I have an autoimmune disorder. Wikipedia actually calls it a disease, but I prefer not to call it that, because usually when you tell someone that you have a disease, they immediately assume that this is going to be your last conversation with them. There’s little you can do from that point on to convince people that you’re not dying.

I’m not dying.

When I was thirteen, I lost about thirty percent of my hair. For something as traumatic as this was for a teenage girl, I actually have a horrible memory of the event. I remember finding a bald patch at the back of my head, probably the size of a silver dollar, and asking my mother if it was normal. Spoiler: it’s not normal. My mother, like many of the people in my life then and now, reacted like I was dying. From that point on, I just remember my dermatologist’s soft, wrinkly face growing more and more worried as she struggled to maintain a comforting tone, my hair swirling down the drain, more patches, steroid injections, and, ultimately, the quiet feeling that this was something I was not supposed to talk about. So, I didn’t. The patches got bigger, and I hid them. I slowly came to terms with the fact that I was no longer in control of what was happening to my body, and that I was designated, by god or nature or something else, to be the girl who deserved to hide.

Alopecia areata is a non-contagious autoimmune disorder/disease/problem wherein the body sort of becomes allergic to its own hair follicles and attacks them like it would any other kind of harmful invader. Hair usually comes out suddenly in small, round patches that can become larger. There’s not a specific cause, though a lot of people make arguments that stress, viruses, and even diet can be the root cause. But, there’s no universal this-is-it cause for alopecia areata and there’s no real this-is-it cure. Your body’s just really great at protecting itself when it feels threatened. If your immune system feels like your hair is a threat at the time, then it’s going to do something about it. In most cases, people only have a few patches, they don’t get too big, and the problem is resolved within a year. In a few cases, though, an individual can grow to lose all of the hair on their head (Alopecia Totalis) and, in even fewer cases, people can lose all of the hair on their bodies (Alopecia Universalis). At any time, the hair can spontaneously grow back, which is great.

In that same vein, however, it can fall out again at any point. I don’t remember anyone telling me that. Maybe they did, and I just denied it.

My hair grew back within a year and I refused to look back. Vehemently. I told myself this was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and I would never have to deal with it again. Moreover, I told myself that no one could know that this happened. I was blessed with about seven years of problem-free hair that allowed me to sink comfortably into my denial of this condition, and to look back at it as something that happened to me Once-Upon-A-Time that no longer was a part of my life. I didn’t realize, however, the damage that this caused until much later. I didn’t realize what hiding and placing so much value in my appearance and my hair was doing to me.

In November, after battling a bout of what I thought was a bad flu, juggling a trying course load, and breaking things off with a boy, I ran my fingers through my hair in the shower and pulled out a handful of it. While I’d advise that most of you not take something like that as a sign of a more serious condition, I knew all too well what this meant for me. I’m going to go ahead and say that I probably over-reacted a little. When I say “over-reacted a little”, I mean that I found myself dry-heaving and sobbing on my parents’ bedroom floor wearing nothing but a towel as my mother, clueless, looked on.

For those of you that read that and thought “it’s just hair,” I want to tell you that you’re right.

It is just hair.

Britney Spears shaved her head in 2007 and people called her crazy. People thought that this was surely the sign of someone who had finally “broken” and gone insane. Now that I’ve reached a point in my life where I’m actually considering shaving my own head just so I don’t have to watch my hair fall out again, I actually find myself thinking about Britney Spears a lot and how sane she seems to me. In an interview with Today in the wake of Britney’s meltdown, T-Pain (yes, I’m citing T-Pain) said, “That was the most beautiful thing in the world. Do you know why she was shaving her head? Because it was so important to other people. She is like, ‘Listen. Don’t touch my hair anymore. Stop touching my hair.’ She still had hair and all that (when I worked with her). People were like, ‘We’ve got to make your hair before you go outside. You can’t leave.’ She went ... ‘Now I don’t have hair. What you going to do?’”

For years, Britney Spears had been sold to people as an attractive, likeable, beautiful, and marketable idol. By shaving her head, Britney Spears stole herself back from the people who were trying to sell her. She let the power of being conventionally beautiful and attractive go in order to gain autonomy. She did it in order to say that she was the one who really owned herself, and she was going to remain alive and true regardless of whether or not she was conventionally “Pretty Enough” to be marketable.

With this idea in mind, I was wholly confident for a few weeks that I wanted to buzz my hair off. I was ready for autonomy, and I was ready to finally show some control over my own body. I very unfairly ran this idea, without the context of my alopecia, past a lot of people in my life. I just said “I think I might shave my head” and nothing else because I wanted to know what people would say. One of the most common responses I got, and the response that easily bothered me the most, was “Well, shouldn’t you ask your boyfriend before you do it?”

This is why I’m writing about this. This is why I want to talk to you.

Hearing that takes me back to when I scrolled through the forum posts of hundreds of women who have this, and who say they feel themselves dwindling away with the rest of their hair. It puts me in the shoes of a woman who posted deep in a forum that she left her boyfriend because she knew that he “deserved better” than to watch his girlfriend slowly grow less and less “attractive”. It takes me back to the girl I was who would hold her breath and clench her teeth before stepping into the shower because I never knew how much I’d lose that day, or how I would reflexively flinch any time anyone touched my hair. It takes me back to the girl I was when I told my boyfriend what was happening, when I could barely get the garbled words out because of the tears and the snot and the fact that I could barely breathe because this was the first person I had told in years. It takes me back to the girl I was during the weeks before I told him, when hearing him say “I love you” just felt like a million tiny, aching splinters under my skin because I was so completely confident that he, or any person for that matter, would never really love me if I didn’t look “Pretty Enough”.

But it also took me back to the girl I became after I was made to feel like my appearance was the most important thing about me. It took me back to the girl who thought she was too dark, too fat, too ugly to deserve attention, and who did horrible, horrible things to not be that way.

“But you’re so pretty with your hair now.”

"You've just always had long hair."

“Well, what would your boyfriend say?”

That’s enough. I think I’ve had enough.

It’s not the individuals saying these things that anger me. It’s the idea that we’ve been brought up to think this way.

It is bizarre to me that after decades of being used by others for the benefit of others, Britney Spears was called crazy when she finally did something for herself. It is bizarre to me that, after everything I have done to look “Pretty Enough” people still think I need to ask someone else’s permission in order to do something to my own body that would make me infinitely happier. It is bizarre to me that my priority should be making sure I’m appealing enough to hold onto my boyfriend before my own actual comfort.

Women do so much to try to show others that they are beautiful, and it is somehow never enough.

I have done so much to try to prove that I’m worth loving. I have done so much for you.

And now, I don’t care if you don’t like how I look. I wasn't put on this planet to spend my time trying to be beautiful for others until I die. I realize now that I am never going to win this game of “Pretty Enough” because it is designed for women to lose until they lose themselves. There is not enough pain in the world that I could put myself through in order to finally feel the relief that comes along with being “Pretty Enough.”

I have to look at those girls now, after all the time I’ve wasted looking at everyone else. I have to look at the girl who was thirteen and believed that no one would ever love her and that no one would ever stay if she lost all the dead protein on her head; I think about how small she is, and how unfair it seems that someone so young could think such horrible things about herself.

There are a lot of things that girl should've heard. It's late now, but I'll say them:

I don’t care who else stays anymore because I’m here, and I've been here the whole time.

I stayed. I’m staying.

I love you, and I always will.