How I stopped biting my fingernails.

When I was seventeen I went to France on this France trip with a bunch of other French-speaking high school kids. It was a school trip for three weeks, and we toured all over the place and ate French food and did French stuff and it was really fun and amazing.

Up until then, from the time I could reach my mouth with my hands, I would chew my fingernails down to my nubs, down to the quick, so they'd bleed. I would nibble furiously, uncontrollably. I tried to stop, but failed.

My mom got this gross stuff when I was a kid and painted it on my nails. It was just stuff that tasted bad and didn't wash off well, so it discouraged kids from biting their nails. I can still taste the stuff if I think about it. It didn't help. I grew to like it, nasty and terrible-tasting as it was.

Why do we do these things to ourselves? In France, after two and a half weeks of whirlwind adventure, back in Paris again, I remember waking up one morning and realizing that I needed to cut my nails. I asked one of the girls in my room if I could borrow her nail trimmers, and then I asked if she had any tips on how to cut them. She was like, why? And I realized, it was the first time I'd ever actually cut my nails, in my whole life.

Why did I stop biting my nails? I don't know really. The dramatic change of scenery and environment and the sense of disorientation. Maybe. I realize there are the things that happen, and there are the things we say to ourselves afterwards about how shit goes down. On some level, even the narrative is a kind of lie. How I quit biting my nails is I went to France. It doesn't sound real when I say it like that, because it's just the truth rubbed raw of all those other details that might muddle or muck it up. It's why I say the key to a good story is omission. But I don't know, and never have known, if this is a good story. I don't really think it is. There's a moral in it somewhere but I'm not sure what it is and I'm not interested in telling it, and maybe that the only human interest it's really got. That and it's true.