INTENT.

Hi world. My name is Emily. I am 29 years old living in a small city in Maine: USA.

I have Alopecia Areata. Somedays I wake up proud. Somedays I wake up embarassed and ashamed. Right now, I have very little hair.

In Nicaragua March 2011

With this blog, I hope to learn to accept myself better. I want to help others understand Alopecia, and what it's like to have it. Maybe I can help myself. Maybe I can help someone.

I started this blog as a release from this...autoimmune disease. I will have this incurable disease until I die. It is like a game for me now, to hide my "true self". This does not make the task of "figuring out who I am" any easier. This blog is acceptance after years of denying a part of me that has undoubtedly shaped every ounce of my being since I was first diagnosed with patches at age 4. Alopecia showed it self in my fourth grade school pictures when I wore a wig and all the kids made fun of me. I lost it all completely. I was free-spirited and delighted in correcting people that I was not a 'young sir'. My hair grew back in fifth grade. I lost it partway through the 8th grade. It grew back. I lost it all again starting my junior year in high school. I was a tomboy. It fell out completely in time for my senior year in high school. I wore a bandana to prom and in my senior pictures. It was ok; I was secretly known (apparently) as "leukemia girl". I went to college and got a couple real hair wigs over the course of a couple years to help me fit in; become 'more adult'; to help me in the job force. I had gone so long without maintaining hair that the very idea of gluing and taping was such a waste of my time...and not for me. [Could it be, and should it be?] I ditched the wig. I was uncomfortable. I was worried my hairlines looked unnatural. It felt strange. I switched to hats. Many hats. Knit hats. Baseball hats. Wool hats. Hats. And here I am 29, after almost three cycles of hair loss and regrowth and the longest period in my life without all my hair. Wearing hats.

This blog will be my thoughts pertaining to existing as a young woman in an American society that lusts for hair. As Alopecians know and one day understand, it's only hair. It could be so much worse.