From the time I was six, my hairline marched slowly up the back of my scalp.
Because there’s no cure for alopecia, I was thrown into a state of helplessness, where everything couldn’t be fixed by a sticker and lollypop.
When you have alopecia, your hair becomes the persecuted minority, attacked by the soldiers of your immune system. The guerrilla militants of Alopecia Areata create patches of hair loss on the scalp; an organised attack by Alopecia Totalis wipes out the entire population of hair on the head. Then it’s up to the secret service agents of Alopecia Universalis to pick off the remaining hairs on the body, including eyebrows and eyelashes.
My hair started falling out in chunks when I was 11. I’d find it on my pillow, on the bathroom floor and on my clothes—it was everywhere except for on my head. Soon, I became painfully aware I shared my baldness with witches in fairy tales and old men, and I felt being different was something to be ashamed of.
I didn’t just lose my hair, I lost my confidence, sense of self-worth and my feeling of belonging.
High school ushered in a new age of secrecy. My beautiful wig granted me the normalcy I craved and I told no one about my condition. Maybe if I ignored what made me different for long enough, it would just go away. I was wrong.
An intense sadness infiltrated my system. It shut me down and rebooted me and the world became darker. I became convinced that the way to restore my damaged self-esteem was to trade in all of my ‘abnormalities’ for things which were acceptably ‘normal’. In thinking like that, the parts of me that were too dark, too imperfect and too different were kept out of the light, unable to be loved and accepted by anyone.
