- With social media, we're able to make our lives
look however we want them to.
Whether or not it's actually true,
we can feign happiness and stability.
So I'm here today to look behind the handle once again
on someone you probably already follow
to tell you something about themselves
that you probably don't know.
This time, Ashly Perez.
(haunting instrumental music)
- Hi, I'm Ashly Perez.
I used to work at BuzzFeed for five years
and now I am producing and acting freelance.
I do a lot of videos about being awkward
or not feeling comfortable in my body.
Mainly scripted comedy videos that are very physical.
So I would say I was known for
being a more comedic person online.
- [Interviewer] What do you think people take away
from your social media when they look at you?
- It's interesting because my social media's
kind of different everywhere.
My Twitter is half Baltics, half jokes,
and then my Instagram is like, here's the hottest
that I ever look and it's on Instagram
and there's not much humor there
unless you're on my story, and it's just my cat.
And then my YouTube presence is
very funny and silly and open.
I think in general, people probably take away
from my social media that I am a very happy person.
Part of being a public figure is needing to find the balance
of what is private in your own life.
People have scrutinized truly every single part of my body
down to the veins in my hands.
As a layer of protection, you start curating
what you want the audience to see versus letting them
comment on every single part of you that's real.
So at any given point in time,
even though I'm being honest about
what has happened to me in the past,
you probably only know 60 to 70%
of what my actual life is at that moment.
- [Interviewer] What we're talking about today,
how many people know this about you?
- I have cumulatively probably a million followers
on social media and less than 10 people in my life
know what I'm about to talk about.
- [Interviewer] Why is it so few?
- It's just so personal.
It's like the most personal thing in my life.
It's weird to talk about something and know that
a lot of people are gonna see it,
because even if only 10,000 people watch this video,
that's 9,999 more people than have ever heard this before.
I've done so many videos but it feels
a little bit unsettling.
I can't believe I'm talking about this.
It's definitely not in the media, and so I just felt like
I must be the only one going through this and this is
like a shameful little secret that I have and so
only my absolute best friends and family know about it.
I've talked about struggles with mental illness before.
I've talked body weight issues.
I've talked about not feeling sexy,
but for some reason I think because this seems so weird
and specific, I've just never talked about it before.
I'm tired of not talking about it and I know
that there are gonna be people who watch this video
who do the same thing and will be seen and
I want us to have less shame and stigma about it.
This is 100% the most private thing about myself.
So you know all of this about me,
but there is something you don't know about me.
I have Trichotillomania, which is a hair pulling disorder.
The beginning of my hair pulling, it just started one day
and it didn't stop for like 10 years.
One random day in college, I found a scab on my head
and I started picking at it and I kept picking from there.
I was really concerned with wanting my head to feel smooth,
so I had this tiny little bald spot.
Wow, this feels so familiar, this feeling.
I had this tiny little bald spot
and I would just feel like this.
And I could feel the tiny, tiny little hairs growing back
and those would bother me so much that I would spend hours
trying to pick them out until my head was smooth.
When I would pick my head, I would go into kind
of like a trance-like state.
I would always have terrible headaches and migraines.
Sometimes I would start bleeding.
It would be debilitating,
but it felt impossible to not pick.
A lot of the relief is from the actual pulling
and so no matter how much I would hurt myself,
once I pulled a hair, it felt so relieving
that you kept doing it.
But another thing that I had to do was take pictures of it.
I have hundreds of pictures in my camera roll
of trying to get a closeup picture of my hair
because since I couldn't see it, I was obsessed with,
what is the thing that is bothering me right now?
I remember one night staying up super late
with just the flash on trying to get the right angle
and I was like, maybe I can turn on my phone,
stream it to the TV so I can see it
and set up the camera in a way...
And then when you realize what you're doing,
you feel insane and it feels like,
how have I gotten this bad?
You do feel sad too that you can't beat this thing, I guess.
It's pretty easy to hide.
You know, I'd be leaning up against my desk
or just like this, but really what I was doing
was picking my head.
