The Secret I Carry: On Being a Frum Woman with Trichotillomania

There is only one time the entire month I need to see my bald eyelids. And that is at the mikveh.

At all other times, I have an enormous amount of eyeliner on. My glasses sit over my eyes, and I walk through the world hoping no one notices my lack of eyelashes. I've convinced myself of this quiet fiction — that the eyeliner is thick enough, that the glasses are a good enough shield — because I have to. It's the story I tell myself every morning when I reapply, and every afternoon when I reapply again, and every evening before bed.

Nobody looks at me and thinks: she's suffering from a mental illness. That's the thing about trichotillomania — it hides. It hides under eyeliner, under wigs, under thick headbands, under the perfectly ordinary face I show the world. And once a month, at the mikveh, it can't hide anymore.

What Trichotillomania Actually Is

Trichotillomania — trich, for short — is a compulsive hair-pulling disorder, an impulse control condition categorized under Obsessive Compulsive and Related Disorders. It frequently occurs alongside anxiety, depression, or ADHD. It can manifest in pulling from the scalp, eyebrows, eyelashes, or anywhere else on the body — and often crosses over into skin picking, especially as ingrown hairs develop over time and the picking follows to try to remove them. Some people eat the hair they pull. Most people have no idea this condition exists until they're already deep inside it.

It exists on a spectrum. There are two main types: automatic and conscious. Most people with trich are automatic pullers — they're watching television, and suddenly there's a pile of hair next to them that they didn't even notice accumulating. I am a conscious picker. I know exactly when I'm doing it. I am fully aware, in real time, and I am filled with shame and self-disgust the entire time. And still, I do it.

I've had trich on and off — majority on — since I was ten years old. I am now forty. That's 30 years of this. I have tried every treatment available: conventional psychotherapy, EMDR, CBT, hypnotherapy, One Brain, and medication. Nothing has worked in any lasting way. There is, as far as anyone can tell, nothing proven to cure it. I've been in online groups. I've spoken to many people who live with versions of this. Every story is different. Every person pulls differently, conceals differently, grieves differently. What's consistent is the secrecy — and the exhaustion of it.

It's the secret I wake up with and the secret I go to bed with.

The Architecture of Concealment

My pulling is confined to two places: my bathroom and my bed at night. The bathroom because I keep eyeliner there — so after I pull, I can reapply immediately and walk out looking like nothing happened. The bedroom because typically my husband and I don't go to sleep at the same time, giving me a private window of forty-five minutes while I read. I'll sometimes start with finger puppets on — a harm-reduction trick — but eventually they come off. The urge is too great.

I tell myself I won't do it this minute. This hour. This day. This week. But the need overwhelms me. There is a release that comes with pulling — a physical and psychological ease that washes over me the moment I pull — and I cannot explain it to someone who hasn't felt it. I don't expect people to understand, just as I don't fully understand other compulsions. But to tell me to simply stop is like telling someone with any addiction to simply stop. 

For me, the pull site is my eyelashes. I am completely bald on my upper eyelids without eyeliner. My husband has never seen me without it. My children haven't either. It is kept with absolute, exhausting precision. Even people who know about the condition — and very few do — don't know the full texture of it. In that sense, I know my illness more intimately than anyone who loves me does.

The concealment has practical limits. I can't swim around other people. I can't be caught off guard in a situation where my eyeliner might come off and there's no way to fix it. I am constantly calculating, constantly scanning for risk, constantly managing the perimeter of my secret.

What It Means to Be a Frum Woman with Trich

There's a particular texture to having trichotillomania as a religious Jewish woman that doesn't get talked about.

For many frum women with trich who pull from their scalp, hair covering is both a halachic obligation and — quietly, privately — a relief. A legitimate, socially accepted reason to cover exactly what they're hiding. I know women who wear thick headbands every single day. People assume they're being extra tzanuah, extra frum. I know the real reason. For those women, the mitzvah of covering their hair is also, unexpectedly, a mercy — a built-in cover for a secret they never asked to carry.

I don't have that. My pull site is my eyelashes, and there is no frum equivalent of a sheitel for your eyelids. There is only eyeliner — applied thickly, reapplied constantly — and the story I tell myself that it's working.

I have lied about this. Directly, straight-out lied, in different contexts, to different people. You could argue it's a private medical matter and I owe no one an explanation — and you'd be right. But the lying isn't neutral. It adds another layer to the architecture of concealment that structures my daily life. It becomes part of who I am in the world: someone who manages, deflects, covers, and occasionally invents. That has a cost.

