About my Alopecia blog

I started this blog weeks ago because I finally came to the conclusion that I needed to not only start keeping a journal about my hair loss, but I needed to keep a personal blog about it too. My friend Julia from Alopecia World suggested that I start writing down my thoughts about alopecia as it relates to my everyday life. For some years now I've felt so lost -- adrift, like I'm drowning and desperate for a life raft -- anything to help me make alopecia make sense. It didn't used to be that way. Once upon a time, I was bold, confident, almost arrogant in how I saw the world and how I thought people saw me. Then I started dating. At first, it was easy to not mention alopecia -- after all, when I started dating, I had a head full of hair, so what did it matter?

Then my hair started falling out again, and when my hair disappeared, so did the guys. Men are such disgustingly shallow creatures. They get turned on by big boobs and a nice ass and a great blowjob, but have all that AND be bald, and you might as well have leprosy or AIDS or some isolating, contaigous, deadly disease, because the effect is the same -- nobody wants to be with you. So I admit it. I objectified myself for a while. I tried to play a man's game. I figured I would love them and leave them before they could do the same thing to me.

But then I fell in love -- and I fell in love hard. From the moment I met Todd, I've felt that he is the one I've been waiting my whole life for. All I want to do is be near him -- breathe in his scent, kiss his lips, wrap my arms around him and feel his arms around me and tell him how much I absolutely adore everything about him -- and even when he pisses me off or hurts my feelings, I want him and nobody else.

But, as we all know, life is not meant to be a bed of roses. I'm in love with a man who hates my alopecia and and abhors my baldness. He has made it very clear that he will not be seen in public with me unless I cover my head. I understand his motives -- to a point. On the one hand, asking me to cover my head is his way of protecting me from the rude stares and questions I still get after nearly 30 years of living with this disease. On the other hand, by acquiescing to this request, I am consciously reinforcing what my mother drilled into me, consciously or not, from the time I was a small child:

Alopecia is something that should always be covered up. After all, even the Bible itself says a bald woman is an abomination, and a curse that should be destroyed. St. Paul says a woman's hair is her glory. And who are we, who are unworthy of God's unmerited favor and grace, to question the Almighty?

It wouldn't be so bad if people would just say up front that they don't like my baldness. After all, obvious rejection is easier to deal with than the ones who laugh at you behind your back and are nice to your face. I can't tolerate that kind of hypocrisy, and never could, especially now that I'm getting older. But despite my pouring out and boring my readers (read: you) with all the things I like and don't like, two things in this world remain constant:

1. I hate being bald. I hate everything about being bald. I hate having to draw on my eyebrows before I go to work and I hate having to ask Todd to rub my head when it hurts because I know deep down he doesn't want to do it. He doesn't understand -- nobody does -- how much of a comfort having my head rubbed is to me. I hate going to bed at night wondering if I'll wake up the next morning with no eyelashes or a bald spot the size of a baseball on the side of my head or anywhere else on my body. Most of all, I hate being asked constantly if I have cancer, as if cancer is the only condition in this world that causes hair loss. I especially hate being pitied because I look like I'm more fragile than everyone else, but truth be told I'm probably more resilient and tough than most people.

2. Because I hate being bald so much, in some ways I hate myself. Like it or not though, being bald is a part of who I am, just like being Hispanic and being black defines me. I used to be known for my brains more than my looks -- or at least, that's what I would like to think. I have to get comfortable again with being who I am, because I feel like I don't have that anymore.

I've tried so hard not to make my hair an issue in my relationship with Todd. Despite my best efforts, I've managed to allow my own insecurities to overshadow things, and once again alopecia sits like the elephant in the room, hovering as a dark cloud threatens a sunny picnic. Todd thinks I'm stupid. He thinks that I don't know that he's talking on the phone to other women that he's met online, and he sneaks out to be with other people, yet somehow I'm just supposed to smile like everything's okay and play along with it. I just wish he would tell me the truth about how he feels -- if an open relationship is what he wants, I'll give it to him. If my alopecia repulses him, I can deal with that too. I've never asked anything of him other than complete and total honesty. I've never lied to him about anything important, and I try to respect him as much as possible. But if my alopecia has caused him to lose all respect for me, then why bother in the first place?

Because love is blind, and sometimes we can't see the forest for the trees....