Day Nine

Today wasn't great for me either. I was working today as well and had a lot to do so got a bit frustrated. I'm not here to make excuses though, it just didn't help me much.

Long story short look at this
                                                             

I picked at my nail and I can admit that. But I stopped myself from picking or biting it off. I waiting until I was home to use nail clippers to fix it. 

That obviously doesn't mean that I didn't do anything wrong because I know I did. I just didn't do the worst thing I could've done, and I held on and told myself to leave it be. I, surprisingly, was able to. I had that broken nail for hours and it was tempting me so much but I didn't let it get to me. 

So although it wasn't a great day for my confidence, I still didn't bite that nail. 

Day Eight

19/09/2015


I'm not too sure about uploading daily pictures anymore. I still take pictures for me to have, but they've reached a stage of not really looking any different on a day-to-day basis. Instead, I was thinking of uploading pictures every 2-3 days. It made more sense to me, and meant I wouldn't have to spend as much time getting the pictures onto my laptop.

I was working yesterday, and I actually remember this as being a really tough day for me. It just seemed that my nails had made no improvement, and they seemed really ugly to me. They were really dirty and fragile looking after my shift at work and I had to clean them with a nail brush before taking a picture of them because they were a state. I really just felt hopeless about my nails yesterday. 

In my mind I can no longer imagine having long nails. I can't imagine getting to the stage of being able to wear nice nail polish, because my nails are so short right now. I've done this before and it doesn't take a genius to know that nails don't suddenly grow long as soon as we stop biting them. But I found pictures of the last time I stopped biting my nails and I was shocked. I didn't even realise how serious I had been about it. I don't remember taking daily photos and stressing over how long my nails had gotten, but I did take pictures, and I didn't do too badly.

 

These are dated 21/06/2015.

After seeing these on my phone I was shocked. And I couldn't help but imagine how long my nails would've been by now if I hadn't have failed and started biting them again. That was three months ago and here I am with short and weak nails. I just started feeling like a failure and that was hard.

Day Seven (One Week)

I've hit the week mark now! Feels good :)

I was in the house all day yesterday binge watching TV programmes and drinking tea so I didn't have much to stress about. I kept my hand cream and oil etc. beside me and used them throughout the day. I keep noticing how much nicer my hands feels from the constant moisturing. Of course, my stupid fingers are still crooked (those basketball years destroyed my poor hands) and my knuckles still do my head in, but they look nicer to me in general.

 

















I've still got a bit of black on my thumb nail from where I tried on my black nail polish because I couldn't get it off with nail polish remover and couldn't really be arsed putting in more effort so it's there until it goes away on its own.

My thumbs seem to be growing so slowly, but I know that when they do grow they'll have the longest nail beds and be the strongest. So I just need to be patient with them. The same goes for my peter pointers. These four nails are also the nails with the most natural shape. They aren't ski slope nails which is great. These fingers don't have a weird shape at the end, which makes the rest of my fingers take on a...bulbous shape. I don't even think that this is something that can be fixed. Sad times. It's my fault which sucks.

It's a nice feeling making it to a week and it makes me excited for when I can write about hitting two weeks, a month, two months etc. I'm getting ahead of myself but it's just one of those things that happens. When you reach a week of nail growth and can see free edge and a (slightly) lengthening nail bed then it's impossible not to plan ahead to a time when I can wear nail polish, rings, tap my nails on a table and hear the nice tapping sound, look at the palm of my hand and see nails peeking over the top of the tip.... the lost goes on.

Waiting to paint my nails

I ordered nail polish from ebay like a week ago and it finally came today.

I had seen so many nice pictures of matte nails on instagram and pinterest, so decided to get some for myself. I got really excited when it came today but I only tried it out on one nail. I know from experience that during early stages of growing my nails it's better to take care of them by rubbing all the crap into them and massaging them and figured that if I painted them then they'd miss out on it and get damaged by the nail polish. Devastating. I know it'll look nicer on long nails though, and until my nails have reached the tips of my fingers then I don't want to wear rings or nail polish. 

