Cut your fingernails into picks?

[Feral Feline]

Nobody showed me how to hold a pick, so instead of just thumb and index, I use thumb index and middle — feels natural and makes sense to me because the triangle-ish shape of most pics lets you get both the index and middle on there.

However, I got into a bad habit of also scraping my middle finger across the string, it kind of lets me know where everything is, a tactile thing. Alas, the roundwounds then thin out my middle-finger's nail, like paper-thin, on the ring-finger side. At first I thought I just had a weird genetically lop-sided thin nail, but eventually realised it was just my weird tactile-picking technique. So...

I don't get how people can use their nails without them getting chewed up by the strings; I must have weak keratin...

 

[HamishR]

Oh my nails are hopeless! They break easily and the back of my index fingernail goes thin and starts to curve upwards because of hitting the strings. Fortunately I mainly use the middle and ring fingernails as the index finger is holding the pick. But my ring finger is currently growing a nail back after a breakage.