One of my stims is biting my fingers, especially biting & picking at the skin near my nails. For some reason my brain processes the type of pain it produces as a good sensory experience so once I've broken skin it becomes hard to stop messing with the injured spots.

After a lot of effort I'd gotten kind of good at redirecting to other stims to avoid getting to the point of breaking skin in the first place. But recently I went on a really long car trip and because I didn't ask for help when packing I forgot a lot of stuff including my stim toys.

A lot of the stims I do that don't require a toy of some kind are hard to do with limited space, like in the back of a totally full car. So I ended up biting at my hands a lot and getting them pretty torn up.

That alone was really frustrating because I had managed to let them heal almost completely before that, and now they look all fucked up again. But what's worse is that I can't stop now, I keep finding myself picking and biting at them and frequently drawing blood. Redirecting to other stims doesn't work consistently because none of them create the kind of physical sensation that biting & scratching at the injured spots do. And that's the stimulus my brain seems to want.

I just hate my hands being so visibly messed up. I know I should probably be more worried about stuff like infection (had a similar stim cause one in the past) but honestly I just feel really self-concious about my appearance. I feel like my autism makes me unattractive both physically via stuff like this and mentally via stuff like bluntness & disorganization.

I finally had a win with letting my hands heal up and now I've lost that and can't seem to get it back.