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Hello, people! I’m Brianna. And this is gonna be a story full of tears, fear, anger, and… hair. And I really hope that by telling it I will not only be able to get it off my chest, but what’s more important – I might inspire other people to live their lives to the fullest.
Everything started around a year ago. It was my last couple of months of high school and it was full of stress, you know, around studying, upcoming finals, an unclear situation with colleges, and so on and so forth. Apart from that, my boyfriend had recently broken up with me because of my weight, as he put it. I cried over him for a week or so. It was so stressful that I’d even put myself on a strict diet and was always feeling light-headed. I was determined to lose a few pounds to look perfect at prom so that this selfish jerk would see how beautiful and happy I was without him.
But at some point I’d noticed that along with the extra pounds I was also losing my hair. I mean, I had been losing some before, especially while brushing it, and this time there were not like 10 single tiny hairs left on the hairbrush, but like a bunch of them. At first I didn’t give it much thought and decided that it was happening because of my new shampoo – sort of an allergic reaction, or something. So, I simply stopped using it and began my own self-treatment according to some recipes from beauty bloggers. You know, my hair actually started looking better - it was super shiny and healthy, but it still kept falling out.
Then I started researching on the internet for why I would be losing my hair and how I could stop it. And guess what I found as the first reason – stress and malnutrition. This can’t be true, I thought. Just in terms of my workload and study schedule there was no way to alleviate my stress - not even mentioning other things that stressed me out. If this was the case, I would be destined to remain fat and hairless, right!? There had to be another way to solve my problem, I thought. And when I felt a whole dime-size bald spot appear on the back of my head, I totally panicked and decided to ask my parents for help. They took me to a nutritionist at first, but when he heard about me losing hair and actually saw a clump in my hand, he said we’d better visit a trichologist first (that’s a hair specialist, in case you don't know). This recommendation made me a little worried. Eventually, it turned out that I had something called alopecia – an incurable disease with an unpredictable course. It meant that I was about to lose all the hair on my head and nobody could promise that it would grow back again.
This news literally killed me. All the way home from the hospital I stayed silent. I was in shock. For the first couple of days I was in denial, I suppose. I just couldn’t believe that this was truly happening with me. I cried all the time, asking the Universe, "Why me?" Of course, I was pitying myself. But once it seemed that I had no more tears to cry, I got so angry. I thought about how it can’t be enough for me to have lost my boyfriend, and to have not lost a single pound, to not have straight A’s, and to not have gotten into any college because I still hadn't gotten a single answer from any of them. But now it turned out that I was going to spend the rest of my life hairless! You know, bald!
It was awful. I didn’t want to see or talk to anybody. I felt so bad that I literally got sick and stayed at home for two weeks. I told friends that I had mono so that they wouldn’t visit me. I just didn’t want to let them know what was actually happening and I had even forbidden my parents to talk to anybody about me and my problem. Still no one was able to understand me and they’d probably think that I was a freak, I thought. Every night I prayed for my hair to come back to me. I even promised to never change its color, or curl it, or even cut it – no extra involvement ever. But that bargain didn’t work.
The time to go back to school came, along with my new daily routine of visiting doctors, and applying various creams and foams and everything. My parents even took me to try acupuncture, but nothing really helped. It just kept falling out, but probably at a slightly lesser rate. I tried to hide my problem in any way possible, like wearing baseball caps, handkerchiefs, or small hats. At first everybody thought I was this new type of fashionista, but then even my friends got tired of my constant headwear. I understood how pathetic my attempts were to hide my problem, when once my friend Elisa had jokingly touched my hair, and even though my head was covered with a hat, I could feel how I'd lost another clump.
Music by Epidemic Sound:
#actuallyhappened
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