Alopecia World
www.alopeciaworld.com
Hope
“Do you ever not like yourself because you don’t have hair?”
“Not really. Sometimes I wish I had hair, but then I wouldn’t be me. You can still be beautiful and wonderful without hair, you know that right?”
“Yeah...”
It’s summer – hot, sometimes sweltering, but still wonderful. We’re outside, and it’s much hotter than it should be, making us overheat. My friends are wearing as little as possible and laying in the pool, and I pull off my hair.
There’s something liberating about being able to lift your hair off your head and reveal a smooth, bald scalp underneath, something exotically beautiful about a woman with a bald head who carries herself with pride. It sounds cliché, but bald really is beautiful.
While alopecia and any number of other conditions that cause hair loss affect millions of women worldwide, it is still not socially acceptable for me to peel off my hairpiece as you would peel off your sweatshirt when you get warm. I get strange looks if I forget that wigs aren’t “normal” and put my finger under it to scratch an itch, and the pressure involved in getting a wig that looks real and doesn’t incite unnecessary questions is frustratingly high. People never know how to treat the issue that is our baldness, but we don’t want or need your pity – rather, we want you to accept us as normal albeit possessing less hair, not stare at our heads like they’re foreign, and move on.
Yes, losing your hair sucks. There’s no other way to put it other than that it sucks. It’s difficult to rediscover yourself and realize that you are more than whether or not you have hair. Unless you’re one of the fortunate, you suffer in silence and without anyone else who has gone through what you’re trying to come to terms with. Because no one ever talks about alopecia, it’s barely known by name and feared, as is all that we do not understand. It is an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks the hair follicles on the body, resulting in hair loss. No, it is not contagious. No, I am not dying, it doesn’t cause me physical pain, and I don’t have cancer. It’s completely unpredictable, so no, I don’t know if my hair will grow back.
Most importantly, no, I did not cause this to happen by some trigger of my own doing and no, I cannot control it. Please stop telling me that it’s stress because even though you’re wrong and we know you’re wrong, you don’t help us stop blaming ourselves.
I won’t deny that I went through my own personal hell trying to come to terms with my baldness. However, looking back, I don’t think I’d take back a minute of it. I still run into sticky situations – telling a cabin full of girls at a retreat that I take off my hair at night, dealing with going to a water park – but I know that other people who reject me because of my hair were never worth my time to begin with.
It’s strange answering questions about my hair. “Is it naturally like that or do you style it?” Well yes, it is natural in a sense – someone somewhere had hair that naturally did this; I just stick it on with double-sided tape every day. We are still normal, and we are still people. We may take our hair off at night and in the shower and sometimes lack eyebrows or eyelashes, but we’re really no different than you.
Being bald doesn’t mean you’re not good enough and it doesn’t make you a freak. Baldness does not exclusively define you just as being blonde or brunette or redheaded does not define a person. I wish I could tell every girl with alopecia that she’s still beautiful and tell everyone in the world that bald is not automatically an unhealthy thing to be, but I can’t. Perhaps the next time I have to ask someone, “Do you know what alopecia is?” they’ll say yes, and perhaps they won’t have to inspect my head like the novelty it may be to them.
To change one confession from awkward to smooth, to teach one person about alopecia, to help one girl realize that she’s still beautiful – that would be enough for me.
To the bald girls who wake up and look in the mirror in the morning and wonder why they’re different – you’re beautiful and deserve everything you can achieve. To those who look at the bald men and women and wonder if we’re sick or somehow contaminated – we differ from you only in that our particular unique characteristic is physically obvious.
Bald is beautiful, and whether or not you have hair will never define who you are.
“Not really. Sometimes I wish I had hair, but then I wouldn’t be me. You can still be beautiful and wonderful without hair, you know that right?”
“Yeah...”
It’s summer – hot, sometimes sweltering, but still wonderful. We’re outside, and it’s much hotter than it should be, making us overheat. My friends are wearing as little as possible and laying in the pool, and I pull off my hair.
There’s something liberating about being able to lift your hair off your head and reveal a smooth, bald scalp underneath, something exotically beautiful about a woman with a bald head who carries herself with pride. It sounds cliché, but bald really is beautiful.
While alopecia and any number of other conditions that cause hair loss affect millions of women worldwide, it is still not socially acceptable for me to peel off my hairpiece as you would peel off your sweatshirt when you get warm. I get strange looks if I forget that wigs aren’t “normal” and put my finger under it to scratch an itch, and the pressure involved in getting a wig that looks real and doesn’t incite unnecessary questions is frustratingly high. People never know how to treat the issue that is our baldness, but we don’t want or need your pity – rather, we want you to accept us as normal albeit possessing less hair, not stare at our heads like they’re foreign, and move on.
Yes, losing your hair sucks. There’s no other way to put it other than that it sucks. It’s difficult to rediscover yourself and realize that you are more than whether or not you have hair. Unless you’re one of the fortunate, you suffer in silence and without anyone else who has gone through what you’re trying to come to terms with. Because no one ever talks about alopecia, it’s barely known by name and feared, as is all that we do not understand. It is an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks the hair follicles on the body, resulting in hair loss. No, it is not contagious. No, I am not dying, it doesn’t cause me physical pain, and I don’t have cancer. It’s completely unpredictable, so no, I don’t know if my hair will grow back.
Most importantly, no, I did not cause this to happen by some trigger of my own doing and no, I cannot control it. Please stop telling me that it’s stress because even though you’re wrong and we know you’re wrong, you don’t help us stop blaming ourselves.
I won’t deny that I went through my own personal hell trying to come to terms with my baldness. However, looking back, I don’t think I’d take back a minute of it. I still run into sticky situations – telling a cabin full of girls at a retreat that I take off my hair at night, dealing with going to a water park – but I know that other people who reject me because of my hair were never worth my time to begin with.
It’s strange answering questions about my hair. “Is it naturally like that or do you style it?” Well yes, it is natural in a sense – someone somewhere had hair that naturally did this; I just stick it on with double-sided tape every day. We are still normal, and we are still people. We may take our hair off at night and in the shower and sometimes lack eyebrows or eyelashes, but we’re really no different than you.
Being bald doesn’t mean you’re not good enough and it doesn’t make you a freak. Baldness does not exclusively define you just as being blonde or brunette or redheaded does not define a person. I wish I could tell every girl with alopecia that she’s still beautiful and tell everyone in the world that bald is not automatically an unhealthy thing to be, but I can’t. Perhaps the next time I have to ask someone, “Do you know what alopecia is?” they’ll say yes, and perhaps they won’t have to inspect my head like the novelty it may be to them.
To change one confession from awkward to smooth, to teach one person about alopecia, to help one girl realize that she’s still beautiful – that would be enough for me.
To the bald girls who wake up and look in the mirror in the morning and wonder why they’re different – you’re beautiful and deserve everything you can achieve. To those who look at the bald men and women and wonder if we’re sick or somehow contaminated – we differ from you only in that our particular unique characteristic is physically obvious.
Bald is beautiful, and whether or not you have hair will never define who you are.
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Comment by Karen Smith on December 24, 2010 at 11:31pm
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Thanks for sharing this!
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I'm so glad this helped you; alopecia is a difficult thing to cope with and anything I can do to help makes me feel like going through it myself had a point. Merry Christmas to you :)
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