The Youthfulness of Balding
A personal essay on caring and caring less
I’d just purchased my first house and my mother and grandmother were in town for to visit. A busy mom-and-grandma type hustle filled my new home — a pot of homemade pasta sauce on the stove, wine flowing, voices raised from a spectrum of failing hearing: my grandmother, 85; my mom, 63, me, 36. My husband, poor man, was the only one who could hear what everyone was saying, which, at this point, mostly consisted of variations of “huh!?” and “WHAT!?”
We were picking at a cheese platter, sitting in the living room — all of us except my grandmother, who stood, slowly circling the room, analyzing our artwork, peering out the windows, knocking her fist gently on the tables as if to make sure they were real furniture and not one of those illusion cakes.
It was then that I felt her standing behind me as I sat on the couch. A warm touch on the top of my head — a sensitive spot where my hair was thinning.
“Oh! Looks like you’ve got a little bald spot,” she said, like she was complimenting the craftsmanship of the wainscoting.
“Gram! What? Stop!” I said, covering my head. No one had ever touched me there — so exactly in the spot where I was balding. In fact, no one had ever mentioned my thinning hair — not even my husband. My grandmother’s brand is uninhibitedness, but this felt a step too far. I covered my head like I was on a crashing plane.
“Oh, who fuckin’ cares!” She yelled, shrugging, and continued her rounds.
“Who cares” seemed to me an absurd attitude. I cared!
I’d always cared a lot about my hair.
Once, in grad school, after a breakup, I’d made plans with a friend to binge an old season of Drag Race and eat ice cream.
After a haircut.
A complete cliche, I spontaneously decided to bleach my hair blonde and shave it into a dramatic Mohawk. I’d been growing it out, sporting a bushy beard, but I’d been getting ghosted by this guy and a dramatic change to my appearance felt like the perfect counteraction.
After leaving the salon, having taken about an hour longer than I’d planned, I ran home to shear off my beard, shower, and style my new hair into a slick punk rock mane. When I arrived at my friend’s house, biker jacket and septum ring gleaming in the streetlights, she was annoyed by my tardiness.
“I was wondering where the hell you were. But I have to admit, you look really good.”
This is the most enabling thing she could’ve said. My coup for control over my appearance not only paid off, but also excused my poor behavior. I smiled and eagerly glanced at myself in her bathroom mirror as soon as I climbed her stairs, intoxicated with the expert handicraft of self-fashioning.
At 25, it still felt new and satisfying to claim full control over how I looked. I wasn’t ready yet to acquiesce to what I knew would happen someday: changes my body would decide upon, which I wouldn’t be able to whimsically revise myself.
I was learning to enjoy the positive outcomes from claiming control over my appearance. I’d never had that pleasure before. I was still catching up on what felt like a lifetime of awkwardness and embarrassment.
My social capital reached its deepest valley twelve years earlier, in middle school.
I was working hard to maintain my friendships, but my closest friends all flocked away in new groups and seemed to forget about me. I had to make huge sacrifices at lunch — a whole pack of gum, for example, just to keep the attention of the cool kids. And even then, when my gum was gone, so were they.
One day, after school, playing video games alone, it occurred to me that maybe my loneliness had to do with style. If I looked more like the other boys, maybe they at least wouldn’t mind having me around. I could sink into the background and at least feel less like an obstruction.
The next day, in the brief half hour after my sister left for school and before my bus, I raided her bedroom. I searched for a hair product that would help me mimic what the boys were doing with their hair.
Their hair was neatly cropped with a perfect little flip in the front, like a built-in baseball cap. I hadn’t had a haircut in a while, but perhaps that was ok — perhaps proper styling would fix that problem.
A wave of inspiration emboldened me. I’d been doing it wrong all along! I get it now. A little attention to personal style is all it would take.
I grabbed an armful of waxes, pastes, and gels, and applied them liberally. I wound up with a head that looked something like a ridged cornfield, the front jutting out over my eyes, jagged and tortured like dying tree branches. Before I left, I sprayed something random over the whole thing just for good measure.
I ran to the bus stop before my mom could review my look, though I was prepared to dismiss any commentary she might have offered.
The day was completely normal. No one seemed to notice the calamity above my forehead. That is, not until lunch. I didn’t have gum, so I was sitting alone, nothing to offer.
A boy came over from the cool kids table: Chad. He was a mid-tier cool kid. We’d never spoken before, but I always got the impression he was working hard to fit in. But his work was paying off a little better than mine. He was lanky, tall, and his teeth jutted out awkwardly, but I think he played basketball, so he had some clout.
He had a hair flip. His was well ordered, carefully crafted. Chad: an experienced flipper of hair.
“Hey Brenden. New hair today?” He said, smiling a polite closed-mouth smile.
I didn’t know how to respond. The last thing I wanted to do was be noticed. I only did this to fit in. So I nodded in a kind of awkward, shoulder to shoulder way that I hoped would deliver a “yeah I guess.”
“Lookin’ good!” he said, his smile breaking open a little further to reveal his teeth.
And that’s when I knew I did not look good.
I glanced behind him to his lunch table full of people trying not to look at us. I wondered if he was trying to embarrass me or if his approaching me was a strange act of mercy — by addressing me, he also outed his friends who’d likely been eviscerating me behind my back. Maybe he’d been sitting there, feeling guilty about partaking and came over to get them to stop.
At least now I knew.
Attempts to control how I look have always borne seemingly random results. Trying hard yielded unpredictable results.
In my thirties, I’ve learned to try a little less. And yet, no matter how mature I feel, I could never fully prepare for the occasional intrusive Chad—or grandmother—appearing before me with a mirror.
I’d seen my wedding photos many times, but my grandmother’s brazen violation inspired me to reopen the photo album.
After she and my mom went to bed, I found my wedding photos in the Google drive I share with Peter to search for a specific one taken during the first dance. I scrolled and scrolled and finally found the photo of him twirling me around because…yes. There it was. The bald spot.
I’d seen it when the wedding photographer sent us our photos, but I had somehow sublimated it. I didn’t see what I didn’t want to see. Or, perhaps, I’d dismissed it as something that maybe only I had noticed. But my grandmother had outed our wedding guests. Turns out they’s all known about me. How could they have betrayed my trust by not telling me?
Maybe I should’ve invited Chad to my wedding. At least he’d tell me what everyone was thinking.
And yet, here I was at my wedding, having surrendered without knowing it. I stared at a version of myself who wasn’t reacting to the uncontrollability of my appearance. Sure, maybe he didn’t know about the bald spot. But that didn’t matter. He was choosing to let his scalp breathe. To let them all see.
There’s something profoundly youthful about balding. Immature. As though I’d made a decision to craft a look doomed for failure. Except, unlike my childish hair flip or my even more childish bleached Mohawk, as a balding adult, the creativity isn’t in the crafting. Rather, it’s in my perspective on how I’m perceived.
I’ve got a second chance to walk through the middle school lunch room now — to be seen by others and to act differently. Less desperately.
The perennial wish of aging goes something like, “oh, if only I could go back in time and act knowing what I know now.” Balding has given me exactly that gift. I’m a child again, not looking how I want to look in the lunch room. And this time, rather than giving away every last piece of gum, I’m shrugging off their looks.
Because, in the wise words of the elders, “oh, who fuckin’ cares!”
I loved this!!!
Remember, what you look like from behind is none of your business! Xx