I Was Bald Because of My Anxiety
As a kid, I didn’t know why I was pulling my hair out — I just knew it made me feel ashamed
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I was eight years old when it started.
My eyes would be itchy, but I couldn’t exactly scratch my eyeballs. So I would reach up with my tiny fingers and do the only thing that gave me momentary relief — I’d pull out my eyelashes. My parents thought it was allergies, and while allergy meds did get rid of my sneezing and runny nose, they didn’t help me stop pulling.
Soon, all of my eyelashes were gone. Keeping my head down hid it for the most part, but people still noticed sometimes. One day, when my great-grandmother was visiting with my mom and my sisters, she stopped what she was doing and peered at me.
“Why do you look different?” she asked. “I can’t figure out what’s changed.”
I avoided her eyes, heart beating fast, while my mom explained that I’d pulled out all of my eyelashes.
I don’t know why I had such terrible anxiety as a kid, but I did. As to why it manifested itself as eyelash pulling? Some research says it’s due to genetics. Once, at a family reunion, I noticed that one of my cousins didn’t have any eyelashes either. When I asked my mom about it, she told me that my cousin had pulled out all of her eyelashes so many times that they’d stopped growing back.
I was mortified. When we got home, I stood in front of my bathroom mirror, teary-eyed, begging God to let my eyelashes grow back. I was panicked at the thought of losing them for good.
Vulnerability was something I shut myself out of before I even knew what it really was.
As a kid, asking for help with my eyelash pulling was out of the question. I’d always shied away from asking my parents questions about things I didn’t understand. I frequently got UTIs, and I’d hide those, too. Vulnerability was something I shut myself out of before I even knew what it was.
Thankfully, the urge to pull seemed to naturally subside as I got older. I still struggled with anxiety — there were times when I thought everyone was secretly laughing at me, even if I was just walking through the grocery store. But it was manageable, due to distractions like schoolwork and intensive ballet. The worst of it was behind me, I thought.
Except it wasn’t. I was 15 when it started up again.
By that point, everything gave me anxiety. So when I signed up to volunteer as kitchen staff at a local summer camp, my stress levels were suffocatingly high. I wasn’t allowed any electronics at camp, so how would I set an alarm to wake up on time? What if someone made a joke that I didn’t understand, and I’d be forever pegged as the sheltered homeschooler that I was?
With all that worry came the pulling — not of my eyelashes this time, but of the hair on my head. I didn’t want to. Many people with trichotillomania claim that the pulling is subconscious, and that really is the best way to describe it. I literally couldn’t help myself.
Camp actually turned out to be fun, but it also came with a lot of anxiety. Anxiety over what people thought of me. Anxiety over not knowing how to do my job. Anxiety that my bosses were judging me for not liking horses when I worked at a horse camp. One evening during a Bible teaching session, I was so worked up over nothing that I literally couldn’t stop pulling. It was one strand after another, until there was a visible pile of hair on the floor.
The advantage of working in the kitchen was that I had to wear a baseball cap, which prevented me from pulling out my hair. Still, there was plenty of time that I wasn’t in the kitchen. By the time camp was over, I had a small bald spot on the back of my head.
As the years went on, there were so many times I almost reached out — to my family, to my friends, to anyone — but, just as I had throughout my childhood, I ultimately kept myself closed off from everyone.
In shutting everyone out, I shut myself in — trapped myself alone in my own personal hell. I barely even wrote about my hair pulling in my journal, and if I did, I kept it vague and cryptic. I took photos of the back of my head so I could look at new bald spots, but I deleted them right away. I was terrified of someone finding out.
Despite a lifetime of symptoms, I was oblivious to the concept of anxiety disorders, and I had no idea what was going on. It wasn’t until I realized I could Google anything that I finally looked to the internet for some help. I was sitting on my bed when I typed in “why am I pulling my hair out?” and binge-read a bunch of articles telling me that I wasn’t alone. That this was something called an anxiety disorder.
Everything clicked, especially when I discovered English vlogger Rebecca Jane Brown, who was very open with the ups and downs of trichotillomania. But while knowing I wasn’t alone gave me momentary comfort, it wasn’t enough to stop myself from pulling my hair out.
It also wasn’t enough to get me to open up to anyone around me. My secret-keeping hit its highest point during a shopping trip with my mom and sisters. I snuck off to a hair salon at the mall, hoping to avoid my mom discovering how bad my pulling was at our next family hair appointment.
Since I didn’t know the woman cutting my hair, I was frank with her. “Just letting you know,” I said, “I have an anxiety disorder called trichotillomania, and that means I pull out my hair when I’m stressed. My hair’s a mess. That’s why I’m here.”
