Dear editor,
I am losing my hair. The first time I noticed was a few months ago and I did not think on it much. But the signs are everywhere: cleaning the shower drain, fluffing my pillow. The process is accelerating. Yes, I have been to the doctor. If there is a vitamin or mineral deficiency, it is not showing. Stress, genes and/or hormones, she said.
I don’t think anybody can fix this problem with the follicles. What I am left with is a distressed feeling, particularly around the mirror. I dread to run my hands through my hair. What is left of it, that is. Any thoughts?
Thank you,
Alex.
Dear Alex,
I want to first emphasize that what you are experiencing is completely normal. Despite a high prevalence of baldness and hair loss that affects both men and women, I have yet to meet anyone who was not extremely upset by the process. In psychoanalytic terms this relates to castration anxiety. As the philosopher Slavoj Žižek explains, the horror of castration “is the absence of the penis, i.e., the fact that there is nothing to see where the gaze expects something.” The power of Edvard Munch’s Scream is struck by the subject’s missing nose and ears more-so than the shriek itself.1 When it comes to hair loss, it is the sight of skin where one expects to see hair that is distressing most of all.
The good news is that this is only symbolic. Like any other loss, the shock of baldness interrupts our imaginary place in the social order. But once we have internalized our new reality, we embrace the social order anew. I’d like to refer you to an article written by Stuart Heritage and published in The Guardian: “Going bald is terrible. But being bald? Actually not bad.” In other words, the worst part is coming to accept the new state of being. Whether your hair loss halts or you get plugs or you shave it off—that will not matter. Once your new state of being is embraced the anxiety will dissipate.
In sols,
Your editor.
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Footnotes:
Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (Routledge, 1992), 130. ↩︎