I was always sure that everyone knew, but no one knew.
Sometimes I would wear hats if it ever got like bad enough.
It was always a little bit alarming
being around taller people.
My bald spot was at the top of my head so truly,
unless you were taller than me,
there was no way you would naturally see it.
It was always super embarrassing to get my hair cut
and when she would slick my hair down,
my little Alfalfa hairs or the hairs that have grown back
would stick right up and she'd be like,
what's going on here?
And I feel like she must have known.
I think people are just afraid to talk about these things,
but I would lie and say that,
oh, I hit my head on the cabinet,
the straightener burned it and so now I have a scab.
I would just make up all these reasons of why.
It's kind of like the same thing of
smelling to see if you have deodorant on.
It's pretty impossible to tell right now that I could be
picking my head, but that's what I was doing.
My friends had no idea that this was something
that I was dealing with, but afterward it was actually
really hard to go from being a completely isolated person
to then having my three best friends know about it
and then being on my case about it.
They were just trying to help me,
but it wasn't with the help of an actual therapist,
people just trying to have good intentions
and being like, don't pick your head.
It's crazy to say to anyone who has a mental illness,
don't be depressed, don't have anxiety,
don't pick your head, because if it was that easy,
then I would have done it.
In my brain I was like, oh yeah, don't pick my head.
I just need to have as much willpower as possible
and every time I failed I felt like I was just a failure
or didn't have enough willpower because no one
was even talking to me about the root causes
for this kind of disorder.
It was treated by me and my friends and family for so long
like it was a bad habit.
The best way I would describe what my hair pulling
feels like to someone who hasn't had a similar
obsessive compulsive disorder is,
if you're ever at home and it's really quiet
and then all of a sudden a fly starts buzzing around
and you can hear it, and as much as you want to ignore it,
you can hear it and it's following you
and then you get up and you try and find it
and you go crazy until you can kill that fly
or get it out of the room.
I think that's just the beginning of what an
obsessive compulsive disorder feels like.
Sometimes I would have peace for a couple days
because I would get my hair pulling to a point
where I was satisfied with it,
and then all of a sudden here come 100 more flies
and I can't deal with it again,
and it's just as annoying as when there was one fly.
I started getting a little bit of tennis elbow,
carpal tunnel from the repetitive motion of
picking at my head because my bald spot is up here.
If you go back into old BuzzFeed videos,
you can actually see me picking my head.
It was so out of control that I couldn't even stop
for the moments that I was on camera.
I was picking my head like every 30 seconds probably.
- [Interviewer] When you're looking to treat hair pulling,
how did you treat yours?
- Whoo!
The treatment is the hardest part, honestly.
The first part is recognizing that you have a problem
and that it actually is something that
needs to be addressed and treated.
For me, it was really hard to recognize that I
had a mental disorder because I had had
histories of mental disorder in my family
and I always just saw this as so much less than that,
that I was like, I don't have a mental illness,
a mental illness is, that's crazy.
It's not this thing, but it was 100% a mental illness.
I met with three different therapists over my lifetime,
but it was never just for hair pulling.
Hair pulling was a larger part of a symptom of a
lot of stuff I was dealing with and it was weird
because I felt like, well I'm here to tackle
my hair pulling, I don't want to deal with my whole life,
but you really kinda have to deal with
the holistic version of yourself.
The third time I went to therapy,
which was the most helpful in terms of my hair pulling,
I was also dealing with coming out
and so I stopped going to that therapist
because I didn't want to admit I was gay
and then that stopped me from dealing with my hair pulling
and my hair pulling kinda got worse and worse.
And so when I finally came back and I was like,
okay, guess what, you were right, I'm gay,
which my therapist was like, yeah,
I was able to fully address the issue head on.
One of the first thing we tried was replacement therapy,
which meant instead of picking my head,
I would pick at something else.
Lots of different textile things, kinetic sand,
my girlfriend got me these magnets that I would play with.
I wore gloves at one point,
I had a pair of gloves in my car and at home.