I don't know how long it'll take for my nails to reach that length, maybe in a month I can wear it, maybe it's more. I don't know at this stage. But it's nice having some motivation and something to look forward to. I've started creeping all these lovely nail designs on instagram and wishing I could do them. So when I'm able to paint my nails and have them look nice (rather than scruffy, which is how they would look if I painted them now) I can go ahead and try out my different nail polish. I've needed black nail polish for yonks but because I bit my nails I never really painted them. I just ended up picking it off and it came off really quickly.

I remember a few months ago (while I worked in a different shop) I painted my nails for work and was amazed at how long nail polish could last when I used a base coat, top coat and most importantly, when I kept my hands away from my mouth. It was just so much nicer to wear and it didn't chip for a while, which was nice. It's almost pathetic how many times I've tried to stop biting my nails when I think about it haha

I stopped in January when I went through a pretty emotionally intense time when things ended for definite with the most amazing guy. I guess I just wanted to show myself that he may be able to change, but he wasn't the only one who could. I wanted to grow my nails and exercise more, or do some meditation and yoga. I failed completely. Not that I've ever gotten to see him again, so I suppose it was a private defeat for me!

I also stopped because my boyfriend (who I started dating after the guy mentioned above btw) said asked me to rub my hands up his back while we were cuddling - nothing iffy don't worry, and he was like "use your nails" and I was like...well damn cuz I don't have any! I kept that up until I was able to wear nail polish but then I started biting again while I was in Amsterdam with my (now ex-) best friend and another close friend.

It's like an emotional rollercoaster with my nails!

Day Six

16/09/2015

Aaaand after this I will be caught up! I'll be taking pictures of my nails tonight but don't know when I'll write that entry. We'll see. Probably tomorrow actually because I'm not working til Saturday. Phew!

Bad news about yesterday :( I was on fitting rooms yesterday in work so I got a bit fidgety (again). I ended up picking at (but not biting) my thumb nail. When I got home I had to cut it a bit and I could see that the surface looked a bit damaged because I had picked a thin layer off the top. Pretty disappointed in myself. It's not as if I slipped up big time and bit my nail short, but I might as well have. Stuff like this is how I end up properly biting again. 

On the bright side, I didn't do anything to harm my other nails, and I didn't damage any of the nail bed or shorten the pink bit.

And there's my wee thumb nail. You can see that it's slightly layered at the top from me picking at it. As you can see, the length hasn't been greatly affected but every time I slip up I feel really disappointed in myself. It's all part of the journey I suppose. As long as I learn from it and try not to be so fidgety next time. Usually when I get fidgety I apply coconut oil or hand cream to me nails and massage it in to turn fidgeting into something that's good for my nails.

Uploading pictures on this site is driving me crazy. It takes ages to align them correctly, and then sometimes they looks crooked or uneven when published. Please forgive me for this, I never publish anything without making sure the pictures are aligned, but when I go to edit uneven ones they appear normal until I view the post :(

Day Five

15/09/2015

Nothing special happened on this day to do with my nails. But I had started taking pride in the nails on my right hand because the free edge had really grown. It's only day five and I can see an actual physical difference in my nails. To be honest, I felt a bit stupid documenting my nail growth on a daily basis because nails hardly grow. I'm not sure there's a huge difference (if any) between single days, but the difference is visible between every couple of days. I can obviously notice tiny differences on a daily basis, but that's because they're my nails and I see them constantly throughout the day.

 Apparently bitten nails grow slightly quicker to protect against more damage, like the damage they sustained from being bitten. As I've been biting my nails since I was wee, it doesn't surprise me that my nails may grow quicker than others. Poor nails :(

If I could give any nail biter a piece of advice, I would tell you to take care of your hands and nails because you do actually think twice before biting nails that look (or even just feel) healthier. And taking pictures of your nails every night isn't a bad idea either. Just like I used to take pictures every couple of days or every week when my nails were long, doing it when your nails are short doesn't hurt either. It means that if you start biting again then you have pictures or healthier and longer nails to look at to remind yourself that you're capable of stopping, and even if it takes several attempts (like it's taking for me) you can get there in the end.

I know I sound like I've totally kicked the habit or even sound patronising, but it's just my way of getting this stuff written down and published online for myself and others to see to motivate myself to keep at it.

