My Trich Six Months On…

Following on from this post from February I have decided to do a quick, but happy update regarding my hair growth!

Just for clarification “trich” is short for trichotillomania which is a condition where a person feels “compelled” to pull their hair out. I have a very mild form of this disorder, but I have a rather large obsession with my hair and so any slight changes in it without my knowledge really jar me and negatively impact the way I feel about myself and my body.

So here we go, let’s see my hair shall we?

At the very start of the year (New Year’s Eve, 2014) I had managed to get my hair to roughly the same length all around as demonstrated here:

So then my focus turned to growing it beyond this length and keeping it from being unhealthy and damaged to my right side where I tend to pull the most.

At my graduation in July I was really worried about how I would feel about my hair in the photos, however, I was pleasantly surprised.

As you can see my hair doesn’t look particularly thick, but it does look soft, long and healthy, which is all I can ask of it at this point in time. For me this is incredible progress to make in six months.

But it’s not July anymore, it’s August and how has my hair progressed since then?

I’ve taken two in slightly different lighting as the first one makes my hair look as though it has been Ombre’d which it hasn’t been (for like three years, the blonde is definitely pushing it’s way back through.)

As you can see even though my hair is curled it is thick and long, with both sides fairly evenly matched in terms of coverage. Of course I have a side parting which makes it a little harder to distinguish whether everything is even, but it most definitely looks that way to me at least.

So have I stopped pulling? Hell no. Have I learned to help my impulse-control disorder to minimise damage? Yes. And I think that’s all I could really ask of myself. I’m not saying we won’t go back to the way things were before, but I am very hopeful for the moment.

My Hair Over The Past Six Years And Why It Matters

This will be the first time I’ve publicly admitted anywhere that I have trichotillomania. It’s probably not something you’ve ever heard of before, in fact it probably sounds quite strange or bizarre, but the definition is pretty simple:

What’s the big deal, you might be wondering. Hair-pulling doesn’t sound life-threatening, or like it has any connection to someone’s mental health. Just stop pulling! It’s that simple. You just have to stop pulling out your hair, and everything goes back to normal, right?

These are thoughts that have plagued me for the last four years of my life. I used to compulsively write on a piece of paper, over and over: “Don’t pull out your hair”. I thought I was being stupid, I thought that I could cover up the hair loss and no-one would ever know. I thought I could tell my hairdresser I burnt it on hair straighteners and no-one would know the difference.

But I was wrong, because I knew.

Somewhere deep down inside I knew that this was a problem. For me it seemed to be tied to stress, whenever I was stressed or worried, there would be hair all over my laptop, my books, my floor. I sometimes wondered if I would eventually lose all my hair.

If you know me you might be sat there wondering why you’ve never seen me bald, or why I don’t have chunks of my hair missing. Unlike other trichsters (people with the same disorder) mine was solely focused on the right side of my head (until recently, but I’ll discuss that later). You can tell I have had hair loss on the right side of my head, sometimes so bad that the hair was no longer than a few inches, but I was so ashamed I never documented it. I will now attempt to show you in the best way I can from old photos, please don’t read further if you suffer from trich and are easily triggered:

15 years old, pre-trich (remember to focus on the right side of my hair).

At 18 the damage isn’t extremely noticeable…

But then it worsens. (Webcam picture flips the sides.)

And by the time I’m 19…

There are noticeable sections of hair that barely reach past my chin.

So I cut my hair all the same length that summer.

But by winter I was back in the same place with the right side of my hair significantly thinner than the left.

And at 20 the hair on the right was mostly gone.

So I cut it all short-ish again.

And it seemed to help… Mostly because I managed to adapt my disorder and pick at the hair at the back of my head, near the neckline.

My hair right now is the healthiest it has ever been in six years, but there’s still a long way to go, because I do pull out my hair at the base of my neck, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to stop it. 

I know my disorder is very mild, there are many others like me who have experienced extreme baldness or bald patches that I’m lucky to never have had, but that doesn’t make it any less real. It took me a long time to come to terms with my disorder, and I still have a long way to go, but if you’re experiencing this yourself – or any other compulsive behavioural disorder – then please try and seek the support I didn’t. It’s out there.

For more information:

http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/trichotillomania/Pages/Introduction.aspx

http://www.trich.org/

http://www.trichotillomania.co.uk/

http://www.theguardian.com/society/christmas-charity-appeal-2014-blog/2015/jan/09/-sp-trichotillomania-mental-health-10-things-you-might-not-know

http://trichtalker.tumblr.com/

https://www.youtube.com/user/TrichJournal