She was so kind, assuring me that she’d do her best for me. Then she told me about her son — how he was my age and how he had anxiety too. She helped me to relax, and I was so grateful.
When I reunited with my mom, she was surprised at my new haircut. But she didn’t make a big deal out of it, so I didn’t explain why I’d gone behind her back.
High school was awful. It became more of a struggle to hide my new bald spots. I watched, day by day, as my thick hair turned thin. I remember the panic as I realized that the left side of my head was bald. The internal scolding. The fear of not being able to hide it any longer. Somehow I managed, thanks to a side part and some bobby pins.
It felt like my life revolved around hiding my freak disorder.
Junior year, my sister and I had friends over for a sleepover. I woke up multiple times that night in a panic, worrying that my bald spot was showing. Even when I was alone, I was terrified to fall asleep. What if my parents came into my bedroom to kiss me goodnight and discovered how bad my hair pulling had become? It felt like my life revolved around hiding my freak disorder, which led to exhaustion, which led to — you guessed it — more stress.
Despite my best efforts to conceal my anxiety and its physical manifestations, there were moments when people clearly realized something was amiss. One Sunday, just after church had ended, a friend’s mother said to me, “Why do you pull your hair out? You look like a gorilla picking bugs off of another gorilla.”
I gripped the back of my chair while stumbling through an answer before my mother stepped in, saying something like, “I know, it’s getting so bad.” While they discussed my hair pulling amongst themselves, I slipped away and hid in the boiler room, fighting back tears on the way there.
I don’t know why my friend’s mom thought that would be a good thing to say to a teenage girl. All her words did was leave me with a deep sense of shame. While it led to me not pulling out my hair in church anymore, it wasn’t for a healthy reason, and my mental health was worse because of it.
By the end of my junior year, I was exhausted from hiding my disorder. From my family’s hair stylist, who asked why my hair was uneven. From the boy in my homeschool group who thought it was hilarious to steal my bobby pins — the only thing keeping my secret safe. From anyone who ever wanted to touch my hair for any reason.
When it was time to cut my hair again, I told my family’s hair stylist to chop it all off. Sitting rigid in her chair, I explained why my hair was so uneven.
“Oh, I thought maybe you had brain surgery or something,” she said. Then, while she trimmed away at what was left of my long hair, she asked me things like, “So why exactly do you pull your hair out?” and, “Does distracting yourself work? Like, fiddling with a necklace or playing with one of those stress balls?”
I answered her questions nervously, explaining that distractions didn’t always work since the pulling is often subconscious, praying that she’d cut my hair faster so I could go home.
After so many years of secretly suffering, it was a relief to tell the world.
Maybe I was sick of hiding. Maybe I didn’t want to feel alone anymore. Maybe I wanted the attention. But after my left side had grown back in, I became very verbal about my hair-pulling disorder. My parents had figured it out at some point during my high school years, but we rarely talked about it openly. Probably because they were as lost as I had been, and because shutting them out was what I did best. Instead, I opened up to my close friends. I wrote a blog post detailing everything I felt. After following Rebecca Jane Brown for a few years, I was ready to show how far I’d come. To be a beacon of hope to those who still felt alone and trapped in their disorders.
After so many years of secretly suffering, it was a relief to tell the world. My day-to-day stress level was still high, but at least I didn’t have to worry about hiding it anymore. I managed to stop giving myself bald spots. After opening up to a friend, I even found out that she and another girl from my local homeschooling community had a milder form of trichotillomania. They’d been able to stop pulling, and that was huge for me. For the first time, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I had support to keep going.
I’m 22 now, and I still pull out my hair. In fact, due to a stressful time last fall, I currently have a small patch on the left side of my head that’s shorter than the rest. The pulling comes and goes. Sometimes I only do it occasionally, or I’m able to catch myself and occupy my hands elsewhere. Other times, my scalp is sore, scabbed, and red.
My eyelashes never filled out again. They’re still thin. Short. I’ve found a mascara that works wonders for me, though, filling out my eyelashes so they look natural again.
I’ve also learned a lot about myself over the past couple of years. Some of it has been because of trichotillomania. Some of it has been because I left my parents’ church and now go somewhere better for my relationship with God. And some of it has been because I’ve recognized that ever since I was a little kid, I’ve been trapping myself, hiding, shoving my issues down so deep that I didn’t even know they existed.
I may be an adult, but it’s like I’m growing up all over again, learning about myself, discovering the world. I don’t know if I’ll ever fully stop pulling out my hair. It may wane in the good times and flare up during the bad times. And honestly, I’m okay with that.
I’m human, not perfect.
