It’s not been a good day, I managed to type just that before I start crying. From that I want people to understand how painful hair loss can be, I only wrote “It’s not been a good day,” and the tears poured out of my face, and all at once I’m flooded with emotion.
It’s been so long so long, well before 2022, that I had these feelings to contend with… like this. After I started wearing wigs in 2012, I cut my hair short to an edgy cut that looked like a choice, though it was for functional purposes to look fuller, hide the thinness, see less of the fall and it made wig wearing easier. I adapted. Fully adapted and I lived my life mostly free of hair loss for over a decade.
Getting a second hair loss last year has truly devastated me in what words probably never ever fully capture. It’s disbelief, of how lightening can strike twice, how I could have had to struggle so much in my life with this, then find my way, and then been thrown this, another type of hair loss, one that changes everything I did from the wigs that I wore, to no longer being able to have that short hair cut that I accepted and felt okay in.
Many people don’t understand I lost the frame of my face, the way my hair line used to be, the one thing female pattern baldness never took was these little baby hairs on my forehead, they didn’t help much of anything other than being my trademark thing I saw, since birth, and what felt like me.
I was beyond in disbelief when they left last year. I existed for over 2 decades with female pattern baldness having mercy on me by allowing me that one part to keep, even when the hairline thinned and did move back some, but last year that didn’t just leave, the temples grew so thin and the sides blew out. Pictures never obviously seem to capture what I try and express since I seem to have no shortage of dismissive comments at times. If I had any other choice, I would never have shaved my head.
So dealing with that was hard, literally watching my hairline crawl back and at rapid speed, and the massive thinness caused my head to look misshapen. With any length on the strand my hair looks freakish and so I shaved it off, that was still the hardest thing I have had to do in my hair loss life, and also the most necessary and right thing for me to do, but it isn’t like I just shaved it and snapped my fingers and rode off into the sunset with ultimate peace for the new beginning.
This was painful. This IS painful to have to accept, and I’m doing better and I do go out in my shaved head ALL the time, even restaurants, I show up online this way for two reasons 1 ) Seeing other women that did this for hair loss reasons truly helped me to do this for myself, and if this (my situation), can help another, I’m all in. I have been since 2007 in sharing my story, and 2) While I anticipated I would receive dismissive comments, I definitely didn’t anticipate them to the level I did receive, and I didn’t really foresee how gutting it would truly be, and in order to break myself free to be OK in all aspects, I just do it.
I’ve done it so many times now to where I am comfortable doing it, that doesn’t mean this is my preferred look, it just means I spent a long ass time in therapy for anxiety, and learning the ways of exposure therapy practices to get out of fear and anxiety in certain situations so I could live my life more comfortably.
So what was it about today? I had an idea of a reel I was going to do, but it required an older photo, so I had to go scrolling through my album, way back in many months of 2022, and I have hundreds an hundreds of photos of just the evolution of my devastating loss. I would take pictures almost every night to just torture myself I suppose, to confirm it truly was as bad as I thought, and it always was, but in seeing this I also saw myself with hair. Sure it was still degraded, recessed, thin, terrible and creaturish hair, but hair still, and I felt the pain of not having that again. HAIR of any kind. Forced into a shaved head because that is by far the better choice, but knowing I can’t get back to Feb 2022, which was 23 years already with female pattern baldness, that’s gone. This is my reality now.
I didn’t expect this, it was beyond out of the blue so it’s been hard every step of the way to accept a second hair loss, watching my hair erode in ways I cannot describe, see the pain in my face of the photos I took, it’s like my soul left my body, I just look dead in the eyes. Lost.
In shaving my head, I almost nearly instantly reclaimed so much of me back, but this IS still a process, this does still hurt me, I don’t want to have a shaved head, that isn’t the me I want to see, but it is the me that needs to be to live with hair loss, so I am adapting and evolving again, but there are some days like today, that it just hits me hard. I also struggled today in the fact I cannot even shave my head they way I want to, as frequently as I want to, because I have a sensitive scalp, and am apparently prone to folliculitis, I’m partially terrified now each time I do shave, that my head will explode again in pimples all over. I took 3 weeks of Doxy, along with other things to treat the scalp disorder created by shaving. This is just a series of unfortunate events. I shaved my head last Monday and made a YouTube video of how I was needing to do it now, I showed the process, you can watch it here.
In 1999, at the age of 21 I thought my life was over before it began. I thought I could never live with hair loss, it would take many years, but I learned to, I accepted, I embraced wigs and I found me again. I know I’ll adapt fully, I have faith in that and I believe in my strength and ability to evolve, but this is a process.
Lastly, I did have other surrounding emotions about this today, that tied into this. This also happened after my father died Feb 2022, and there was a series of many unfortunate events that occurred for me 2022, that I believe played a factor in getting a second hair loss, and so having this reminds me of all of that as well.
Much Love
Y
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