Shabbat

When I first learned the laws of Shabbat, something shifted in me — and not in a good way.

I realized that pulling hair is a melacha, forbidden on Shabbat. And applying eyeliner is also forbidden on Shabbat. Which meant that if I pulled on Shabbat — and I do — and then needed to cover it up the way I always do, I would be violating Shabbat twice over.

I have been mechalel Shabbat in this area since I was ten years old.

I want to be careful about how I say this. I try harder on Shabbat. Sometimes I succeed. I don't wear a full face of makeup — no foundation, no lipstick. This one thing, the eyeliner, is not about vanity. It is about managing a mental illness in the only way I know how. And yet I know the halacha, and I carry the weight of that every single week.

The harder truth is this: there are Friday nights where I need to pull in order to fall asleep. If there is one tiny stub of a hair — barely even an eyelash — and I can feel it, it has to come out. I cannot sleep knowing it's there. I've gone downstairs at midnight to get a tweezer and remove one hair, just so my brain would go quiet enough to let me rest. That is not a choice. That is a mental illness. And the guilt of it, layered on top of the exhaustion of it, is its own particular kind of suffering.

The Mikveh

If Shabbat is a weekly reckoning, the mikveh is a monthly one — and in some ways, a more intimate one.

For most frum women, going to the mikveh is an act that involves vulnerability — undressing, being seen, immersing. For me, it involves a very specific, carefully choreographed emotional negotiation that begins well before I leave the house.

I prepare at home. I keep my eyeliner on until the absolute last possible moment. I arrive at the mikveh still wearing it. The only thing I remove there is my eyeliner — and because I apply it so heavily and reapply so many times throughout the day, it takes a very long time to get off. Layer after layer of the thing that's been protecting me, scrubbed away under fluorescent light.

And then there are those few minutes — three, maybe five — where I stand in front of the mirror and look at myself without it.

It is horrible. I am filled with shame and anger and embarrassment. But I try — I really try — to be kind to myself in those minutes. To not pass judgment on the face looking back at me. I just look, and breathe, and accept.

I don't make eye contact with the balanit. I was taught, in my Haredi kallah classes, that after immersing you're meant to look at the mikveh attendant — to see something tahor before encountering something else. I was taught I had to do this. So when I avoid her gaze — looking down, looking away — there's a voice in my head saying: you're not doing this right. You're not doing this right. Which spirals directly back into everything else I feel standing there with my naked eyes.

I think about whether she notices. I think she probably doesn't look that closely. But without eyeliner, my eyes are unmistakably bare — completely bald on the upper lids — and the balanit is the only person in the world, other than me in that mirror, who ever sees it. It makes the encounter weighted in a way I suspect she has no idea about. When she gives me a bracha at the end, I should be looking at her, meeting her eyes, saying amen with intention. Instead I'm looking at the floor, willing the moment to be over, thinking only about getting to my eyeliner to cover my secret again.

And yet — and this is something I've only recently started to sit with — there is something unexpectedly significant about it too. I hide so well, so constantly, in every other part of my life. But because I am a frum married woman, once a month, I am forced to face it. Literally. I cannot pretend at the mikveh. Every month, the mirror shows me the truth that I spend the rest of my time concealing. And while that is painful, it is also the one moment where the hiding stops — not for anyone else, but for me. It is a forced reckoning, and maybe, on some level, a necessary one.

What I Want People to Understand

I am not weak. I am not vain. I am not someone who simply lacks self-control.

I have a mental illness that is invisible by design, maintained through enormous daily effort, that I have lived with in nearly complete silence for twenty-six years. The religious dimensions of it — the Shabbat violations I carry quietly every week, the mikveh experience I both dread and somehow need, the lying, the calculating, the constant management of a secret that touches every corner of my life — add a layer of complexity that I have almost never seen spoken out loud.

I await the day I will be free of this. In the meantime, I keep applying eyeliner thickly, even on Shabbat, and especially on a Friday night when I need to go to the mIkvah. But I keep showing up to the mikveh. I try to be kind to myself in those three minutes when my secret is visible, when the mirror shows me everything I spend the rest of the month hiding.

And I try to remember that once a month, being forced to see yourself — really see yourself — might be its own kind of grace.