February 12th, 2000 I was 8 years old. I woke up with a bunch of hair on my pillow but I didn’t pay it any attention. I got up, walked to the bathroom and turned on the light. I put my hands to the front of my head and slowly moved them to the back of my head. While my hands were moving slowly from the front to the back of my head the remaining strands of my hair just wiped off my head as if someone had just put them there. When I stopped moving my hands I was completely bald, there wasn’t a hair in sight on my head. There wasn’t a hair in sight on my eyebrows, there wasn’t a hair in sight on my eyelashes. Never have I ever screamed so loud in my entire life, all of my pretty brownish black super curly shoulder length hair was gone, all gone! Every strand was gone. 12 is a very significant number to me, that date will always remain in my head. I wore the #12 jersey for basketball, for track and it is my favorite number, I use to hate that number but as I got older I embraced it. I stopped looking at it as such a horrible day, the day that ruined my life.

It was just the year 2000, technology and medicine had come a long way but for something such as a rear disease as Alopecia Areata there wasn’t much to go off of. 2 out of 100 people will have Alopecia and 5% of those people will lose all the hair on their body, 1.3% of those people have their hair grown back as if they had ever lost it. I did not fall in that 1.3% of people and I’m ok with that. When I was in the 6th grade the pastor to my church had brought this woman from Africa over to visit for a little bit and she made hat & scarfs. I walked over there just to see what she had made and she gave me a matching set. It was a red charlie brown hat & scarf, I didn’t care too much for the scarf but the hat, that hat became my world. Since the day she gave it to me it was my “security blanket” I wore that hat everywhere and I wouldn’t dare take it off until I was somewhere comfortable where people who I didn’t know couldn’t see that I was this bald little girl. When I accidentally left that hat at my college classmates house it was like God was telling me that it was time for me to stop hiding.

I have noticed that every Fall my hair falls out more then any other time of the year and in the Spring it grows in more then any other time of the year. When I was younger all of my eyebrows and eyelash hair would fall out once I turned 21 and Fall came around they didn’t fall all the way out anymore. My eyebrows would just become lighter because I had so little hair strands and my eyelashes would become irritated and very sensitive. So it’s become a routine now that in the Spring my hair would grow back, not alot but my eyebrows would become more define and I would have little fuzzies one my head. During the Summer I can feel every time the wind blows pass my head and think bugs are crawling on me because I’m just not use to it. Come Fall and all the little extra hair that had grown over the last few months surely falls back off but I never even notice till like the middle of December. And for Winter I have to constantly have my head and chest covered because my body feels so naked. My head gets annoyed from always having something on it, Winter is probably the worse time. My head becomes very dry so I have to constantly keep it moisturized, so I be stuck between having a dry head and a head that be as shine as a newly waxed floor. But I’m use to it now, it may sound like a big deal but it’s really not.

I use to think that if I wore makeup people would think I wasn’t comfortable the way I am. Like if I wore a wig or if I wore make up that I would somehow be trying to hide what I really look like. When I turned 17 I started wearing high heels, not anything crazy but mediocre heels. I started to care if I matched when I got dressed. When I turned 18 I started wearing eye liner and mascara and decided that maybe a little lipstick would be nice. When I turned 19 that’s when I really started to get into high heels and it hit me that I was just becoming the woman that God wanted me to be. Slowly but surely. Once I turned 20 it just got better and better, I turned 23 this year and just last week I learned how to apply my own foundation. I have different shades of lipstick, like just this year I started doing so much more and realizing that God just knew I was better off without hair. People ask me from time to time if I could grow it back, would I grow it back and I wouldn’t.

Benefits of being a woman with no hair:I save so much money by not having to worry about getting it done all the time. When I’m running late I don’t get slowed down by having to do my hair. I don’t have to buy all them chemicals and stuff to maintain my hair. I don’t have to waste hours of my life sitting in a chair getting my hair done. And my two favorite things, because of the “Winter phase” when I get out the shower somebody rubs Vaseline on my head and my goodness it feels good. And last but not least when I like a guy and he’s completely comfortable with me he just rubs my head, it’s a comforting feeling and it feels good.

I had wrote this for a little girl I met with AA, who was scared to come out of the house and I just wanted her to know that it wouldn't always be hard or bad and that in time she would have the confidence to go anywhere without worrying about what other people say.