Funny girl/ Regular GirlieGirl Army Contributress Daiva Dupree shares her picky past;
When I was 8 years old, I was so stressed out by my parents’ divorce that I started compulsively picking my nose. Yep, you heard me correctly. I didn’t say, “so stressed out that I got into trouble at school” or “so stressed out that I stopped speaking”…nope, I said “so stressed out that I compulsively picked my nose.”
Someone actually had to take me to the doctor because I kept getting “nosebleeds.” Technically they weren’t nosebleeds so much as episodes of extreme over-picking, but they didn’t know that, I was a very private picker. Well, private until halfway through 3rd grade when my addiction grew so strong that I started picking my nose in Mrs. Watson’s class. I tried all sorts of techniques to keep from publicizing my picking to the other kids, especially the popular ones. I was absolutely not one of them, and the last thing they needed was more ammunition. So I’d fake yawn and fake sneeze and follow it up with a fake cough…anything to get my fingers within picking proximity to my face. Now, when picking your nose, there’s the action, but then there’s also the result. There’s a certain product one procures, and you have to figure out where to put it. I couldn’t put it on my desk because that was too obvious, and belonged too specifically to me. The carpet, however, was open territory, and it was there that I decided to deposit my DNA. Of course, for this, I also had to employ some sort of technique, so I dropped my eraser, scratched my ankle, and even sometimes…as a last resort, performed a sort of chair-to-floor-ballet-arm-stretch.
Eventually, I put an end to the picking, but not because I was caught or made fun of…I stopped because one Friday night, while trying to fall asleep, I was gripped with terror. Oh. My. God. WHAT IF, THIS WEEKEND, A BOOGER TREE GROWS RIGHT NEXT TO MY DESK!?! THEN EVERYONE WILL KNOW WHAT I’VE BEEN DOING! All weekend long I imagined the boogers sprouting and then growing into a giant, pale booger tree (everyone knows that booger trees grow at a very rapid rate, and would totally be full grown by Monday morning). I spent 3 sleepless nights imagining the principal and the janitor trying to chop it down, while everyone stared at me and Mrs. Watson wrote my name on the blackboard.
Monday morning came, and thankfully the booger tree did not, but my insane imagination scared me straight and I never picked in public again. I had to deal with my stress somehow though, and with the picking gone, I had only my terrifying imagination to keep me company. My parents didn’t have to do anything; I was the most well behaved little girl in Naples, Florida because I lived in a constant state of self-induced panic.
After a few months, in Mr. Reitz’s gifted class, my love for a boy named Max Major eclipsed my obsessive compulsive rule following and I threw caution to the wind and doodled “MM+DD” in pencil on my desk. I felt free and dangerous for about 5 seconds and then gripped by my usual terror, quickly erased my desperate doodle. Not only was I SURE that Max Major had somehow seen my love letter from across the room, but later that night…tucked into the bunk bed I shared with my baby brother…my imagination climbed the ladder and crawled into my top bunk. What if someone goes over the desk with a lead detecting light sensor and sees traces of my vandalism? I was momentarily mollified when I remembered that the now damaged desk belonged to several different students. But then…WHAT IF THE CIA (everyone knows the CIA makes frequent trips to elementary school gifted classrooms to check for suspicious activity) FINDS THE REMNANTS OF MY ERASER SHAVINGS AND TRACES THEM BACK TO MY PENCIL!?! I had images of men in dark suits and sunglasses dragging me out of school and then interrogating me in some horrible jail cell. “WE KNOW YOU LOVE MAX MAJOR, LITTLE GIRL! WAS IS WORTH IT!? WAS IT!?” I spent many sleepless school nights trying to think up a story for why I had to do it, but never came up with one that I thought was sufficient.
Luckily, like the booger tree, the CIA didn’t show up…although 6 months later, when my Great Aunt pulled up next to me and offered me a ride home from the bus stop, I was sure that either the government, or a group of high-tech killer kidnappers had made an exact replica of Aunt M.L.’s face and high-pitched Kennedy voice. I respectfully refused the ride and anxiously sped-walked home checking behind me all the way for other replicated relatives. To this day Aunt M.L. congratulates me on what an intelligent 8 year-old I was. ” I had my big sunglasses on,” she says, “I was probably hard to recognize, and you were so smart not to accept a ride from me.” I’ve never had the heart to tell her that I totally recognized her; I just thought she was a robot built by people who wanted to steal me.
I am older now, and my paranoid imagination is no longer quite as elaborate, but it is still alive and well. I have been known to set intricate booby traps in my apartment when my roommate is out of town, cry in my seat because I’m sure that I’m going to fall through the floor of the airplane, and call or email friends frantically to make sure I didn’t offend them when I made that joke at that party. And most nights you can find me in bed, wide awake and worrying about whether or not I said thank you for the drink that someone bought me, or if my phone dialed my friend while I was complaining about her, or why I didn’t stop at one bagel, or if my ex-boyfriend and his family know how much I loved them, or if I was wearing enough lip gloss at my audition and why did I say, “Hello,” so weirdly when I walked in, and are you sure that guy can’t see how many times I look at his Facebook page?….wait…did you hear that? That is definitely a robber.
I picture myself like a crazed stressed out version of the “Zippity-Doo-Dah” man, only instead of cute and cuddly cartoon animals, there are masked murderers, CIA agents, weirded out guys, disappointed casting directors, and ninja robbers following me around. Recently one morning, a fella I was friendly with, jokingly called me a head-case. I laughed, rolled over, and winked at the CIA guys who were pressing their fingers to their earpieces and whispering into their sleeves. The ninja robbers and masked murders stopped conspiring for a moment to look at us, and the booger tree said, “Dude, you have no idea.”
Love always,
Daiva Deupree is an actor, writer, and part-time wedding planner who lives in NYC.
