My Hair and I: A complicated mess of tangles and therapy sessions
Session 1:
Day 0
Hair Strand Count: 0
Coping Technique: None
Can you tell me when this habit began?
The second week of my freshman year. An unopened email taunted me.
Urgent, it read.
Ten days of solidarity. Ten days away from my friends. Ten days of the school year were stolen. The culprit? COVID-19.
Two men entered my house. White masks covered their mouths to keep the germs away. Their bodies were stiff in dark blue suits. I stared at them, dumbfounded as one of them robotically declared, “We are representatives from the Ministry of Health. According to our data, you have been in close contact with an infected person and must quarantine. If you step more than ten feet away from your room, this band will beep.”
The other man latched the red band onto my arm and instructed me to keep it on at all times. House arrest, I thought—like a dog with an electric collar. Like a criminal in jail. I had no say.
Tears tumbled down my face and teeming bubbles of sadness, anger, and pure frustration stained my skin. I shrieked inconsolably, my words lost in between the words I was spewing out as I tried to make sense of the situation.
How did this make you feel?
Angry. Restless.
The house grew too quiet and far too still. I had nothing to say and nothing to hear. An uneasy emptiness settled inside me, coiling tight. My fingers fidgeted and my body tensed in annoyance as I sat in that pool of inescapable and haunting silence.
I hadn’t felt this type of disturbance before. My walls seemed to shrink, entrapping me between the splashes of pink and blue that coated them.
It became hazy. What sort of dystopian world had I been transported to? Colors boomed louder, swirling into ominous clouds. My chest grew tighter, and my worries began to come to life. From the depths of my heart where I had tucked them away, my deepest pitfalls emerged, ridiculing me as they swayed within the clouds of color.
Anything else?
Panic. Distress.
With my palms sweating and my fingers numb, I needed to feel something tangible to remind myself that those clouds of fear were not real, that I was not going insane.
My hands made their way up my head as I swayed back and forth. Comforted in the tangle of my curls, they stayed. A finger caught onto a strand. It was crinkled. Not as smooth as the rest. Slightly coarse. I twirled it gently and felt glossy hair against calloused fingers. I tugged. With the feeling of sweet release looming ever so close, I pulled the plug.
What did the hair look like?
It was black. Crinkled like I had felt it. Its root was crowned with a white keratin sheath. I had a strong desire for more. More hair. More roots. More sweet release. Please.
A menacing black web of hair strands formed, and it took a life of its own. It blew across the house, collecting more hair as it swept across the floors. It became a monstrous figure.
Diagnosis: Trichotillomania, listed under Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Session 2:
Day 25
Hair Strand Count: 1000
Coping Technique: Journaling
Have your friend or peers brought up the fact that you are balding?
“Why do you always wear a headband?” “Do you have hair cancer?”
“Your hair is patchy.”
They weren’t often, but I heard the comments, and I felt the stares frmo both friends and strangers. They stung each time.
In just a few months, my head had gone from a haven of luscious brown curls to a graveyard—a barren scalp with a few measly strands waiting to be pulled. The thinnest ponytail imaginable dangled, pathetically. I should have been worried.
What about your parents’ response?
I didn’t notice how fast I was losing hair, or how my hand stayed in my hair throughout the day. But behind the couches, under the dinner table, and on my bed, my parents saw the loose strands building up. Concern spelled out in the wrinkles on their forehead, their faces scrunching up each time I reached for my hair.
“Stop pulling.”
“STOP PULLING.”
“STOP PULLING YOUR HAIR,” they yelled.
But it was my hair. My choice. I was angered by their reaction, angered that they kept bringing it up, and angered that they noticed it before I did.
In retaliation and frustration, I continued to pull.
Is there a hairstyle you used to love?
French braids. Dutch braids. Intricate, neat braids. Those were my specialty. Now, that’s foreign to me.
Each morning, I woke up earlier and earlier. It took longer and it became harder to hide the bald patches. Up, down, up, down—over and over, I tied and retied my hair until my arms couldn’t lift anymore.
Fighting back the tears of exasperation was a struggle. I fought against it each day. Eventually, I gave up and settled for a ponytail.
This style lasted for four years.
So essentially, it has been four years since:
- I have had a haircut
- I have loved my hair
- I have properly taken care of my curls
- I have felt confident with my hair
- I have thought of my hair as anything but a disgusting, knotted inconvenience
- I have felt pretty
In fact, I can count on one hand the number of times I have let my hair down since then. And each time I do try, it has been a slap in the face.
What frustrates me is that I still don’t understand the why. The why that causes me to continuously pull my hair. With this terrifying unknown, the coping techniques I learned in therapy, and pleading cries of worry from my parents remain unheard.
Thus, my battle with the mirror is a lost cause.
