(mani)Curing My Pandemic Blues
I can pinpoint the exact moment I became obsessed with having long, perfectly painted nails. I was maybe 10 years old, and I was watching The Blues Brothers for the first time. There’s this perfect scene where Carrie Fisher, a “Mystery Woman” who works at a salon called “Curl Up and Dye,” is painting her impressively long nails fire engine red as she casually flips through a manual for a flame thrower, careful not to smudge the fresh paint. If you’re not familiar with the film, (spoiler alert!) Fisher’s character is Jake Blues’ (played by John Belushi) jilted ex-lover, hellbent on literally killing him in the most violent way possible for ditching her without warning before the film’s beginning.
As soon as I saw this scene, something inside me flipped. I was determined to one day have nails as beautiful as hers. The only problem? I’d been a chronic nail biter from the moment I figured out the little bones in my mouth could rip apart the keratin disks on my fingertips. I convinced my mom to let me buy all kinds of nail polish whenever we were at the nearby Rite Aid and learned how to badly paint my nails on my own, experimenting with cheap fake nails and French manicure kits and cute little nail stickers.
On weekends, I would paint my nails red and imagine I was a woman scorned as I gingerly leafed through whatever book I was reading, pretending it contained instructions on how to blast the shit out of a shitty fake ex-boyfriend with a flame thrower.
But they never looked like Carrie’s.
Since the pandemic started, I’ve spent a lot of time alone. I’ve been working from home since the first week of March 2020 and haven’t seen my family or any non-local friends in over a year. This may come as a huge surprise given the circumstances we’ve all been in for the past twelve months, but I’ve spent most of the last year more anxious, depressed, and burned out than I’ve been in years. So, naturally, I’ve been biting the absolute shit out of my nails. Sure, there were a few weeks towards the beginning of the pandemic where I really let them grow out of boredom, only to get tired of how they looked without me shaping them in any way, or freaked out by how they felt tapping on my keyboard and phone, both of which I’d become Gorilla-glued to for eight to 10 hours every day.
Something changed this fall, though. I started buying nail polish again, in colors that felt as cozy and elegant as Fisher’s nails looked to a pre-teen me. In the past, I would simply scrape off polish in order to soothe my often-crippling anxiety with my favorite forbidden snack, but I found that suddenly, having paint on my nails deterred me from incessantly gnawing on them like a dog with a new bone. Reader, my nails were growing! Like, a lot! I started painting them regularly, trying out new colors and staring at my hands in awe when I should have been doing literally anything else.
This didn’t last forever. After a particularly bad mental health week at the end of December where I said, “Fuck it, give me a keratin treat,” and bit so much that my fingertips hurt for days afterwards, I decided enough was enough. I was going to stop biting my nails.
And I did.
Now, after almost two months of not biting them, my nails are long enough for me to shape into little round points. I paint them at least once a week. I even bought a nail art kit from Ulta that I’m honestly still intimidated by, but I’m determined to learn how to turn my newly healthy nails into works of art one day.
I know that breathing in all of these toxic fumes is probably going to do something bad to my body one day (Did you know most polishes and removers have formaldehyde in them? I’m just starting the embalming process early, baby!), but there’s something incredibly therapeutic about learning to care for a specific part of my body, especially one that I’ve spent most of my life mutilating. Every week, I get to wipe away the previous week’s polish and start over. I base my color selection on what kind of mood I’m in, or what kind of mood I think I’ll be in for the rest of the week. Sometimes it’s nice to wallow in my bad feelings and paint my nails inky black (it also looks sick, let’s be real). Other times, I know I’ll need a different kind of relief that only an opalescent pastel blue or a bright coral pink can provide.
There’s something incredibly therapeutic about learning to care for a specific part of my body.
Maybe this sounds crazy, but given everything that’s happened in the past year, I’m okay with taking solace wherever I can find it. Right now, that happens to be in growing my nails really, really long and painting them once or twice a week. I also trim my pandemic bangs whenever I’m in an anxiety spiral (that’s a whole other essay, though) or have a glass of juicy red wine and an edible from Massachusetts while I take an overly sudsy bubble bath or bake vegan treats for my boyfriend and I to enjoy at the end of these seemingly endless days.
I might get tired of this new coping mechanism soon — like a lot of people, I got way too into baking bread for a few months last spring and haven’t baked a loaf in months. But right now, I’m grateful. I’m grateful that I’ve kicked a legitimately gross habit (fingernails are so dirty???), and that I’ve found something to keep my head just above the water in what often feels like a constant and relentless daily flood that would normally inspire God to ask some dude with a big beard to build an arc and save some animals.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m still losing my mind in isolation. Like basically everyone I know, I’ve hit the dreaded pandemic wall at full speed in the last few weeks. But pretending I’m Carrie Fisher casually painting her nails in a short scene in a movie about a bunch of reckless dudes in a blues cover band helps.
It really helps.
