By Denise Donahue, M Ed
I believe I was 37 when the first clump of hair fell out. I remember standing in the shower, putting conditioner in my hair like I always did, then running my fingers through it. Normally, my hands would glide through smooth, silky hair. But this time, something felt different.
Hair came out with my hands. And we’re not talking about 10 or 20 strands. We’re talking clumps.
I’m not sure anyone understands how horrifying it is to watch your hair fall out until it happens to you. Hair is such a strange thing. We cut it, dye it, curl it, straighten it, complain about it and spend ridiculous amounts of money trying to make it behave. But you don’t really think about what it means to you until suddenly it’s disappearing.
I probably spent the next few months researching every shampoo, conditioner, cream, vitamin and miracle pill that promised to grow hair back. I remember going to the doctor and being told I could try Rogaine, which at the time I thought was something only balding men used. She told me there was one caveat: once I started using it, I couldn’t stop.
Well, that scared the living shit out of me. At the time, I was probably more afraid of getting cancer from putting some mysterious chemical on my head forever than I was of losing my hair.
Eventually, with changes to my diet and vitamins, some of my hair started growing back. But it was never the same. I was never going back to the great hair of my youth. And when I say great hair, I mean great 80s hair. Puffed up, permed, sprayed within an inch of its life with Aqua Net. The bigger the hair, the closer to God. That kind of hair. Those days were gone.
What grew back was thinner and more brittle, and I had learned how to keep it short. I would look at women with long, flowing hair, thick curls or heavy ponytails and feel this little pang of jealousy. I wanted that hair. I wanted to be the woman who could casually throw her hair into a messy bun and somehow look adorable.
But deep down, I knew I would probably never have that kind of hair again.
Then about four years ago, I saw a Facebook ad for hair toppers for women with thinning hair. I thought, Why not? What do I have to lose?
Apparently, the answer was a lot of money, because that innocent little topper purchase eventually turned into a full blown wig obsession. And I loved them.
Around that same time, menopause and changing hormones decided my hair situation apparently wasn’t dramatic enough. The alopecia came back in full force. Eventually, I even lost most of my eyebrows and eyelashes. On the upside, shaving my legs became something I could put on the quarterly calendar. But underneath the humor, it hurt.
Hair is deeply connected to a woman’s identity and self esteem, whether we want to admit that or not. Underneath those beautiful wigs was always my real hair: thin, patchy, brittle and increasingly difficult to manage. Every shower became another reminder. Every clump in my hand reminded me that I had alopecia and that no matter how many vitamins I took or products I bought, I was probably never going to have the hair I once had.
The thought of shaving my head crossed my mind more than once. Okay, probably a hundred times. But I was terrified.
Oddly enough, I wasn’t really afraid of how I would feel about being bald. I was afraid of how everyone else would feel about it. Would people stare? Would they assume I was sick? Would they wonder why in the hell a woman would voluntarily shave her head?
Because let’s face it: when a man starts balding, shaving his head is practically a rite of passage. Nobody thinks twice about it. He shaves it off, grows a beard and suddenly everyone tells him he looks younger.
Women lose their hair and we are somehow expected to quietly hide it. So I did.
I work on myself every day to be confident, independent, and proud of who I am. Yet underneath my wigs was this matted, thinning, patchy mess that made me feel anything but confident. I thought about shaving it countless times, but I could never quite find the courage.
Until one day I looked in the mirror and thought:
Fuck it.
You’re a badass. Start acting like one. Shave your head. I was reminded that I have an entire drawer full of wigs if I hate it. And more importantly, who cares what anyone else thinks? Who cares what society says a woman is supposed to look like?
Do what makes you feel confident. So that was it. I made the decision. Now I just needed back up. So I called a good friend.
At 10 o’clock that night, she came over to shave my head for me. There was something incredibly fitting about another woman being the one holding the razor. Women spend so much of our lives being told what we’re supposed to look like, how we’re supposed to age, what makes us feminine and what makes us beautiful. And there she was, another woman, helping me say fuck all of that.
From the moment the razor grabbed that first clump of hair, something inside me changed. I expected to panic. Instead, I felt relief.
With every pass of the razor, I felt lighter. I was smiling. I could practically feel the dopamine surging through my body. All of the heartache, embarrassment, frustration and worry I had attached to my hair for almost 20 years seemed to be falling onto the floor right along with it. And in the background, “Unstoppable” blasted from the radio. I mean, seriously. You couldn’t have scripted it better.
Clump after clump fell, and I felt happier. There is something incredibly liberating about taking control of something that has felt completely out of your control for so long. Alopecia had been making decisions for me for years. It decided how I wore my hair. It decided whether I felt attractive. It decided what I saw when I looked in the mirror. Now suddenly, I was the one making the decision.
I wasn’t losing my hair anymore. I was choosing to let it go.
Maybe that’s why shaving my head felt like so much more than shaving my head. Lying on that floor with those thin, brittle strands were years of fear, insecurity and this ridiculous idea that being feminine or beautiful somehow required me to keep desperately holding onto hair my body had already decided to let go of. So I let it go too.
The hair. The worry. The embarrassment. The fear of what people might think.
All of it.
And underneath it was me. Turns out, I really like her. My only regret? I wish I had met her sooner.
