April 24, 2002

It's been crazy nice weather this week. Thirty-five degrees one day. so nice. But you can't wear a hat in that weather so I went without one. It was kind of nerve-racking, I hadn't done it before. But it was fine. I have a bit more hair now but not tons. People kind of looked but not too bad. It's weird. I spent so much time before making myself look different and I enjoyed the reactions. So you'd think someone with that attitude towards appearances would be fine with walking around bald. But I'm not. I cared a lot less than I thought I would but there's still a pretty decent level of discomfort there. But the difference is that with this lack of hair, it's totally out of my control. I chose to spike/dye my hair when I was 15 and 16. I willingly did that to by body fully aware of the ractions I would get. Baldness is something beyond my control. There are ways to hide it, to prevent people from knowing what's going on but the fact of the matter remains. My appearance is being altered by something completely beyond my control.

So do I really not care about my appearance like I say I do? So long as I have control over it. I don't know. I guess that's it. I want to be the only one who determines what I do with my life and body. I want to have the final word and that way I can guide people's reactions and have them treat me on my terms. That's impossible right now. In order to live, I've got to have this treatment. And it goes far beyond that. I am not in complete control over everything that happens to me. Random life-altering things do happen and they are totally beyond anyone's control. For me, most recently, it was cancer. No one caused it. Who knows, I could get in some disfiguring accident tomorrow. I could get hit by a bus, tons is possible, all of it completely out of my hands. That makes it all seem kind of hopeless. No matter what you do, how hard you try to control your own life, the possibility always exists of something coming into your life and taking that all away, temporarily or permanently. But with physical things like this, control over my appearance is completely secondary to control over my mind. That can be taken away too, but mainaining control over your mind is so much more rewarding than maintaining control over anything else. I can lose any aspect of control but if I've still got my mind I can maintain that stability and ensure I don't take trivial, temporary things too seriously. And realize that I may not have hair or eyebrows and I may truely look like crap some days but I'm still happy. I can still do most things I want to do, I'm still so excited about everything to come and I still laugh and smile. Screw not having hair when you've got that. Really.

Right now, I don't control what my hair does but I'm responsible for what I let drag me down, what I see as being a negative part of my life. I can't let hair loss be too big of a negative aspect because it's so small and insignificant compared to the good things.

Having no hair sucks, I don't like it at all but isn't being in remission just lovely? Isn't being able to alugh for 25 minutes about a typo in the newspaper resulting in drooling so much fun? Yeah.

Hair loss is temporary but the ability to laugh at typos for 20 minutes, and the fact that I got into remission are permanent and exist regardless of the state of my scalp.

And that's what's important.

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