Another thing that I tried, this medicine.
My psychiatrist said that OCD is one of the
hardest things to treat medically.
I took Lexapro, but then it led to other side effects.
I had to go on Wellbutrin and before I knew it,
that made me not feel like myself.
What often happens is cognitive behavioral therapy,
which has been the only thing that's been helpful for me.
Cognitive behavioral therapy means a lot of things.
I personally have tried 10 to 15 different strategies
to see which one works for me.
I had to figure out how to change the behavior
of what I'm actually doing, putting my hand up and down,
and then change the mental state behind it.
So the thing that was most helpful to me,
basically every time I pick my head
because I couldn't stop doing this,
when I was aware that my hand was up there,
I would have to stop, leave my hand there,
breathe in and out,
think about what was making me anxious,
take a second and only when I was ready, put my hand down.
And even that is so relaxing.
I feel more relaxed than I've been this whole time.
Problem is, one and a half seconds later
my hand was here again and you couldn't just skip
and be like, oh well, I already did my thing.
You had to go...
(deep breathing)
Over and over and over again until your body
starts to unlearn the behavior and your body
starts to become aware of what you're doing.
So I had to start keeping a journal.
When am I picking my head?
When am I picking it the most?
How long am I picking my head for?
Is there other things that are making me anxious?
It was this slow, terrible process of elimination
that took so long for progress that seemed so minute,
but just like it started, it very much felt like
the first time I stopped picking my head,
that just one day I stopped picking my head.
But I think it was because I was doing so much small work.
After the first time that I got better,
I had about a year clean where I didn't relapse.
And then I had a scab one day,
started picking and picked for probably another six months.
The one thing that really helped me this last time
was just putting a tiny little butterfly clip in my hair
right there and it looked ridiculous,
but it stayed so well that I couldn't move it
and every time I'd put it up there,
it made me immediately conscious of the fact
that my hand was up there, and that was the most
helpful thing for me in terms of stopping my hair pulling.
Once you know what works for you,
tell the people who love you, what works for you so that
they can remind you specifically what you need to do.
Sometimes my girlfriend would catch me and be like,
do you want to take a breath right now?
In a very easy way that wasn't shaming me,
that wasn't making me feel bad.
It was like, oh yeah, I do want to take a breath right now.
Thank you.
Take a breath, and be done with it.
It's not always dark and always evil
and always this thing that will bring you down.
Even when I was getting better, the experience of
having my little hairs grow back and my Alfalfa's,
I was so proud of having it.
I would be like, look, my Alfalfa's are coming back.
Oh my God, my hair, and it was comical.
My hair would stick up like this,
but it felt like such a big win.
It did feel like a hard thing that I went through,
but it didn't change who I was fundamentally.
Because mental illness is something that we think of
as such a bad thing, we often try to just not show it
or not talk about it, but that's the most destructive part.
Creating a culture of shame where we can't talk
about it and because it's harmful, we don't talk about it,
gives it so much more power.
- [Interviewer] So how does it feel
now that you've talked about it?
- This video is gonna be online and everyone's
gonna know this thing about me or a lot of people.
It feels weird right now because I don't know
what the response is gonna be.
Part of me feels so much relief in just talking about it
and so I would encourage you guys too,
you don't have to go through this alone.
In fact, you absolutely shouldn't go through this alone.
I wanted so desperately for it to be something
that I could fix myself, but it is a mental disorder
and you need help.
It doesn't make you a weirdo
and it doesn't make you an oddball.
It's just a normal thing that there are people
and professionals who can help you,
and that if you stick with it,
you will get better eventually.
- [Interviewer] I think that's great.
- That's all folks.
Man, I need to pee.
(laughing)
- [Interviewer] Cool, let's go ahead and cut.
- [Ashly] Cut.
- [Interviewer] For more information,
resources and support groups for Trichotillomania,
check out the links in the description below.
There are people out there who want to help you.
You got this.
(upbeat music)
- Hey!
Unsolved is on a new channel and now your part.
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That was my part.