What Shaving My Head Taught Me About Acceptance & True Self-Love

I will never forget the way that I felt sitting in the chair at Ken Paves West Hollywood Salon as my dear friend and longtime hairstylist brought a buzzer to my scalp. "Ready?" he asked. There was a pit in my stomach, and my heart was racing, but my mind was clear and still.

"Let's do this," I replied.

It started with just one small patch, one little bald spot. My mom took me to the dermatologist, who diagnosed me with alopecia areata—a condition in which the immune system becomes triggered to attack the hair follicles as if they were foreign invaders. The hair falls out and, in many cases, will grow back, which is what happened to me.

In the following years, my hair would fall out in little patches around my head and eventually grow back. It was just enough to make me self-conscious but not so much that anyone else noticed. Sometimes there were several bald spots, and sometimes there was just one. There didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to my hair loss cycles. I went to numerous doctors, none of whom could solve my hair loss. One doctor offered me a smelly cream that just made my remaining hair look gross. Other doctors offered me steroid injections, which seemed to work. Every month for 18 years, I would go to the doctor and get between 50 and 100 injections of corticosteroids directly into my scalp. These injections made my hair grow back, but before I knew it, another bald spot would crop up.

As a young woman, hair was a crucial part of my identity. I felt that my bright blond hair introduced me wherever I went; it defined me. Externally, I did everything I could to hide my hair loss. I parted my hair in different ways, plastered it in place with hair spray, went through periods when I would only wear a ponytail, and I ultimately began wearing a wig. Hiding my hair loss became an obsession. I looked into every mirror I passed by to see if a bald spot was visible, I was terrified when the wind blew, and I didn't want to go swimming for fear that my bald spots would show. My alopecia was my biggest secret, and I became a prisoner of my condition.

As my hair loss became worse over the years, I stopped wondering who I would be if I didn't have perfect hair and started wondering who would I be if I didn't have any hair at all. Would I be beautiful? Would people recognize me?

My self-loathing was deep and all-consuming. In my early teens, I began to turn to alcohol to help me cope with the pain. Drinking offered me an escape from the constant self-criticism that filled my mind and allowed me to feel more comfortable in social settings. After college, as my hair loss continued, I turned to prescription drugs to help me cope with my anxiety and suffering. Depending on substances to ease the stress turned out to be a dark path. My hair began falling out in bigger and bigger patches, and because of all of the steroid injections, drugs, and alcohol, my physical health began to decline.

I started to view life through a new lens, and I saw that injecting steroids into my body every month was merely putting a Band-Aid on the situation. If I actually wanted to heal, I would need to do some deeper work. For the first time, I began to see that the only way out of my pain was by going in.

In that moment, I knew that I was ready to let go and experience a new level of self-love. I decided to shave my head in an act of surrender, acceptance, and rebirth. It was powerful, emotional, and extremely vulnerable. Even six months later, as I type these words, I am once again filled with emotion as I remember the sense of rebirth I felt when I finally let go of struggle and took a deep dive into new depths of self-love. The day I shaved my head was one of the most uncomfortable, and liberating, days of my life.