This month, I have some exciting news. I’ve been invited to be a featured speaker at Baldie Con! This is an amazing annual event that’s put on to support the bald community. Although there are a lot of women there with alopecia areata (like me!), Baldie Con isn’t exclusive to just those with this specific diagnosis – it’s for anyone who’s bald for any reason.
The main purpose of Baldie Con is emotional empowerment for bald women. It takes place September 27 to 29 in Atlanta. There are just a few tickets left, so if you’re thinking of going, I highly encourage you to grab your ticket right away. You can head to the Baldie Con website to learn more or book your ticket.
I’m so excited to have been invited to speak at the conference. If you’ll be attending, I look forward to seeing you there! If not, I wanted to share more with my community about my story of growing up with alopecia areata. I’ll be sharing this on my blog over the course of this month.
Whether you have alopecia or any other chronic skin condition, my hope is that learning about my story inspires you along your journey. I want to speak to the challenges that my condition has presented me with, and how I was able to overcome those to live a truly authentic and inspired life.
I’ll start by talking about the very beginning of my alopecia journey.
My diagnosis with alopecia
I was first diagnosed with alopecia areata at the age of 8. While there are certainly kids who are diagnosed with alopecia, this isn’t super common – it’s more common to be diagnosed in early adulthood (20s or early 30s). But for me, this diagnosis came very early in my life.
My parents wanted to make absolutely sure of the diagnosis. I’m sure they were scared, and they didn’t want to believe that their child was going to have to deal with this condition for the rest of her life. They took me to multiple dermatologists, to see whether someone would come to a different conclusion.
But they all had the same message: I had alopecia areata. This meant that my body was attacking my hair follicles, causing bald patches. There’s no cure for this condition, but there are treatments that can help. As a kid, all I really knew was that this meant I would have to go to the doctor a lot. I didn’t completely understand the journey that I was on.
Honestly, I don’t think it occurred to a single one of the adults in the situation that it would be okay for me to have hair loss. I internalized the idea that it was very important for me to do whatever it took to try to preserve my hair. This isn’t anyone’s fault – my parents and all of the medical professionals involved had themselves internalized society’s idea that hair is a crucial part of every woman’s beauty, and they couldn’t even imagine that this might not be true.
My continued journey with alopecia
And so my treatments began. Sometimes they were painful – I would have to have needles injected into my scalp to place medicines there. I hated those treatments, but I put up with them because I really didn’t think I had a choice.
My treatments were expensive. My parents had to work extra shifts to be able to afford them. I knew that this meant that they loved and valued me. To this day, I’m grateful to them for doing that for me.
At the same time, I think I felt a little guilty for making them work extra hard. It’s common for kids to feel guilty about difficult things that are happening to the adults around them. Divorce is a common example, but this also often happens to kids with any kind of chronic medical condition. They feel like it’s their fault that the adults they love and depend on are struggling. Looking back, I think this might have been how some of my adult struggles with low self-worth got started.
The difficulty of sharing my struggles
I was definitely struggling with some difficult emotions at that time. Of course, just like the adults around me, I had internalized the widely held belief in my culture that hair was a woman’s “crown.” To most women I knew, their hair was very important, and they usually put a lot of time and money into it.
I didn’t have any models of being a woman that didn’t involve having beautiful hair. And yet I was losing mine, and although I kept fighting harder and harder with the painful and expensive treatments, these didn’t always stop the hair loss. I felt like I was being deprived of something essential to becoming a woman.
But I didn’t really know how to talk about any of this. I grew up in the South, and especially at that time, sharing about difficult emotions was not really encouraged. Most people just kept their struggles to themselves, believing that talking about them would burden others or would be shameful. I’m sure that many of you reading this grew up in an environment like that.
I’ve often wondered whether my experience growing up would have been different if I’d been able to talk about what I was feeling. Of course, I have no way to know what that would have been like. But if you have a child in your life who’s experiencing alopecia, I would definitely suggest encouraging them to talk about what they’re feeling.
They may not really be sure what to say – kids don’t always have the language to describe their emotions. (Honestly, a lot of adults don’t either.) But just opening that door and encouraging them to share what they’re feeling, even when it’s difficult, could make a huge difference for them. Do your best to listen and receive them openly, without telling them that they should feel differently than they do. (This is something that adults tend to do to children a lot, so it’s another ingrained habit for many of us.)
Exploring how your diagnosis impacted you
I’ll pick up my story again next week. For now, I’d like to invite you to consider how your own diagnosis might have affected you. I’m targeting this to those who have alopecia, but you can do this exercise for any chronic skin condition. This is also targeted to those who were diagnosed at a younger age like I was, but you can still do a similar exercise if you were diagnosed later in life.
One of my favorite techniques for self-exploration and transformation is journaling. Grab your journal and a pen. Consider these questions, and just write freely. No editing – just write whatever comes. This is simply an opportunity to explore your own truths.
What emotions did you feel around your diagnosis?
How did your diagnosis affect your self-esteem?
How did your diagnosis shape your identity?
What impact did your diagnosis have on your social interactions?
What ideas or beliefs did you form in childhood related to hair (or skin)?
Are any of the ideas, beliefs, or emotions from your childhood still impacting you today?
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