I Shaved My Head Due To Hair Loss | History, Thoughts & Reflections – Podcast

I shaved my head May 7, 2023, due to a second hair loss I got last year, an Inflammatory alopecia. I have had female pattern baldness (androgenetic alopecia) for 24 years, since the age of 21.

Podcast Episode and YouTube Links Below

I began wearing wigs 11 years ago at the age of 34.

I never expected to get a second hair loss, I never thought I’d be forced to NEED to make this choice for survival, in order to be able to continue to live with hair loss without it stealing any more of my life from me. 

I don’t love this, I don’t love seeing myself with a shaved head, but it is better than the alternative, it is better than the creaturish loss that was more obvious before. In the months prior to shaving, I had reached a place I could no longer look at myself in the mirror, at all. 

Listen On Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-womens-hair-loss-project/id1496551496?i=1000629123379

I made the decision to show my shaved head, after never showing my bio hair online for 16 years (the length of time I’ve been online talking about hair loss), I started my site in 2007. I did so because it was so difficult for me to do this, basically impossible… and the one thing that did help was seeing women that had done this FOR hair loss. For that reason, and that reason alone I made the difficult decision to show my head, knowing that I would get dismissive comments about my hair loss. I knew people would see follicles and judge, that’s how it goes. It doesn’t matter if 90% of your hair is gone, or that this destroyed your life for so long, or that you devoted 16 years of your life sharing about your journey, struggles and trumps with hair loss, and trying to help others, none of that matters, people judge.

Women have told me it looks like I would have a lot of hair (I most definitely do not), or it looks like I’d have enough hair for a cute short hair cut (as though I wouldn’t have chosen that as an option IF it was an option. I cut my hair very short in 2012, I haven’t been able to make a ponytail with my bio hair since that time. If I had enough hair for a cute, short hair cut, I guarantee you I never would have shaved my head, this was incredibly difficult and painful for me to do. I’ve also been told I have more hair than someone else (the person commenting) as though this was a competition, some else wrote “You have more hair than me, Congratulations.” It’s unreal, truly.

Those type of comments have made this part of my journey more difficult and more painful than it already was.

YouTube Clip From Podcast

Shaving your head, helps conceal the loss, helps it to look even, that’s the point, part of it anyways, the other being I don’t have to see it fall out all over, but the main thing was I could no longer look at myself in the mirror anymore, it hurt too much, I was brushing my teeth in a beanie, I was feeling paralyzed in my life… again, after already knowing what it’s like to have lived a decade without hair loss being at the forefront of every thought. After living with hair loss successfully for so long.

I have no regrets on shaving my head, I wish it didn’t come to this, I wish I didn’t get a second hair loss, but this is where things are at this time, and I have to work with the hand I’ve been dealt.

Please me respectful of my hair loss journey and that of others, this is hard, this is NOT easy, and I’m still adjusting to it. A few weeks back someone wrote me a comment and said “I hate you had to shave your head,” and that was probably the most validating comment I ever received in my life about my hair loss. I read that and tears just poured out of my face. Someone got it, someone got ME, how devastating this has been for me, how difficult.

I do accept this, I know I’ll be OK, and it’s getting easier to see myself this way, but that doesn’t mean this doesn’t still suck, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been painful.