Origin Story

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

I was 7 years old when my mom and I noticed my first bald spot, the size of a dime. Mom took me to see our small town family doctor to get it checked out. He said it was nothing and that it would probably grow back in. He was wrong – and right. Wrong, because it was not “nothing.” Granted, there was no such thing as a Google search when I was a kid, but from what I can find, the term alopecia areata (AA) was introduced by a French physician in the 1700s. Alopecia areata has been around for way longer than that, and like many diseases, it has a complicated history when it comes to classifying it. Our doctor was right because it did grow back, and I didn’t see another bald spot until a few years later, when I was in fifth grade, or around ten years old.

So, fast forward to fifth grade when a quarter-sized bald spot showed up somewhere on the back of my head. At the time, I had plenty of thick hair to cover it up, but it was still distressing, mainly, because I was already a loyal reader of Seventeen magazine (my early 1980s print version of YouTube makeup tutorials, TikTok things, and a whole bunch of other stuff) and knew that THIS was definitely not part of the acceptable metamorphosis into a socially acceptable teenage girl butterfly.

Anyway, this loss led to an intense game of Whac-A-Mole with my head as the playing field. As soon as one spot grew back, another would take its place somewhere else. Sometimes, the loss would slow down; sometimes, it accelerated. That’s one of many things that those with AA know: this hair loss disease is maddeningly unpredictable. I could deal with these ups and downs for the rest of elementary school, although I was going through a phase where I liked to braid my hair and then pin it up. When I discovered a larger, stubborn patch at the nape of my neck that didn’t want to grow back in, I thought it was the end of the world. Or, at least the end of my favorite hairstyle. I lived in a constant state of worry that someone would find out, even my best friends. I remember thinking, “At least it’s almost the end of the school year.” Unfortunately, that was the beginning of frequent bouts of social isolation and withdrawing into myself.

It’s a good thing I loved school as much as I did during fifth and sixth grades, or I think it would have been a challenge for my tired, single mom to get me there most days. I also tried hard to never disappoint her because she worked so hard to provide for me and my siblings. And I would soon discover what a fierce advocate my mom would become for me.

There’s more to my origin story. Maybe what I’ve described is the ‘beginning of the origin’ story. Spoiler alert: It eventually has a happy ending, but there have been some Chicago-sized potholes along the way. I love real life stories, and as a teacher of reading and writing, I also love the backgrounds of richly developed characters we meet in the made up stories we carry with us. Our stories are the glue that connects us all. (And love, of course! Love is an important part of the glue.) We often shy away from telling our stories like a tween girl who’s losing her hair shies away from Friday night sleepovers at her best friend’s house. Some know that this page, this endeavor, has been in the works for over a decade, mostly in my mind at 3am when I can’t fall back to sleep. “It wasn’t the right time, no one will care (and that would be totally fine because I was raised “Iowa nice”), tech issues (hah! there are still issues), and FEAR.” My list of excuses goes on, but fear holds us back from grabbing life by the cranial prosthetic and embracing it. Did I mention fear?

Little did I know as a ten year old long ago what I was in for in the next few years and how it would change me and my story.

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