Let me start from the beginning....
This...is a balding man....
Society is well aquatinted with this guy. Every man since he realized he was a man has known that there is a potential that he will go bald generally in his old age and in some families, like a certain Royal we know of, there is almost a certainty that the men will eventually go bald.
No one tells or warns any woman throughout her life that there is even a slight possibility of her going bald, so you can imagine my surprise when I parted my hair one day and just about dropped the comb because there it was, the first of several bald patches that appeared it seemed almost over night.
The only acceptable bald women in western society are those who are undergoing cancer treatment. Everyone else is almost always automatically judged as being a tomboy, angry, butch, undateable, a lesbian, some sort of freak, or lacking in femininity even if she is the furthest thing from those descriptors.
So why was I suddenly going bald? In the late 2000's, I was diagnosed with a chronic illness, one I will have for the rest of my life. There are dozens of symptoms that I deal with off and on, but for the most part, my illness is not visible. You can't look at me and know whether I'm sick or not which is something a lot of people don't know about those with chronic illnesses---people just assume that if you are sick, you're going to look strung out or like you're on your death bed. Mentally it sort of helps sometimes to know that people can't tell how you really feel, but what people can see is that you're bald or balding. This is especially true if you're a woman not to mention that there are only soo many places you can naturally wear a hat indoors and it won't totally look weird.
As part of my illness, my body can for whatever reason attack it's own healthy cells, which can lead to hair loss among other things. So in part of the most stressful sector of your life, just trying to deal with everything your body is going through, and go to work, and deal with relationships, bills and everything else, suddenly without warning, your hair starts taking flight and well, you feel helpless all over again. You're in no way prepared as a woman for this. You can't call up your mom and be like, so hey what did you do to deal with your balding.
Oh and pardon my language, but fuck all that body positivity stuff. All that love yourself and what not. You have to say that so you can try and sleep at night after dealing with people staring at you and whispering behind your back or after losing your shit and embarrassing yourself when someone attempts to take off your hat without your permission.
I've never showed up to a doctors appointment with such absolute quickness. As Rob Lowe has now so infamously said, when I saw that I was balding, I knew there were medications and things that may help and I was ready to have it mainlined straight to me. I mean all I could picture in the prime of my life was having people ask me all damn day what was wrong with me, where was my hair, why was I wearing a wig---actually sweating to death wearing a wig in the 100 degree summers. I could feel my self esteem plummeting to the ground with each google search of women like me who had this happen to them and their tails of debilitating depression and lack of support or understanding many of them got from those around them.
At this point, I was at four going on five about 2 inch round patches like the pic above. I had thick hair so it hadn't really at first been noticeable until they patches kept on growing. At my appointment, my dermatologist injected my scalp with what I don't know. All I could actually hear in her explanation was her saying, this may or may not work. She said it like 4 times and with each time, my stomach bounced.
It took a few weeks, and a few more shots, but my hair, blessed be, grew back. I wish I could say I learned some deep lesson about self worth or not being caught up in one's vanity, but I didn't. This became yet another story of yet another hurdle I had to jump, and something else I survived, and something else I share with my "Fight Club" support group. If you want to say, now you know what men go through, say it. If you want to accuse me of being totally superficial, feel free, but end of the day, for me, it's one less thing I have to endure and that makes me happy because from what I can tell, here, or in real life, nobody likes a bald woman.
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