Article 8 of 8

by Stephen Morris, Guest Writer

Stephen’s journey with self image from an early age really got me in the feels. Stephen tells his story of a hope rollercoaster genuinely with wit and personality, which I love. The lesson that hits me like a ton of bricks when I read this is that the thing you’re hoping for may have been within you all along; realizing that powerfully changes your life. Consider part of our human purpose as living in peace and harmony with our own truth. - Brandi

“So, what do you want to do bud?” 

I was 14, going on 15 at the time. Leaning against the wooden porch of our deck, staring off into the backwoods of Tennessee. And despite the beauty of the scenery, the sounds of the cicadas, fireflies dancing in the yard, and a clear sky all I could say was:

“What do you think I should do?” 

My dad looked back at me, and it was nice having him home for a change. Being in the military for most of his life, and a good chunk of mine, it was almost odd having him home for one of the serious moments in my life. But here we were, trying to figure out how I was going to go into my freshman year of high school.

If you know anything about being a teenager, and that calm before the hormonal, peer-pressure, anxiety filled storm the first year of high school can be, then you know it’s enough to freeze you to the spot, no matter how hot and humid the weather is. Something snapped me out of my thought spiral - a look, a nudge, a “hey,” I can’t quite remember - but I know I had made my decision before he spoke up again. I wanted the confirmation of at least one person that my idea wasn’t as crazy as it sounded. Dad said:

“Well, you can go on and do what we’ve been doing. Mom will take you to the school your first day, and have a talk with the principal, and make sure you have a note for all your classes. Or, you can shave it all off. Own it. That’s what I think you should do.” 

My foot hadn’t stopped bouncing the entire time we stood there.

Nervous habit I suppose, or a way for part of my ADHD-riddled brain to occupy its time while the other half happily filled my thoughts with every possible combination of outcomes. From best case scenario, to worst, too much worse, to life ending, to I’ll move away and live with the forest creatures the rest of my life. 

Let’s rewind a few years. Roughly a decade. 

10 years or so earlier

I’m four years old now, possibly five - memories can be pretty finicky.

What I remember is coming home from school one day and my mom asking if I had been pulling out my eyebrows.

Of course not, what kid would do that? Well as it turns out, loads of kids. But how was I supposed to know? I told my mother no, and so the inspections began. For weeks, my mom would check my eyebrows and see they were only getting worse.

Slowly but surely, every hair I had would vanish. Eyebrows, eyelashes, arm hair, and of course, bald patches on my head, beginning with a small patch about the size of a quarter on the back of my head.

Queue the first appointment with a pediatrician. 

“Well, maybe it’s ringworm. I’m going to prescribe an anti-fungal; apply as directed.”

Naturally, the hair loss wasn’t due to ringworm. I didn’t have the itchy skin or scaly appearance of ringworm. But we did the anti-fungal cream anyways. Then to another doctor to have me be told that it was due to an allergy and perhaps changing shampoo and conditioner would fix it. So, for weeks I used Selsun-Blue, which is for dandruff, but once again, that didn’t work. 

“Maybe it’s a sign of stress. You are a military family, and moving schools can be difficult for everyone in the family, especially children.” 

This is the sentiment from every doctor I would see for multiple years all blended into one. None of which would know what was wrong with me.

Why at the age of four was I losing my hair and how could I go back to being normal?

I started hating the doctors, or at the very least becoming apathetic to their diagnoses. If they knew what was up, I’d be fixed already right? I thought, what’s the point in going anymore? They’re just going to continue throwing drugs at me until something sticks or it hurts.

Queue the doc that decided he’d try something a bit more radical.

This fun treatment was “Burn Therapy.” I’m unsure if it’s still practiced today, but the thought at the time was that if they induced an irritant to my skin, that it would trigger an inflammatory response from my body. This increases blood flow to the area and thus the immune system would know exactly where to go and fix my hair.

The TLDR (Too Long Didn’t Read) part of this was that they gave my mom a new cream which quite literally burned my skin and hurt like hell. I would be in the bath, leaning my head back against the side of the tub while my mom applied this cream and had to hold me there to prevent me from washing it off ASAP or getting it in my eyes. 

~

The Hat

Hi, future Stephen here to add a minor interruption to this story. I’d like to remind you that while all of this was happening, I was still a student, going to school every single day with kids that were my age. And then I was going to a babysitter when I got out of school or went straight home to my mom being a daycare provider.

Do you remember what kids are like? Awful.

At least to anyone who got “special treatment,” and guess who qualified as the special kid? Me.

Because I was so self-conscious, I was given a note from every doctor I would ever see, so that I could wear a hat in school and wasn’t required to take it off for any reason unless I decided to.

Here in the US, you’re not allowed to wear hats in school. Why? I haven’t a clue. But the schools I went to in the 90s and early 00’s? No hats. Except for yours truly.