 






































I think it was a good day this day. The free edge is definitely lengthening. I've been pushing back my cuticles and still moisturising my hands and nails religiously. I carry coconut oil with me in a mini travel tub (the ones for bringing stuff onto aeroplanes) when I'm out of the house, and use it before and after work. I wish there was a way for me to use handcream during work, but I don't work in a shop like Lush or The Body Shop so can't sneak some haha maybe next time!

Day Four

14/09/2015

This day was a challenging one. I was fidgeting at work and two of my nails started breaking, and it took all of my will power not to bite them off. You can (vaguely) see the photos that the middle finger of my left hand and my thumb on my right hand have broken nails. I am proud to say that I managed to get through my four hour shift at work without biting or picking at these bad boys!

Instead, I waited until I got home and then cut them with nail clippers. Praise the lord. Was pretty proud of myself for being able to do that, because all nail biters know how hard it is to ignore a broken nail and not pick or chew at it.

The nails on my right hand are still doing better than those on my left, but I suppose I'll just have to accept this and take that into consideration when judging my nails.

I took these photos when at night time when I finished work, had dinner and had had a chance to watch True Blood and drink tea...so the flash was needed. The flash makes my nails look shinier so that's a plus. It makes a lot more sense to me to take pictures of them at night because the day will have ended and I can see what effect the day had on them, and I don't want to take a picture in the morning or afternoon and jinx things by being too positive about them...we don't want to tempt fate!

So how did I feel about my nails that day? Pretty good actually, I didn't even really mind that two of my nails had to be cut because I knew that cutting them evenly and with nail clippers was much better than biting at them and making them uneven or jagged, which could lead to more breakage.

Day Three

13/09/2015

It feels weird to be writing these all in one go. I wrote notes on the back of pictures to keep me right and to help me remember any highlights of the day to do with my nails, so I'll just have to rely on those.

 

I began to see a clear difference in both hands. The nails on my right hand were doing much better than the ones on my left, and I'm not really sure why this is. The left don't look that different from the way they did on day one, but I can see the growth of the ones on my right hand. 

However, I could see that on some nails there were light pink lines beginning to form just below the free edge. I've grown my nails before so I know that this is the nail bed lengthening. Maybe it's from applying so much handcream and constantly massaging my nails with oil and gel, but this happened sooner than I expected. I took a picture to try to show yous, and it worked well when the image was bigger, but not so much when it got flipped round and put on here. This was on my left hand, which shows that even though I'm not seeing much growth on the free edge, it's not as if nothing is happening.

Day Two

12/09/2015

I don't know why, but for some reason I saw a lot of progress after just one day of no biting.

I was really impressed at how quickly my nails seemed to have grown in one day. After using so much handcream (Poundland's finest), the Sally Hansen nail gel I mentioned in my last post, and some coconut oil, I felt like my nails were a bit more...moisturised I suppose.

They're still obviously the nails of a nail biter. It'll take a long time for them to look more normal, and I know from experience that we're not talking days here. We're talking weeks and months. And then I'll have to wait for my nail beds to (hopefully) sort themselves out. But this is the sort of thing that can only be done day by day, step by step. Aaaaargh I wish I could fast forward to when they're long. My gad.

Day One

Soooo I've been busy with work and as I didn't finish before 9pm each night (retail problems lol) I didn't get to update this blog on my nails' progress.

Even though I haven't been writing here everyday, I've been taking pictures on a daily basis, and I'm going to show yous (yes, that goes out to you, the two people who viewed my previous post haha) how I've been doing.

So here is my post for the 11th of September, 2015

 



































So this was my first day of not biting. The reason I decided not to bite anymore was mostly because of my two thumbs (and the till). I had bitten both of my thumb nails so that the free edge on the nails were in a straight line, which meant that I had caused the pink bit to shrink and separated the nail from the nail bed. It hurt to type and lift stuff, and the straight line made my nails look really short and weird. I was working on the two worst days they hurt, so couldn't take a picture on the first day when I bit them short, but the ends were red and looked painful.

