consciously pull it down on to his neck to conceal his skin, and I could instantly see that the hair was contributing to his red and inflamed skin.
He was doing that thing that humans (especially me) often do - making a problem worse by attempting to conceal it.
Running
My Physical Education teacher in years 10 and 11 was called Mr Manson (scary name, scary dude). He was aware of my skin allergies and that I had permission to avoid swimming because my skin would react negatively to the chlorine in the school pool (by exploding into histamine rash). Instead of swimming, he would make me get into my track kit and run laps around the oval in the scorching sun, in the middle of the day, in the middle of summer, in 40-degree heat, whilst all the rest of my classmates would be cooling their loins in the swimming pool.
The cost benefit ratio of this activity was slumped heavily in the ‘cost’ corner.
I could either be doused in the toxic pool water disinfected by truckloads of the poisonous halogen chlorine, or I could run in the heat, doused by direct ultra-violet electromagnetic radiation cascading down onto my baking, broiling skin like my own personalised nuclear winter. Tough choice. One that was made for me regardless.
Worse than my overheating body taking hours to cool down after such activities was the fact that I was doing something ‘different’, hence poking my head up above the trench of normality and risking getting picked off by the snipers of derision. I was already missing out on classes and constantly playing catch up because of all the days I had off school. The feeling of being behind the eight ball, of not quite knowing what everyone else was ‘up to’ with schoolwork or content, and the missing of crucial social events - vital social happenings such as ‘so and so fell over at lunch time and everyone laughed’ or ‘our physics teacher sneezed and some snot came out of his nose’ - led to a feeling of me being misplaced, as if the ground I was standing on wasn’t solid but always shifting, and I was always running (around the burning hot oval of my discontent) in an effort to catch up.
This was where the two worlds I’d constructed (the school Nick that was ‘fine’, the home Nick that was ‘munted’) came perilously close to colliding. It seemed to require much metaphorical running, dodging, and weaving to keep these strands of my personality away from each other, constantly evading the ‘radar beam of conspicuousness’ each day.
Conforming to fit socially is an incredibly powerful force. Another classic psychological study, the Asch Conformity Experiments, showed that the obvious answer to a very simple question in a group setting could be influenced by a majority group purposefully choosing incorrectly. Even when people ‘knew’ they were choosing an incorrect answer, the power to conform to the group of actors designed to trick them was so big that nearly a third of the participants would conform with the clearly wrong majority in order to fit in, rather than choosing the correct answer and standing out. 75% of people conformed at least once.
Our desire to follow the crowd seems to be baked in.
There was a part of me that was desperate to be ‘normal’ and to fit in, to get ‘lost in the crowd’ of sameness, whilst another part despised the uniformity of high school and the homogeneity of our culture and was desperate for uniqueness and individuality.
Confusing polarities abound in teenage-hood.
Let’s wrap this chapter by irresponsibly boiling down this complex anthropological socialisation process into a 4-word phrase – monkey see, monkey do.
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Thanks for reading episode 4 / 10.
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Find me at sheddingskin.substack.com and on Twitter/X @nick_gilpin_
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Vids, Links and References
Click below for the page of all the links, clips and references for this episode:
S1 Ep04 - Confessions of an Itchoholic