Why I Wear Wigs.

This sounds really dramatic, as if I just started wearing them for this really awful reason. I do just generally enjoy them, I think everyone can benefit from them if they have hair. If you have black hair and you think it would be nice to try out white, your hairstylist will bless the ground you walk on for just getting a wig instead.

But the reality is, I wear them much more often than I used to because they make me feel better about myself.

Because I have alopecia.

I still have hair, enough so that you don't really notice it, but I'm having to move my hair around a lot more to cover up the thinning than I used to. I don't really like to think about it too often because my prized possession has always been my hair - it took years for me to not hate it, years before I stopped trying to make it straight and letting hairdressers trample over my wishes and attempt to 'control it'. I never even cut it more than a trim, except for the times I put my trust in the wrong stylists.

Hair has always been so vital to who I am as a person. I am Rey, the girl with curly hair. I am Rey, who has hundreds of pictures of her wet hair in the mirror because she promises it reaches down past her hips when it's straight. I am Rey, who spent every ounce of her money on buying hair products to protect her hair.

I am Rey, who is losing her hair.

The first time I noticed my hair thinning, I remember crying for hours. Yesterday it was okay, and today I knew, because I had so many pictures of my hair over the years that the reality wasn't easy to find. I cried and I cried. My friends gave me good advice: see a doctor. So I did, I had at least one appointment every month for over a year, I was placed on a few waitlists and got acquainted with my local dermatology unit. Often enough that my doctor and I are note buddies now, because I have the miraculous ability of being able to read any hand writing, no matter how incomprehensible. He took me seriously, which was a surprise because I emit a vibe that seems to not do me any favours in that area.

The day I was told that there was nothing more I could do, I was in a little private room with six doctors fondling my scalp and discussing the efficiency of how often I was taking iron tablets. Apparently I can take one every three days instead of three everyday, though they were being a bit dramatic because they were talking about my 'quality of life' - I don't really think about the side-effects of taking copious amounts of iron but they were very serious about the cost of my daily life. And then they looked at my charts, back at my scalp, at all the things I'd done like stuffing myself full of iron and medicated shampoos, and then they said that I have alopecia. So it was a really lovely day. They were quite nice about it though, my original doctor fixed my hair before I left and said that if I moved a little section of the crown of my hair to the left, I could cover the new section that found itself sparce. I love my skin, but bright paper white really does scream 'you can see my scalp where you shouldn't'.

Anyway, now I'm doing things despite being told I can't do much, which always squeezes my heart when I remind myself of it. I take iron and avoid iron inhibiting foods in the morning to reach the top 1% of iron levels people tend to reach (it's distracting from my protein goals because why does egg and calcium stop iron from absorbing? And I can't multitask like that, I was already awful at macros. Not that I'm giving up. Just complaining about my current lack of direction) and I'm using all sorts of medicated shampoos, investing in minoxidil products I cannot afford because it's like a subscription of £30 a month for the rest of your life, and I'm dealing with ugly hair until I can afford to consistently see a good hairdresser and actually have my hair dyed to a nice colour I don't have to bleach the life out of my remaining strands to achieve.

So, my hair is falling out, and it's also currently a bit ugly. I'm rocking it though with a claw grip - I gave up on ponytails a long time ago because you can tell how sparce my hair is when it's not laid down. I need a better one though, because my claw is literally falling to pieces by the minute because my unbleached hair is too smooth to keep anything up with. At least it's technically healthy once it's left the confines of my skin. I am the problem.

Now you can see why I wear wigs. I do wear them a lot, just whenever I want to feel really pretty. This issue with my hair over the last year and a half has been life changing, in good ways and bad. I want to keep my hair so bad, but I centred myself around it more than I thought, and the idea of losing my hair made me scared of losing my identity. Her and I were really tangled up at one point (in more ways than one, because I will sit there for hours a week just untangling the tricky bleached bits gently enough that it doesn't pull on my head). I realised that noticing so early meant I had time to do something about it - to alter what I put value on and redirect it somewhere that it can't be taken from me. A debatable one is tattoos - I spent so much time on tattooing last year, half of my money, because I wanted to feel some version of who I am expressed on myself visually. If not the red of my hair, it has to be the ink in my skin. And I have tattoos on my torso - can't take those away without me dying in the process, so they're definitely sticking around. I did consider what I would do if someone skinned me, but then I came to the conclusion that it's unlikely, and disregarded the thought.

But it's more than that - I needed more. So I built myself up on the inside, threw myself into figuring out what I could do to make myself genuinely happy, as a person outside of my looks. As a teenager, I'd done what every girl has ever done and placed my worth on validation about my beauty. How well my day went was entirely dependent on how I thought people perceived me, and male validation was the most important thing of all. If I wasn't seen as pretty, I would be left with who I was as a person - flawed and sad, the kind of person who romanticised my struggles so hard that I wore them like a badge of honour, sinking deeper and deeper into the familiar comfort of my own misery. Happiness is a skill, not a given like the books say. Even something as natural as emotion is a skill that must be practised to be good at. When I discovered my hair issue, I was rather out of practice. I had been working on it since I was nineteen and I'd decided I didn't want to be like this anymore, having aged into the adult I'd never expected to stick around long enough to see. But this was the turning point, the moment I realised how deeply I associated the value of my character with the quality of my visual self. It was difficult to figure out how to move on from that and stop observing myself from an outsiders perspective whilst living my life and trying to be happy - I always spent my time thinking about how I would be perceived whilst doing it, even when I was alone, even when I was the rawest form of myself. I am always observed by myself. I'll write another blog post about this, because though I haven't really achieved decentring my looks from the way I live my life, it's a topic I feel needs to be spoken about more, because it really detracts from what you feel you can do. I have avoided making videos for years, despite wanting to, because I prefer to view myself as a perfect still image. It's a burden I will spend this year trying to leave behind.

Nowadays, I am happier, I have a rounded personality with goals, a bunch of wigs, and a lot less hair. But it's okay, sometimes unideal stuff happens and we just have to be sad about it and move onto the next thing life has to offer. For me, life has been offering a lot of tea recently, and I think even that is something to be joyous about. For what is hair compared to the moments you get to sit and be present with the heat of a mug of tea steaming up the tip of your nose and the heat as you cup it within your bare hands. It's a nice life when you look in the right places, even when you're losing hair.