Healing. Allow yourself time, in all this to cry, to be upset, to accept the unexplained emotions of chaos at times, to scream, to meltdown. Allow yourself the ability to grieve. Within that have hope that this moment can pass from beyond the pain of which you are in.
It can.
Don’t allow others to rob you of your feelings, to make you feel less than or vain, or stupid for feeling downright devastated by the loss, a loss that I don’t think anyone can comprehend unless it’s happened to them.
I took this picture and I see my age – Drier skin, wrinkles, the dark circles I always had since I was born, raccoon eyes. The signs of aging doesn’t bother me, I’m 45. What bothers me is that I lost so much of life to hair loss, 13 years really spent in a deep struggle before I started wearing wigs at 34. I will never get back that time, and I wish I could get a do over, with the mindset of NOW. My life would look very different, hair loss and all.
Hair loss is awful, I’ll never state otherwise, but it wasn’t worth losing years of my life over. At the age of 21 I didn’t know how to cope, at all, with any of this. I couldn’t process a future. What I didn’t know then, that I wish I did, was that I could make it work in a non perfect way, but still in a way that I would allow me to feel good and live my life. I wish I would have accepted sooner. The denial kept me struggling, the denial kept me in pain.
Acceptance set me free, that has been the key to this and I am still healing now, with this new phase of my hair loss life, after becoming a 2x hair loss winner, and needing to shave my head, adjusting to THIS. It will take time, but the hardest part was done, for me shaving my head was the hardest part. The acceptance I needed to do it, was easier than the actual DOING of it. I accept this is my reality, but I am still adjusting to it, and all the emotions that come with that.
I still struggle of course, some days are harder than others and I found it was made more difficult by so opening sharing this part of my journey. I got support (which was great), but I also got a fair bit of negative comments that were hurtful and painful. It also brought up feelings of my past self that dealt in so much pain with hair loss. Hair loss was traumatic for me, and I know now that pain lives in me, if I didn’t know before, I found out by getting a second hair loss, that brought many things full circle, and the negative / dismissive comments just started taking a bit of a toll on me, it wasn’t okay. It’s not okay. I was aware this was inhibiting my ability to heal right now, so I’ve had to pull back in some ways of posting online, because I need to heal myself, my way, without my truth being questioned or my reality being dismissed or minimized.
Allow yourself the ability to heal in whatever way that means for you. You can, we can. This I know is possible. Share in your life, or online, only if you feel safe to do so, it’s not always without consequence and I think it can hurt a person’s ability to heal depending on the space they are in.
Sending you much love
Y
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