And this was a huge flag to mark me as the kid to bully. Whether it was to flip off my hat to see what I was hiding, badgering me to take off the hat, or the constant pressure to talk to girls as I grew up and wanting them to like me, the hat was both my security blanket and source of emotional turmoil.

This would only get worse the older I got and the more pressure there was to ask girls to dances, be invited to parties, sleep overs, birthdays, the works.

How do you fit in when everyone is in the pool including someone you had a crush on, but to join them meant you had to take your hat off?

Alright with that in mind, let’s get back to the story.

~

It is safe to say as tears streamed down my face, the only thing I had to hold onto was the hope I’d be normal…

The hope that I could ditch the hats and go back to getting haircuts like normal without quickly putting my hat back on. To even wear a hat and not have to make sure that my hair was properly concealing the bald patch on the back of my head, which if not done right, you could see right through the hat.

A More Drastic Approach

Flash forward and I’m sitting in a chair. A nurse walks in with a tray holding a bunch of syringes and the doc is now leaning against the counter in front of me, and my mom is behind me with her hand on my shoulder. Why are we here? A more…. drastic approach.

By this time, we had learned what I had. Alopecia Areata.

It’s an autoimmune disease where my own immune system attacks my hair follicles and prevents hair from growing. Knowing this was a relief in one sense because now my parents knew for a fact I hadn’t been lying for years and it wasn’t because of the shampoo/detergent we used.

The downside? There is no treatment - only “possible” treatments.

And the most radical of these possible treatments was taking a large needle and filling it with corticosteroids (immunosuppressants) to bring my immune system from Hulk levels, back down to Bruce Banner.

The extra downside to this treatment - there’s no numbing of the injection sites. Yes, sites - there aren’t one or two, but dozens of injections in multiple spots.

I glanced at my mom and then back at the doctor and gave the okay that I was ready.

The pain, for me, was excruciating. Over and over again. The injections felt like bee stings, only becoming more inflamed with constant bleeding.

We did two spots the size of a half-dollar, if I remember correctly, and to this day, those spots have retained the hair that grew back. But those were the only two spots I would ever get done because too many steroids, especially directly into the scalp, led my physician to believe they would mess with my hormones as I got older. But if they worked, I could come back in a few years and do it again. 

I never went back. 

I had this hope that those spots would grow like a lawn. A surge of growth in two spots would create the kind of growth that it wouldn’t stop until my entire head of hair was back.

That never happened. And I would spend countless nights crying myself to sleep, wondering why I wasn’t normal. I just wanted to be like the other kids - get haircuts, go to pool parties, have sleep overs without having to wait until everyone was asleep to take my hat off, or to make sure the parents knew what was wrong before asking tons of questions in front of everyone.

I lost more than hope in those late hours. I lost any faith I had in a higher power. I lost hope in doctors and the medical field entirely. 

Back to the deck, standing next to my dad

“Let’s just shave it all off.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah, I don’t want to wear a hat anymore. I hate it, and don’t want the attention.” 

“Alright let’s do it.” 

That night I shaved my head, and by “I shaved my head” I mean my dad shaved it all off.

In another life, or timeline, he would be showing me how to shave my face, but in this one it was my head. How to go with or against the grain, how to feel for hairs I missed, and how to use shaving cream. All of it. 

Day 1 of school. I walked in and the first guy that saw me was someone I considered a friend since sixth grade. Charlie, pretty well-known skater guy in our age group. He saw me as I passed through the big double doors, full of fear and anxiety and the first thing he said to me resonates to the present day:

“It’s about time dude. I’ve been waiting on you to shave it off since we met. Looks good” 

And that was it.

I felt my shoulders relax, and I owned it.

From that day on, I embraced my hair, or lack there-of. I leaned into my sarcastic sense of humor and when someone would make fun of me, I’d crack back. I got to be really quick with comebacks, and even making jokes about myself. That and I learned to stand up to bullies.

The only incident I ever remember getting into an altercation with someone was in math class. I don’t remember who he was, what he said, but he came at me sideways and I threw him over a desk. Is violence ok? I think it depends on the situation. He was an upper-classman, and a good 6ft something, whereas I was roughly 5’7-5’9. Nothing happened to me and he never said another word, and I don’t remember ever getting into another fight. 

Present Day

Hey there. Since those high school days, a lot has changed. I’m a father of a five-year-old girl who is my world. I have to keep my eyes on her because Alopecia is genetic, and I need to be able to respond quickly when I notice what’s up. Going through what I went through was rough, but at least society will accept a bald guy. But a bald girl? That’s a whole other issue.

I went on to join the military and found hundreds of people who were bald. The older I got, and now, I realize people don’t really care what you look like. We’re so enthralled with our own lives that rarely do we notice others unless there’s a certain taboo going on, such as not wearing a mask in times of a pandemic.

