Giving Thanks

a hair update, a gratitude list to keep from despairing

This photo is 10 years old and we were already quite married, but this made us giggle. Also, hubby said yesterday that he’s down to be Team Baldie. That made me tear up.

A few months ago, I wrote about the experience of losing my hair and getting an initial diagnosis.

on losing my hair

I finally got biopsy results this week about my hair, and it’s the worst case scenario: I have been diagnosed with CCCA. (Googling it is a hellscape of hopelessness—lack of research, lots of snake oil salespeople, photos of aggressive scarring baldness). It’s the one diagnosis I feared, and it’s here and it’s my reality.

So, I want to give thanks. Often, when I plummet into the pit of despair (and I do tend toward the melancholic), gratitude provides a steady ladder back to the grounding of reality: All is not lost, beauty can be found in my life now and every day.

CCCA usually presents in people while they’re in their early 30s. I want to give thanks to my body for giving me almost 20 more years of fluffy clouds of thick hair — 20 years of long wash days and flat ironing and two strand twists and babies tugging at my coils with wonder and my husband’s hands sinking through my hair’s soft resistance to affectionately massage my scalp.

I want to give thanks for my intuition that said, “something’s wrong” over and over again — my gut is trustworthy.

I am grateful to my husband, who saw me struggling to prioritize my care because care costs so much in this country. He reminded me that inaction also costs and said whatever the cost is, you are worth it. (I want to remind you who are reading this — you are worth it, too. You are worth it.)

I want to give thanks for the timing of intervention — that I have a chance to keep the hair I have. Maybe. But at least today, when I look in the mirror, I still recognize myself. I could have lost so much more.

I am thankful that I have room to change. I may be bald this time next year. But I am still here (shouting in my Celie voice)! Life is a gift.

The changes in my hair alerted me to silent goings-on within my body and this is a gift. I had no idea how insidiously inflammation attacked my scalp, and who knows what else. I have been offered an unexpected opportunity to love myself tangibly through intentional movement (I have been loving tuning in to Nico Marie’s YouTube channel for the 30-day challenge, and erging has given me strength I didn’t know I had). I also get to nourish myself into healing with what I eat and drink. Beans and legumes, blueberries and ginger, sweet potatoes and kale, quinoa, spinach, tomatoes and cucumbers have become a part of my every day diet. I grow every day in respect for what the land provides us.

I am grateful to my God for giving me room to shout and be angry and process. I am bewildered and disappointed that my Creator, who fashioned this hair so fabulously, would allow this shrinking, decaying, aggressive end to my crown. I cry every day. Every day. This experience feels intimately violent and it is awakening past traumas. I don’t know who God is in this process, but I know I am loved, as I was, as I always will be.

I am thankful for the knowledge that I stand on the other side of those traumas now. I survived before, and will survive this.

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Can you relate to the despair of diagnoses or some news that you can’t control? Can you relate to the lifting power of gratitude? Talk to me about it in the comments.