Some days man I feel the weight of it..

I see the vellus hairs thickening and I can feel them in the balding vertex and crown in the horseshoe pattern of my scalp and I want to scream grow damn you.. grow!!

I am tired of shaving to hide what I have and I have for many years grown to be tired because I was ashamed and had low self esteem. I hated the self conscious of looking behind me to see who was looking at my baldness from behind and commenting on it. I would be hard pressed to take my cap off in a bar first thing entering the door. I wanted to be able to NOT wear hats in the wintertime like guys with full heads of hair and just wearing ear muffs.

And then one day I stopped giving a crap. I realized the ridicule of strangers whom I would never see again did not matter in the overall picture or for that matter women too shallow to see past my hairline. Taking propecia for the past five to six months feeling my testicles burn and then that feeling stopped after two days and then the watery low volume semen and then that stopped and returned to normal after about a week.

It might take the full year to see real progress.. maybe sooner or maybe never. I hopped on many products including the Minoxidil by UpJohn when it was being sold for almost 70 dollars for a few ounces.

But I started balding at least 6 years before propecia came about and way before generics could be purchased on the internet as the internet was brand spanking new in the nineties. At rapid rate I became a norwood 4 by the end of my twenties. Now I am somewhere clinging to the later stages of NW5. At this point if I could reverse it back to an NW3 I would consider it a victory of sorts.

My dad is already an NW7 what is left of his hair is a white wreath of hair with sideburns and my mother took to wearing wigs after her fifites now well into her seventies I have caught glimpses and there is uneven baldness ravaging her scalp like it did her mother...

Sometimes I catch glimpses of her embarassment as the wind catches it blowing it up a little or worse she has to adjust it a little because some of her real hair is showing unevenly under it.

And then they would look at me with my hair growing out showing the thinning areas and the bald spot and they would ask me to shave my head with the question " what are you trying to do ?" or trying to mask an uncomfortable or unfavorable expression on their faces. Sometimes it would be phrased as " you look better bald anyway than when you ever had hair.

Fine but it is a cold comfort reminding me of a time when I had options. i could shave my head or grow out an afro to have rivaled any one of the Jackson Five with Lenny Kravitz sideburns

It just feels like rolling craps every day and hoping to hell you don't roll snake eyes..