I applied coconut oil and Sally Hansen VitaSurge Strength Gel, but as I was applying them I'd remember what it was like to apply them on my long nails that I had bitten, and it felt weird to have so little surface area to work on. At this stage I remember doubting whether I'd be able to keep it up or have the motivation to do so because it seemed kind of pointless or hopeless to try to grow such short, ugly and damaged nails. Don't get me wrong, they're not the shortest nails in the world, and I had a lot worse nails when I was younger and I wouldn't even have any free edge. The tip of my nails would be jagged and layered because they were freshly bitten, and I'd have a lot of rag nails from having them in my mouth so much. But as I mentioned in my previous post, I'd been stopping and starting growing them for a few months, so they weren't at their worst...thankfully.

The dreaded post...

I'm not going to lie - I've been dreading writing and publishing this post from the moment I decided to start blogging about my nail biting journey. The reason I've dreaded it is because this post is about my previous attempts at growing my nails. Any time I started growing my nails it was something personal and private - I didn't tell anyone I was doing it and when I failed I was the one who dealt with it alone, with only memories of my the nails I'd grown in my mind. And over time these memories would fade and I'd end up with thoughts like, "well they didn't get that long" or, "they didn't even look that nice".

Fortunately for anyone reading this, I took pictures documenting my nail growth back in 2013/2014. My formal was in the November of 2013 and I started growing my nails in the September of that year in the hopes of having longer nails. I ended up wearing fake nails anyway because they weren't long enough to do a french manicure on by the time of the formal.

I decided to keep growing them because I had already done a month and a half and didn't want my efforts to have gone to waste.

Soooo without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, I'll show yous my nail growth. The first picture was taken on 15/11/2013, and the last ones were taken on 12/02/2014.

They make me sad :( HATE HAVING TO WRITE IN THE PAST TENSE FOR THESE

15/11/2013

In less than a month they had grown to this length:

07/12/2013

07/12/2013

 Less than a week later they seem to have grown even longer than I thought they would have

12/12/2013

12/12/2013

Another week later:

20/12/2013

20/12/2013

By January they were so long </3

02/01/2014

02/01/2014

02/01/2014

The two pictures above show you the way my nails grow when they get long. I have short nail beds, which means that the pink area of my nail is quite small and starts high up on my fingers. This also means that when my nail grow, the free edge gets really long and looks a bit weird on short pink bits.

I also have (self-inflicted due to nail biting) what are known are "ski slope nails". This means that when the nails grow they grow at a slope and slope upwards. It gets more obvious as the nails grow and I hated it. I didn't cut them to hide this because I thought that I had stopped biting for good and that this would sort itself in time.

What I wouldn't do to go back and keep them long. It hurts to think of what they'd look like today, two years later. Aaaaargh I hate myself.

Ten days later, we are here:

12/01/2014

12/01/2014

 Haha throwback to when I did Irish A-Level translations about George Best <3

Also, I know that my nails were too long at this stage. Maybe I was tempting fate, maybe I was getting too cocky about my long nails, but I just couldn't bar to cut them. They look weird with so much free edge, but I promise that they looked good with nail polish!

Now for the final set of pictures :(

12/02/2014

12/02/2014

LOOK AT THEM

They're so long! By this stage the ski slope nails didn't seem so bad. Seeing as I stopped biting in September and the last pictures were taken in February, I made it to 6 months.

SIX MONTHS. My god.

After February things started to get a bit stressful for me. I was preparing for A2 exams and having to watch my granda waste away due to illness. So I guess it just wasn't my time to stop biting my nails for good. But I made it to six months, and loved the way my nails looked super long (by my standards, no judgement pls) with nail polish on.

I also have quite short fingers and growing my nails out made my hands look so much nicer and really elongated my fingers. Right now I'm determined to get back to nails like those because I bought rings online that I'm dying to wear! I'm thin so rings never really fit me, but I found midi rings online and BOOM they fit...not as midi rings, I have to wear them as regular rings but still, I want to wear those when, and only when, I have pretty hands to wear them on. I also bought matte black nail polish and need to wait until my nails are long to be able to wear it.

And so, I'm blogging about it because I don't want to have those pictures on my computer as a constant reminder of what I'm capable of, and not try to do it again.

I hope you'll join me on my journey to long nails and be able to see the results when I'm able to paint my nails, wear nice nail polish, and not feel embarrassed by my ugly hands while working on tills.

I'm also sorry for any frustration caused by my nail pictures and the fact that I started biting again... please bear with me :)