by Kim Harrison
“There’s a lot of damage to your hair here at the back… What’s going on? Did you get layers put in?”
I could feel my palms turning clammy. All I could manage to reply was, “Yeah, I had some layers there.”
I was sitting, in a golden bridesmaid dress, next to my friend—the bride—on the morning of her wedding. She had treated us to the full service: hair, nails, make-up. I should have been excited, grateful for the gift, but instead, I just kept my eyes glued to the clock, counting down the minutes until it would be over.
Please don’t ask more questions, please don’t find out, I repeated silently to myself like a mantra.
Some five or so years later, I could feel the sweat on my palms again, only this time it was spreading up to my scalp.
“Is it raining outside?” Mark, my new hairstylist, asked, as he started to comb through my hair.
“No. I just walked fast.”
My cheeks flushed red, and my grip on the black leather chair tightened.
“Before we start, I need to tell you something. I have trichotillomania. I pull my own hair out.”
It wasn’t until I felt the tepid water rinsing over my head that I began to breathe again. I’d done it—I’d told a new hairstylist I had trichotillomania. For the first time ever. Although I still looked at my hands for most of the appointment, avoiding the mirror, and whispering my responses to questions about how I wanted my hair styled, my mind was not begging me to escape before the stylist found out.
I don’t remember Mark’s exact words to me in response to this revelation. His body language said, “it’s ok, it’s no big deal,” even if those precise words never left his mouth. We didn’t spend too much time talking about the condition although later he did tell me about someone he knew who had it, and we had some conversations about anxiety. What I remember most was the feeling of acceptance. He never judged me. Never told me to take more care of my hair or showed any frustration at the difficulty of cutting and styling hair with bald and uneven patches. I’d had enough negative experiences with stylists who, I’m sure out of the best of intentions, had forcefully encouraged me to look after my hair better to profoundly and immediately feel the difference when a stylist simply accepts you and your hair the way they are.
I hadn’t just got lucky choosing Mark. I’d done my homework. Prior to that first appointment, I’d researched more than thirty hair salons in Vancouver, discounting any that seemed more focused on quality of results over customer care. I walked past the ones on my shortlist to get a feel for the space and crossed off anywhere the lights seemed too bright, the space too public, the owner too brash. Before booking my appointment, I re-read Mark’s bio at least ten times to be sure—as sure as I could be—that I was making the right choice.
After that first appointment, Mark took care of my hair for the next seven years. I looked forward to my hair appointments, had fun trying out different cuts and colours, and found I had lots in common with Mark; I can’t imagine many hairstylists getting that excited over the Megaman costume I was making for my then three-year-old son. He was my stylist right up until my family and I moved out of province.
This past week, I realized that I’d been seeing my current stylist for almost a year and hadn’t told her about my trichotillomania. When I first met her, my pulling had been minimal and I was fairly sure there were no noticeable bald or uneven patches. Recently, however, I’d been pulling more frequently and now worried that she would be able to tell something was ‘wrong.’
Since leaving Vancouver, I’d lived in two different provinces and had told three new stylists that I had trichotillomania. It hadn’t got any easier. Each time, I had to ignore the inner voices telling me I was a freak, and that I would be laughed out, rejected, yelled at. Each time I had to eat dry toast and chew on gum to stop myself throwing up over the floor of the salon, and each time I spent the hours after my appointment in bed, re-watching “The Internship” and binging on chocolate, unable to stop the tears stinging my face.
As my thumb hovered over my current stylist’s number, I wondered if I could come up with an excuse to postpone the appointment or switch salons, or maybe I could leave town, change my name, or say I lost all my hair in a freak lightning incident.
I put my phone down, made myself tea with honey, and opened my journal. I wrote down all my fears around her finding out I had trichotillomania, all the worst-case scenarios, all the bad experiences at hair salons, all the times I felt I didn’t belong and didn’t deserve to be here. I let the tears drop onto the page, smudging the ink. My bottom lip was trembling so much, I couldn’t finish my tea.
Then I stopped. I took some deep breaths, opened my laptop, and created my own ‘trichotillomania card’ in Canva. I chose the prettiest font I could and printed it on thick pink paper.
The next day I handed it to my stylist as I said the words, “I realized there’s something about me and my hair that I haven’t told you. I have trichotillomania. It’s not a bad habit and it’s not self-harm. I’ve had it since I was 9 years old, and I’m now at a stage where I want to talk about it and hopefully even help others who have it. So it’s important that I tell you about it.”
She studied the card, asked me some questions, then invited me to tip my head back. As the familiar tepid water rinsed over my hair, I once again felt some of the anxiety lifting. I was proud of the fact that I’d not only set my intention and shared my condition with her, but the card I’d made for myself had worked. It was a fun, creative tool to help me, and hopefully others. So why did I still feel like crying and running back to my car?
The rest of the appointment was okay—my stylist seemed to talk more than usual, maybe because she felt more comfortable with me. We chatted a little about how she was introduced to trich as part of her studies, and the differences between the terms in French and in English (I’m now based in Quebec). But I didn’t feel elated the way I thought I would. I just felt flat. I went home and made myself something nice and nourishing to eat, then went to bed and watched a favourite show on my laptop.
The next morning I woke up more energized than I’d been in a long time. I opened my journal and scribbled down everything I’d done the day before. Exclamation marks seemed to flow from my pen as I described how I’d shared my condition, and I wrote the words “I did it!” in fancy letters right in the middle of the page. The prior day’s let-down sensation now made perfect sense: it was the adrenaline leaving my body.
This is still a really big deal for you, I wrote to myself, so no wonder you felt exhausted and vulnerable. I smiled as I read over those last thoughts, and then watched as one final question appeared on the page. Now you’ve done this, what’s your next step?
In the next post, check out Kim’s 5 Tips for Telling Your Hair Stylist You Have Trichotillomania
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Kim Harrison is a writer and teacher. She shares poems and creative resources for adults and children at http://rubyriddlestein.com/
She has been living with trichotillomania since the age of 9 and has recently started to share her experiences through personal essays and poems.
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