Twenty years of hair loss, twenty years of hell.

[bawty81027]

Hi Guys,

Just signed up today. I have nothing to share here that hasn't been said a million times before. But after 21 years of suffering with hair loss, the opportunity this website presents to vent has finally gotten the best of me. In a way I'm ashamed of that, but it is what it is.

I've always resisted spending time discussing my hair loss because after all is said and done, there ain't no getting what we all really want... which is to revert the hair loss back to pre-loss conditions. Like a whole nose, a whole arm, or a whole leg, we understandably want a whole head of hair. But because there is no attaining that ideal solution, to sit around yapping about it is time lost in negativity, and time lost for other productive activities. We are alive for a startlingly short period of time (I tell myself)... we should use our time prudently.

Anyway, I'm 39 years old and I've been losing my hair since age 18. Throughout that time I've always summed it up as, "20 years too early," regarding how my hair has looked at any given time. I was 18 looking 38. This observation is obviously not scientific, but before it all started, I somehow got it in my naive head that this kind of thing always begins no earlier than in one's 40's. At age 17, I "knew" this kind of thing was decades away.

While the truth about it all rode quickly into my young world like a speeding Mack truck into a little girl's lemonade stand, my problem has been that despite herculean efforts to distract myself from it, I have not been able to shake the emotional devastation the hair loss has unleashed on my psyche. In that way, it definitely is disease-like.

At age 18 the beginning was characterized by shock. By age 20 the shock morphed into terror, which later evolved into deep sadness, which by age 30 became a crushing depression, which led me to where I am now... a numb resignation. The condition, via the depression, has literally caused me to fail at my career, and at this point the first 15 or so years of dread I experienced presenting myself in public has now begun to be displaced by a "third-person" pity of sorts. Now that I am (out of sheer exhaustion) beginning to surrender to it, I have pity for myself that 20 years of potentially positive living (my precious 20's and 30's) have been lost to the daily, dark, torturous state of mind I've been submerged in all this time. I'm not asking for pity, I'm just acknowledging that it's unfortunate, whether it's about me or anyone else.

Needless to say, with so many years to confront this issue, there isn't a "solution" I haven't explored, or a perspective I haven't heard. And obviously, no solution or perspective has brought relief. More than a full head of hair, I now just wish I could escape the feelings once and for all. Nearing middle age, I fear I will never know a year as an adult unconsciously blissful of what has happened to me.

It's incredible that with all the poverty, hunger, unfairness, and bloodshed one could experience in this crazy world, weathering something as "harmless" as hair loss can so crush the life out of someone. Intellectually, I really can see that it's no big deal. But emotionally it's a completely different story.

Do I have advice? I guess the only thing I can advise is that if you're just starting to notice a hint of hair loss, start swimming in Rogaine, which by all accounts seems to allow you to at least stay where you are. If you don't want to treat it, move quickly to work through the psychology of it so that if you're going to find peace, you will waste as few years as possible submersed in the mental hell of it all.

If you read this, thanks for taking the time, and good luck.