We hung out at my younger brother's place, and they were picking on me. I have a habit of twirling my hair. Now, since Sept.28/00, I've twirled my hair to shape it into the locs I have 2years and 8 months later. Some idiots declare they're extensions, "a weave", and that's one way to provoke a black woman to violence. I call it grooming, whenever I'm twirling, although I might take offence if someone told me to "go away and twirl". Sometimes I dont' realize I'm doing it. It's become an absent-minded habit, like biting one's nails or something. I get this rush in my torso near the tail-end of the act. I was accused of being neurotic "or something", like they were hoping I'd confess or reassure them I wasn't. Ah, what do they know? You explain things to people and they give you some pat answer, belittlingly so. Yeah, go on about what bothers you when you try to go to sleep at night and any answer they tell you is to tell you that you're fretting over nothing. I hate telling my family any personal crap. I'd rather keep it all bottled up than share my neuroses with them so I can be mocked/belittled/shunned into seclusion. I love them all, but I don't like confiding in people. I don't feel any better. Even having volumes of diaries hasn't guaranteed a vanishing of my worries and fears. So, I'm a private twirler, unless I zone out and I'm doing it on a bus, at a mall, at church, in my sleep and being struck by people treating it like nose-picking.