Because I am too scared to see where my hair no longer grows. To see what others see when they pass by me.
The secret stays between my ponytail and me.
Session 3:
Day 50
Hair Strand Count: 5000
Coping Technique: Taping my fingers with Band-Aids to avoid pulling.
What are some of the ways you have tried to deal with this stressful habit?
“I run, a lot,” I answered. It was the few hours in the day when I wasn’t bound to a desk, where there was no chance for my hands to crawl up to my head and for my hair to be pulled. My hair stayed intact, and I felt in control.
During those heavenly hours, it was only me against the grunts of boars that roamed the Bukit Timah Forest.
I lost myself in the beauty of the world around me, not in the hair on my head. I pretended not to notice the cool wind brushing against my bare scalp and continued to tunnel down the path.
Step after step, the rhythmic sound of my feet was the constant I could count on.
To some people, “a lot of running” might mean twenty or thirty miles a week, but no, a minimum of fifty miles were required for me to function; for me to have an adequate time away from thinking, touching, or looking at my hair and from basically going insane.
If I couldn’t be pretty because of my “ugly” hair I decided that I was going to adopt a new identity: an athlete, praised for the sport, not for the look. I had to find something to feel confident about, something I could channel my energy into, and running was what that became.
I no longer wore dresses, nor bracelets, not anything that remotely resembled being “put together,” because there was always something missing: beautiful hair.
But what started as an escape spiraled into something else. Excessive running tumbled into an unhealthy obsession with eating the right kinds of food, exercising the correct number of times, getting the right number of steps in, rounding off every mile to an even number. The simple joy of roaming through the Bukit Timah forest vanished.
My parents saw the change, the color in my face was draining, and my obsession with running was taking over my life.
I could tell they wanted to say something, but at least I wasn’t pulling my hair.
Why did I need to fixate on something?
I asked why?
My parents asked why?
My therapist asked, why?
We didn’t know.
If I couldn’t control the strands on my head, I would have to control everything else. Running became hard. My one true love became hard.
My hair, more so the lack of, was taking everything I loved away from me. This only made me hate it more.
Possible cause for diagnosis: Desperate need for perfectionism.
Session 4:
Day 100
Hair Strand Count: Five Million
Coping Technique: Nothing. Nothing is Working.
Why do you think you pull your hair?
Are you kidding? I didn’t know. Did this lady really think I understood why this manic disease had infected my soul, my very being, and everything I had become? It had reached a point where stress was no longer a contributing factor, pulling my hair had just become a habit.
Habits take anywhere from 18 to over 250 days to break, she told me. But this habit? It felt unbreakable, it had become a ritual.
And I was over it.
I was over my parents staring at me with concern and yelling at me to stop touching my hair. I was over the jokes my friends were making about me being bald.
I was over being in therapy and having to refer to this lady I talked to once a week as the “hair-pulling lady,” instead of what she was: A therapist.
I was over being ashamed.
I was over everyone in my life knowing about this madness.
The journaling, the Band-Aids on my fingers, and the therapy sessions helped for short periods, days maybe weeks, but the hair-pulling continued to return in waves. Moments of anger, hopelessness, and frustration lead my fingers right back to my curls. The familiar tug comforts me.
These strands clutter my life, and sprinkle over my desk, reminding me of my struggle.
I don’t know when I will get my curls back. I don’t know when I’ll care for them the way they deserve or when I will feel like myself again.
My hair is a mess, too far from perfection, too far from good, too far from even okay. It is a patchwork of uneven lengths, longer in areas where it escaped my pulling, and shorter in areas that fell victim.
I don’t like it. I want to change it. But how?
I don’t think I will ever know.
Have there been moments of progress that give you any glimmer of hope?
There have been a few moments of rejoicing. The feeling of achievement when I wore my hair down to prom, was complimented on my growing curls, or caught a glimpse of my hair dancing in the wind as I ran.
But these moments of hope are far too sparse and far too short. They are soon followed with hours of concentrated hair-pulling and self-hatred.
“Did you buy a wig?” someone asked me at prom. The two seconds of beauty, that pure ecstasy I felt as I looked at my beautiful hair against my navy-blue gown, shattered.
The image of an untamed nest on my head reappeared in the mirror and I felt hopeless.
The smile on my face stayed put as I politely answered, but inside I crumbled. An overwhelming rush of sadness enveloped me, and I wanted to return to the comfort of my ponytail, the comfort of my shorts and t-shirts, and to the comfort in the tug of my curls.
Is my hair not good enough? Does it not look like my own? Is it still ugly? These thoughts swallowed me then and continue to loom today.
Perfectionism is hard. When you’re too far away from it, the task feels impossible. Tangled and confused, my hair and I need to find our way back to each other.