I’m 28, and I’ve been noticing hair loss since I was 25. On Wednesday, I decided to shave my head bald.
If I’m going to be bald one day, I thought it’s best that I get used to it.
While I felt very liberated afterwards, I was extremely conflicted beforehand.
A part of me accepted my fate, but another part just couldn’t.
What I struggled most with wasn’t so much that my “youth” has died, but with the process of my “youth” dying.
It’s the constant oscillation between acceptance and denial since I was 25 that was most tiring and frustrating.
When the time came, when I shaved off what’s left of my hair and my “youth”, I felt so liberated and alive.
I’m sure you’ve heard people say, “I just want to die a peaceful death.”
Like me with losing hair, perhaps what some you fear more isn’t the event of death itself but the process of dying.
Currently, your “youth”—specifically in this case, a part of your physicality—might be in the process of dying and you’re trying to come to terms with its imminent death.
Maybe you’re still playing the sport you used to play, but it’s becoming harder to ignore: you’re not as quick, flexible, or explosive. You take a lot longer to recover, and you have to reduce your training load.
Or you’re active and careful about your diet, but you’ve been noticing it’s increasingly harder to maintain your weight. Your metabolism is slowing down, and you cannot eat your favorite food as often.
Whatever it is you’re facing, you’re confronted with a visceral reality: You’re getting further away from who you used to be, no matter how hard you cling onto that past version of yourself.
I don’t think shaving my head solved anything. Who knows how I’d feel when my male pattern baldness worsens. My present sense of liberation and acceptance might be temporary.
But in finally accepting the death of my old self, I allowed a new self to grow.
Right now, you might be in the process of dying, oscillating between denial and acceptance.
You’re neither here nor there—neither death nor life.
I wonder what it would be like for you to choose death and acceptance. If you do so, I really hope you might liberate yourself to embody and grow the potential of a new sense of self.
I won’t tell you what to do, though. Everyone has their unique relationship with death. And there’s no formula to life.
All I can say is it’s pretty liberating to not have to constantly worry about my hair. The confidence of Bald-Gary is off the charts, not because he looks good, but because he finally feels alive.
Drying my 3mm hair in 5 seconds and feeling the soft breeze caress my scalp,
Gary
About the Author
Hello, I’m Gary: A recent Anthropology graduate from Yale-NUS College, and an incoming student pursuing a Masters in Counselling. If I were to describe myself in a sentence — which is impossible, but I’ll try nonetheless — I’m currently someone who’s in a perpetual existential mood!
I invite you to join me on my journey of writing to make sense of that mood, myself, and this crazy, complex world. I’m not following a fixed structure, so I don’t know what I would come out of this conviction — I guess we can only find out as I write!
