I'm going to be happy, dammit.
WARNING: this one's super-long. Like, War and Peace long. Fair notice. :)
I feel like I'm a lot more contemplative lately, and even though the pulling isn't getting better, I'm hoping that I can fix my brain, first, and then start in on the pulling.
The one thing I DO know is that I can stop. I've done it before, even though it was only for a few months. But what a great few months! The times when its' good/stopped are always when I'm happy, when I don't have stressors, when I'm around people. I am really, really a people person, which I think is part of what makes me having this disease so depressing - I feel like all I want to do is be close to people, but there's such a huge part of me that I want to hide/divides me from people when they find out. Even though people try to understand, and most do, sometime I can just tell that people think of me differently. I don't know that they think less of me, necessarily, but it's like I'm a schizophrenic or something who just isn't 'normal,' who they just can't relate to because I'm different on a fundamental level.
At any rate: my pulling is at its best when I'm taking care of myself, when I'm getting enough sleep, when I'm happy. And I think that's a big reason of why I pull so much at law school: I'm away from my friends, in a high-stress environment, and I'm under constant pressure to look perfect. (They even told us for interviews that we needed to make sure our hair and makeup looked nice, clean, and professional. Kind of hard when you don't have a lot of hair to clean... :-/)
The good news is that no one has asked me about my hair. The bad news is I also don't really have any close friends here. I just don't have a lot in common with most people, and I'm gone most weekends to visit my boyfriend in Dallas. But I am getting especially sad this year because even though I try and visit a lot, I feel like so much goes on back home that I'm missing out on, and then I come back here and everyone is talking about what they did on the weekends. It's like I can't really win...
I've also been thinking a lot about what I want to do with my law degree. One of my biggest 'life moments' was when I was an undergraduate and read about Sophie Scholl. She was part of an underground organization that opposed Nazis, and was arrested and executed for treason when she was only 21. She didn't even cry when she was going to be beheaded, and said that she didn't care that she was going to die if it meant that thousands of people would stand up to evil.
I try and think of Sophie sometimes when I get bogged down in feeling sorry for myself about trich. I don't have to face even a tenth of the challenges she had to, and I'm probably not a tenth as brave - and if she can go to the guillotine without flinching, who am I to let law school grades or a bald spot get me down? Everyone only gets one shot at living, and I want to give it the best I've got. So if I get rid of this trich, fine. I want to. But if I have to choose between giving something great back to humanity or being 'normal,' then maybe normal isn't what I should be shooting for...
P.S. I consider helping people feel better about their trich as something great... so I hope this helps at least one other person!!! Love you guys. :)
I feel like I'm a lot more contemplative lately, and even though the pulling isn't getting better, I'm hoping that I can fix my brain, first, and then start in on the pulling.
The one thing I DO know is that I can stop. I've done it before, even though it was only for a few months. But what a great few months! The times when its' good/stopped are always when I'm happy, when I don't have stressors, when I'm around people. I am really, really a people person, which I think is part of what makes me having this disease so depressing - I feel like all I want to do is be close to people, but there's such a huge part of me that I want to hide/divides me from people when they find out. Even though people try to understand, and most do, sometime I can just tell that people think of me differently. I don't know that they think less of me, necessarily, but it's like I'm a schizophrenic or something who just isn't 'normal,' who they just can't relate to because I'm different on a fundamental level.
At any rate: my pulling is at its best when I'm taking care of myself, when I'm getting enough sleep, when I'm happy. And I think that's a big reason of why I pull so much at law school: I'm away from my friends, in a high-stress environment, and I'm under constant pressure to look perfect. (They even told us for interviews that we needed to make sure our hair and makeup looked nice, clean, and professional. Kind of hard when you don't have a lot of hair to clean... :-/)
The good news is that no one has asked me about my hair. The bad news is I also don't really have any close friends here. I just don't have a lot in common with most people, and I'm gone most weekends to visit my boyfriend in Dallas. But I am getting especially sad this year because even though I try and visit a lot, I feel like so much goes on back home that I'm missing out on, and then I come back here and everyone is talking about what they did on the weekends. It's like I can't really win...
