As an
adult (well, 26, married, step son, mostly counts) people can be a bit
shocked when they realize that I still suck my thumb. Most folk don't even realize for the first year or two, if ever. In my case, the oddity of the act is mostly drowned out by my extensive collection of other personal
peculiarities.
They don't realize, for the most part, because I spent the vast majority of my upbringing learning the
fine art of
concealment. My
parents and
elder brother spent the 14
years between the ages of 4 (when he really ought to have
grown out of this by now) and 18 (well, he's left home, nothing much we can do about it now)
trying hard to
break me of the habit. Not a chance of course, an
oral fixation like thumb sucking, when you hit your twenties, is there for life. I drink the supposedly
foul varnishes that parents apply to their
childrens hands to keep them out of their mouths like
cocktails, I can get my thumb out of my mouth when Someone In
Authority looks my way so fast you'd swear it had
never been there. Mostly, people just think I like to rest my head on my right hand a lot.
So, what is the
perk? What is the
personal benefit? None, beyond that most
precious of all things, a little moment of
warm comfort that makes the world a
softer happier, more
embracing place.
Fluffy animals, moments of
intense happiness, moments of
fear and
worry and moments of
intense concentration all bring it out in me.
As a
programmer, I can only really
work with one or other hand 'plugged in', to the extent that a patch of the right hand side of my space bar is always the second
cleanest thing in my office as a result of it's constant
contact with the cleanest (I strongly favor the right hand, though in the strictest sense of the word, I am
Ambithumbsterous, being capable of deriving satisfaction from either right or left).
Is it an
addiction? Oh yes, absolutely. I am a thoroughly orally fixated person, I
chewgum, I tend to eat slightly too much, I'm an on again-off again smoker (comparatively easy habit to kick from an addiction perspective, just hard from an
emotional motivation one) and I talk too much. The thumb is just the
first entry in a long list, but it is my
favorite, the one I would be least prepared to give up. For many years I lived with a sort of all
permeating low grade
guilt about it, felt that it was '
un-manly'(whatever the hell that means) or
childish or in some way
destructive of the
moral fiber. A couple of years ago however, I had an
epiphany, I realized that by doing it, I hurt no one, myself included, and really did nothing negative, on the contrary, I made myself a happier person and nicer to be around. Once I fully
embraced that fact, I learned to
embrace the act, and at this stage, quite frankly I couldn't give a fig if people know or care (not that that changes the learned concealment
behaviors, which interestingly enough seem to be just as ingrained as the thumb sucking itself).
In terms of negative effects, the only ones I can think of are the reactions of people who spot it but who do not know the Whole
Me, and the difficulty of
unexpectedly needing to shake hands with someone when one has a
wet digit. The
buck teeth I was promised by
parents and
dentists alike failed to materialize, indeed the only
physiological evidence of my
fixation seems to be a small patch of ever so subtly
callused skin on the back of my thumb, just above the last
joint, where my lower
incisors make contact.
Well, that about covers it, I think.
Oh, no, it doesn't. I can just hear you (yes, you, you know who you are) mutter 'Huh, must be
a sexual thing, probably
latently gay' or somesuch.
I've considered this in some depth, and I really don't think it follows (well, I may be latently gay, though I rather doubt that as well. All experimentation in that direction seemed to lead to dead ends). Granted, I occasionally suck my thumb at some point during really good sex, which tends to make it better, but it isn't in and of itself a sexual activity, perhaps a catalyst.
Existential MSG, only without the carcinogenic nastiness. Taken in isolation, there seems to be no direct sexual stimulation that I can detect. Obviously, being
breast fed, it is perhaps oedipal at some level below that which I can perceive, but I would even rather doubt that. (I can however do things to
nipples that would make some in the audience
shiver in a
delightfully
thoughtful manner.
Perk of the
vice I suppose)