One of my close friends wrote a bit about me for one of her classes. It means so much to me and I want to share it with you all!!


Lillie Laraque

JLS- Feature Writing

The Bald and the Beautiful

She gets out of bed, brushes her teeth, and washes her face. She goes into her room and picks out her clothes for the day, finally putting on a bright top, bubbled-out skirt, and designer sandals on her trim form. She frames her green eyes with eyeliner, pencils in her eyebrows, and puts in some dangling earrings. Camille Reinecker is going to her interior design class at Northern Arizona University, and she passes several Styrofoam faces holding various colors, shades and cuts of wigs on the way out, but she continues out the door without them. She doesn’t have cancer.

At a time when most kids are trying to fit into the new high school order, Reinecker really started to stand out. The 22-year-old Calabasas, Calif. native she found out she had an auto-immune disorder when she was a high school freshman. She was only 15 years old when all of her brown hair started to fall out, and with it her self-esteem. She told her mom that her hair was slowly falling out, but it wasn’t until her sister noticed that the back of her hairline was receding that things started to get weird. The support of her two sisters and parents, helped her when she was diagnosed with Alopecia.

Alopecia usually starts at a moment of high stress, can affect all ages, and is life-long. It causes white blood cells to attack hair follicles, and other than hair loss there are no other physical symptoms unlike other auto-immune diseases. Trying to fit in at school was getting harder for Camille as she fought depression, and a sudden shyness. “I really didn’t talk to anyone for two-and-a-half years. I was doing my best to be a wallflower,” she admits. “In high school everyone thought I was dying, I never really talked about it.” When she finally reached out to people in high school, her first boyfriend was more OK with her wig wearing than she was. One girl at school, when Camille explained why she didn’t have hair, said that she must be lying, and that it was so sad that she didn’t have hair.

It’s a beautiful day in northern Arizona as she walks along the ped-way to class; people stare at her, nudging their friends as she walks by, long earrings dangling behind her. Even though people stare, she believes that having Alopecia makes her unique, and more special that the ordinary individual. Camille now relies on a new inner strength, and because of it, her thicker skin. She continues walking with her books balanced against her hip. Camille stopped wearing wigs a few months ago because she wanted to be comfortable when she worked out, and more importantly she felt like she was lying to people. “It’s almost like a security blanket,” she explains, “it doesn’t show me, it hides me. I spent so much time [in high school] thinking about myself and sad, I’m just over it.” She smiles wryly, “it only took seven years.”

Camille wanted courage. “I wanted to live my life not upset by it all the time; no ‘oh woe is me’. Would you [want to live that way]?”

After class she heads to work at Home Depot. Customers constantly ask her questions, and depending on whether they’re rude or not is how she answers. “I explain about it [Alopecia], and most people are awesome. [But] one lady stuck her fingernail in my back and asked if I had cancer.” People mistake her baldness for a sign of cancer “all the time, especially when was I sad and gloomy, but once I started smiling people stopped assuming I had cancer.” However the short girl without hair wearing a neon orange apron with is not without humor. She recalls, grinning, that, “one time, a couple asked me out on a date. I guess because the husband likes bald women.”

The petite girl gets in her car in the late evening to go home. Climbing up two flights of dimly lit stairs she reaches into her purse, gets her keys and opens the apartment door. Her roommates’ two faces smile at her from a low blue felt couch with a red throw over it. The living room is full of beaten mismatched furniture, a coffee table with cards on it, and one wall with a window dressing on it complete with curtains and valence. One of the roommates, Janessa Rosales, describes her roommate as “funny and little”. The second roommate, Juli Ann Claiborne grins like a Cheshire cat while saying that living with Camille is interesting and fun, “but she steals my hair-ties!”

She goes in her room to get ready for bed and passes a photo of her and several other bald women from this summer’s National Bald Out Day. That day she and her friends Mary, Lindsey, and Carol, counted all the bald men that pass them by thinking it would be nice if women were allowed to wear their hair anyway they chose, especially bald. Only a handful of women were “out” that day, the other women they saw wore wigs and wouldn’t talk to them, Camille remembers. She would have liked to tell those embarrassed women, “there are other people out there and not to be ashamed about it.”

She dreams that one day she will be a publicized advocate for Alopecia, and appear on the Ellen Show. She wants to explain to the world that people who are different don’t want your pity, just your acceptance. Her hope is that something that is out there and unordinary would become ordinary and not shocking. So she lives her life without wigs, exposing her true self to her friends and strangers because she knows that “the inner strength to be different” is what is beautiful about being bald.