But I don’t ever get asked about my hair. Even though I still don’t have eyebrows, or eyelashes, it never comes up. You think you’d notice? Not likely. Unless it’s pointed out, no one really cares.

Accepting who I am was many many years in the making. It wasn’t overnight and I still struggle with my self-image.

But to fix that I began working out, because I might not be able to control my genetics, but I can control my body in the physical muscle sense. It is such a calming, freeing experience to go into the gym. Lifting heavy things, putting them back down. Repeat haha.

It’s that simple.

As I come to the close here, let’s say I could go back in time to relive what I went through. Would I change anything? Yeah. I would shave my head much earlier.

Years earlier.

It would have saved me from so much, and so many embarrassing moments. I was denying who I was for the majority of my young life, in the hopes that one day I’d get to go to school the next year and blow everyone away with a full head of hair and everyone would love me.

Well as it turns out, I was loved...

By the friends who stuck by me, the family who took me to my appointments constantly and never lost faith who were always telling me they would do whatever I wanted. If I wanted to go to the doc? Cool. Stop going? Cool. Hat or no? Cool. I’m eternally grateful for what they all did. I have some friends to this day that stuck with me through the years and I game with on a regular basis.

I have a daughter that is pretty damn great, a podcast I do on a weekly basis that I love doing, a therapist I see every month or so to talk things out, and my life is overall pretty great. It’s at this point in my life, as a newly (ish) minted 30-year-old that I wish I had, had an Uncle Iroh growing up. Because there’s one episode of The Legend of Korra that makes me cry even today. In that episode, Uncle Iroh says the following: 

“If you look for the light, you can often find it. But if you look for the dark that is all you will ever see.”

Looking for the Light

Growing up, all I looked for was the dark. Constantly seeing the worst in myself, in the doctors trying to help me, in the friends who were inviting me to things, and family taking me to soccer practices. But every time I looked in the mirror, I hated what looked back at me. But didn’t even try to see the good. The athlete, the creative, the witty, the caring guy that I am to this day. 

“So, when you imagine yourself, you think of yourself as a massively complex individual.” You may hate yourself or like yourself or whatever, but you certainly think of yourself as fully human. As Whitman puts it, “I contain multitudes.”

That quote is from author John Green, best known for his Paper Towns, The Fault in Our Stars, and Turtles All the Way Down. And it’s a concept that took me a long time to understand. I was always thinking of myself as the dark, seeing the faults, and seeing those same things in other people, instead of understanding that they have their own problems, worries, concerns, and visualizations of how they see others.

Imagining people complexly is the best thing I learned how to do when it came to accepting who I am and how others see me. I’m not perfect and I still struggle with my mental health and thought spirals. But if I had never had the courage to shave my head when I did, who knows if I ever would have accepted the person, I am today

What I do know is that it was the greatest decision I ever made.

I can still laugh and joke about who I am. I’m much more vocal about my Alopecia, and even appeared on a podcast to discuss my life with it and any advice I have for parents or kids going through this.

We are our worst critics; we see ourselves daily. We know our flaws, habits, annoyances, pleasures, and we assume others see us like we see ourselves. But that’s not it at all, and many times they see and can bring out the best in us.

My daughter does that with me, and lights up my world constantly, and shaving the patches on my head that still grow hair instead of an All or Nothing approach is annoying. But it’s who I am.

Could my life be worse? Of course, but it could be a whole lot worse too. And it turns out, wearing hats constantly does contribute to early baldness in men unaffected by Alopecia. So, who knows haha maybe I would’ve ended up bald sooner anyways.

The what if game can be fun, but it’s one I don’t need to play with my disease.

Being who I am allows me to help others that wouldn’t have someone to turn to or someone to lighten the mood when they get a bad haircut and then I simply point at my head haha.

At the end of the day, I’m happy with who I turned out to be. The good and the bad. I hope a treatment is available one day, so those afflicted by this don’t have to go through what I went through, but for those that do?

I’m here to tell you that you define who you are, no one else.

You got this, and there’s a silver lining for every cloud. I’m proof of that

Tell us in the comments, how has hope gotten you where you are today?

About the Author

My name is Stephen Morris. I host the Persuade You podcast, where I do my best to convince the listeners to check out stuff and things I believe are worth their time. Completely safe for work which was my goal when setting out to do this.

I‘m an avid gamer, mainly of Destiny or more recently Fall Guys. If you caught me in public, I’d have my headphones in. I love audiobooks and podcasts to the point I’m always listening, especially when I’m gardening. Which segues nicely into my green thumb.

I found I loved nature early on in life, likely due to my grandmother who was adamant about me learning all there was to know about the planet and my role in it. She was, in a sense, my Uncle Iroh, but I guess Aunt here. But because of the military I wasn’t around her very much.

I learned to appreciate nature, and help it grow, with sunflowers being my favorite of them all. If you would like to reach out to me, you can find all the links and what not below, or in my podcast feed. 

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