This is a phrase I’ve come across a lot when researching Alopecia on the internet and to start with I didn’t fully understand it but now I get it – my life has been changed forever. I have days where I am able to look in the mirror and focus on the positives, I have decent skin, my features don’t seem to be too unfortunate, my teeth are ok and even though my head is rather large it’s a reasonable shape but I also have days where I look in the mirror and I cry. Not only do I not feel like a woman without hair but on the bad days I see an alien when I look in the mirror.
In my last post I was pondering what it means to have a good life and I also talked about the upcoming move to the country in the hope of having a more peaceful and less stressful life. The town I now live in has a population of 554 people, there are no street lights and very little traffic although a semi-trailer drove down my street the other day with a truckload of hay bales on board and that was kind of noisy. When I was in the process of purchasing my tiny cottage in the country an ‘evaluator’ was sent from the city to inspect my prospective home and her comment was the house is uninhabitable and $30,000 would need to be spent just to make the house liveable. I purchased the house anyway and even though my tiny cottage is rather rustic it belongs to me and I am no longer paying hundreds of dollars in interest to the bank each pay day.
Becoming debt free has been a huge burden off my back, living in a small quiet country town has been as lovely as I hoped, being so far away from my adult children is not nice but they didn’t live at home anymore anyway so the tree change has been a very positive one for me.
My old life included a mortgage which I would have taken decades to pay off, living on a busy street on a tiny block with an alcoholic neighbour who would somehow know exactly when I was about to walk out my front door and proceed to talk shit until I managed to escape, working a job which I detested and constant deadlines and schedules which had to be obeyed.
My new life consists of waking up when I feel like it, having my breakfast and coffee in bed, taking my dog for a long walk each day, sitting in the sun for a bit each afternoon and sitting by the fire at night with no need to go to bed until I feel like it because there won’t be an alarm going off the next morning.
I’m as happy as a pig in shit with my new life but I wish I had hair, is it wrong to allow my happiness to be tainted by something so superficial? Why is that I don’t feel like a woman anymore just because I don’t have hair? Will I ever be able to look in the mirror and see the good things about Susan even though she has no hair? I have never considered myself to be a shallow person, I don’t focus too much on the physical attributes of other humans so why am I so embarrassed about how I look without any hair, eyelashes or eyebrows?
I hope I will eventually be able to look in the mirror and not be alarmed by what I see, I hope I can get past how I look on the outside because it even though having Alopecia has changed my life forever I cannot let it ruin my life – especially now that I have achieved one of my lifelong dreams of living a peaceful life in the country.
The bald and the beautiful? 