Going Bald Taught Me Not to Care About Stupid Shit
The cool thing about getting older is you learn what doesn’t really matter
A bald man.
This is all I am now, I thought to myself.
One of them. The men with no hair.
I gazed into the mirror and applied a gray paste carefully to the top of my head with a spatula. The paste stuck to the remaining hairs, matting them together as questions of a new identity loomed on the horizon like the light of a new day.
The treatment would have been more effective if you had come two years ago, the woman with the Eastern European accent had said to me three days earlier. There is, she grimaced, not much chance now to stimulate regrowth. I nodded and thought of the months it had taken to summon the courage to get myself to that cold, dead room.
I listened to her advice about moving the spatula most effectively across the surface of my scalp, absorbed statistics about follicle regeneration, paid too much money for a brace of medications, and descended the stairs. The two of us returned home through the muted light of the morning, my secret and I.
“And indeed there will be time
To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’
