I wish I could say just how I feel about my baldness. Do I like people knowing what I am going through? No. But not no exactly. This is the first time in over 7 years of the cancer battle that I have lost my hair. I have at times felt like an impostor. I looked as good and as normal and as healthy (or so I think) as the woman sitting on the park bench with me, smiling at her kids the same way I was smiling at mine. She might ask me how I'm doing and I might say fine. We might talk about our kids and our day and I might leave out that I spent the night barfing from my chemo that has a fat chance of helping with the tumors I have popping up all over my brain. The grocery store clerk asks genuinely how my day has been, just hours after I getting the results that the cancer is spreading, and I would disingenuously answer, "Great!"
But it was all believable because I looked very normal.
Now everyone knows there is something wrong with me. Maybe they don't understand how serious or how long of a fight I've had, but they know I'm in the middle of a something terrible.
And so they are kind. And sometimes awkward. And they do seem to smile with sympathy. And a few people you can almost tell have been touched by the same disease. And usually they are the ones that will strike up a conversation about it.
But would you like your problems to be written on your forehead? On one hand you would get more respect and understanding (or maybe rarely the opposite). On the other hand you just want to be treated like everyone else.
It is also just not cute. I have been fortunate enough to keep my eyebrows, and at least some of my my eyelashes. But without some mascara and some eyeliner I look pretty scary. When I walk by the mirror in the morning, out of the corner of my eye I catch Lord Voldemort following me and I have to suppress a scream.
I don't really know that that is what bothers me though.
I think it's feeling normal inside, but the outside telling a different story. Maybe it's the true story and one I don't want to be told.
There is one wonderful thing: warm raindrops on the skin at the top of my body. Pure Poetry.
I guess two things. I haven't picked up my razor for a couple of months. :)
How have you or your loved ones dealt with hair loss?
