When I started Bald is Beautiful – creating happiness by giving bald dolls to younger girls who like me had lost their hair because of chemo – the feeling was similar to how I felt on Junior Prom night. I was conflicted.
Junior Prom came after a year of treatment during which I experienced some of the hardest times and some of the best times I have ever had.
Amid the physical and emotional trauma, abandonment by many friends, and the impact on my teenage years, I also had the chance to see the compassion and love of people around me. It was when I was at my lowest ebb that I could empathize with other people’s own struggles, realizing that everyone faced their own personal battles.
While many friends didn’t know how to be there for me, and some walked away altogether, the people who held my hand through my treatment made me feel seen and valued.
And one of the moments I remember being genuinely happy was Junior Prom.
From Pretty in Pink to Lady in Red
Amid my treatment, I had to put my junior year of high school on pause. While my friends studied and made plans, I was at home or in the hospital. Although seeing my friends have fun without me made me sad, my best friend Armando stood with me the entire time. When Junior Prom rolled around, he even “prom-posed” to me with a poster and ice cream.
At that point, thin tufts of hair had started growing back on my head. But my doctor warned me these would soon fall out again. Whatever, I dyed my hair pastel pink… which came out as bright, fire engine, red! It was not long before I started leaving a trail of red hair on my pillow and everywhere I went, as the last of my new ‘do’ fell out.
I was nervous for prom. Seeing the joy a bald doll brought younger girls had made me realize that my identity was not inherently tied to my hair, or the lack of it. So I had started wearing my head completely bald, even decorating it with temporary tattoos. I was making the best of a situation still deeply uncomfortable for me.
However, prom would be the first time seeing my classmates again since I had been sick. I was anxious about standing out as a sore thumb amidst a hundred blow-dried hair-dos.
Yet once the big night came I was certain I wanted to go bald. I put on some temporary flash tattoos all along my head, and was on my way. I won’t lie – I did get a lot of stares. But throughout the night, I just stopped caring and was happy to feel like a regular teenager going to her Junior Prom – hair or no hair, cancer or no cancer.
The feeling I had was similar to when I started Bald is Beautiful. The day I chose the project’s name was conflicting for me. Anyone who has experienced hair loss is probably familiar with the phrase “bald is beautiful” – but the first time I heard it, it felt like a punch to the gut.
Only a few hours after my diagnosis in the hospital, it was almost the first thing a friend said to me. I was not yet even ready to accept I was really sick – much less how every aspect of my life, including something as small as my hair, would drastically change.
As the months went on and I heard the phrase more often, I hated it more each time. It felt like a cliché, like a platitude for someone who stood on shaky ground every minute of every day.
When I started the Bald is Beautiful Project, and I found the bald American Girl dolls, I experienced a sense of relief because I did not feel like an oddball anymore. Some sense of normalcy was returned to me. I always felt the project should have been called something more along the lines of “Bald is Okay Too” or “I Am a Normal Girl Even If I Have A Few Less Hairs Than I Should.” But these were just not as catchy.
The New Normal?
You see, the Bald is Beautiful doll project was always deeper than hair. I only hoped to bring some joy to others around me, as we fought to navigate the painful chemo sessions, and the awkwardness of being visibly different from our peers.
Selfishly, I hoped making other people happy would also bring me a modicum of joy and security. I knew that having cancer was not my fault, but somehow the stares of others and my bald head could make me feel ashamed.
This was never to mean that Bald is not Beautiful. But the point was that beauty did not matter. It was about being valued over something other than your looks, your hair, your ability, your status or your health. “Normal” can look a thousand different ways, and I did not feel I was being “seen” by Pantene commercials or social media. While of course bald was beautiful, so were wigs, scarves and hair.
On the one hand, I realized the silliness of the idea that “beauty” could be defined by one characteristic, or that “beauty” would go away if one was sick. On the other hand, my efforts to normalize baldness made me acutely aware that the underlying causes of my baldness were not really normal. While cancer has been around forever, childhood cancer has increased by 50% in the past 45 years. Why is that?
I have never stopped wondering why I became sick. It has made me hyper-analyze every minute of the year leading up to my diagnosis. Did I eat too much junk food? Did I swim in contaminated water? Were other forces at work? I have had no answers, and often when I lead myself along this path, I end up more confused and more guilty than before. I want to know: I think it will help my healing. But if I don’t know, that’s also ok.
In the meantime, however, just don’t ask me to watch a Pantene commercial!