I've also been thinking a lot about what I want to do with my law degree. One of my biggest 'life moments' was when I was an undergraduate and read about Sophie Scholl. She was part of an underground organization that opposed Nazis, and was arrested and executed for treason when she was only 21. She didn't even cry when she was going to be beheaded, and said that she didn't care that she was going to die if it meant that thousands of people would stand up to evil.
I try and think of Sophie sometimes when I get bogged down in feeling sorry for myself about trich. I don't have to face even a tenth of the challenges she had to, and I'm probably not a tenth as brave - and if she can go to the guillotine without flinching, who am I to let law school grades or a bald spot get me down? Everyone only gets one shot at living, and I want to give it the best I've got. So if I get rid of this trich, fine. I want to. But if I have to choose between giving something great back to humanity or being 'normal,' then maybe normal isn't what I should be shooting for...
P.S. I consider helping people feel better about their trich as something great... so I hope this helps at least one other person!!! Love you guys. :)
Replies
not sure where to put this response so i\'ll just put it here :)
1)i work graveyard at a retirement home. so im almost always up all night. i fell asleep around 9 this morning and didn\'t get up til 430! i\'m jealous bc you get daytime.
2) i\'ve never tried putting up pics of bald people in the house. does that work? i can almost imagine it working for me for a day or so, then eventually i\'d find myself staring at one the pictures, in a trance of sorts, pulling incessently one day while i\'m home from work, by myself, where no one sees me during these moments where i seem to mentally disappear.
3) i did have a dream once where i looked in the mirror and my hair was long again. it surprised me in the dream. i didn\'t journal then like i do now, so i don\'t know how my pulling was at the time of the dream. but my friend always tells me to always think what i want, not what brings me down, and it will appear eventually..like Law of Attraction. maybe put pics up of people with long hair??
3) how do you deal with stress? i\'m not very active but i do find that when i exercise i take time away from pulling.
you are also very open and honest. i don\'t normally talk about this kind of stuff except on here bc i know a lot of people on here are going through the same thing. so it isn\'t hard for me to talk about personal stuff, no one on here knows who i am anyway :)
i do enjoy reading your journal though. ive been thinking about going to law school too.
sorry, i write a LOT , i hope i don\'t bog u down with all this stuff. (its funny i don\'t talk very much but i like to write)
thats awesome that you been able to stop, even for only for a few months. THATS AWESOME. do you remember how it happened? what it felt like? did you feel lighter like i did? did you get a nagging feeling that it was going to come back?
i say \'it\' bc i keep thinking of it i\'m holding onto a thought that isn\'t true. and whenever i process this thought it makes me pull, but my mind thinks its true but my brain can\'t handle its illusory effects, making it go haywire. then i think that if i can find the illusion, replace, or amend it til its true, or creative, then i can move on from this mental loop that keeps plaguing me and keeping me from accomplishing much else.
thats how i imagine the \'root\' of my problem. when i try to imagine whats going on with me at a subatomic level. how do you imagine it?
theres lot of kinds of tragedies. sometimes i wonder if i had to suffer like Sophie Scholl, i probably would be too preoccupied to pull out my hair. sometimes pulling out my hair makes me feel selfish, like if i kept my mind on finding solutions for the world\'s problems i probably wouldn\'t pull as much. i dunno though. ill think about all the starving chldren and all the ugly things people do to each other and i\'ll get so overwhelmed and feel helpless like i have to fix ALL of it. that makes me pull. but Sophie was a part of something greater than herself. a movement that required her to take immediate action bc her friends and family were in immediate danger. i hope that i could someone that brave if i ever found myself in a situation calling for courage. but its very inconvenient to be courageous. sometimes very lonely, as lonely as a guillotine. hair pulling is very convenient, with all its immediate gratification. hair pulling is like whining. no one likes whiners. sophie probably didn\'t pull her hair but she also didn\'t whine at her execution. i dunno whether she was jewish or not, or whether it matters, but jesus didn\'t whine either....and what are we really stressed out about anyway? my life is such a blessing in comparison to most of the world. i have good food, a safe and healthy family, a job, my own place, a future...people with much sadder more demanding lives have never pulled their hair, ever....what gives??
ps. im putting this in my journal....your thoughts are certainly fun to write off of. you bring up lots of interesting ideas to think about :)
Yup, there\'s definitely a weird feeling guilty about hating the disease thing I\'ve got going on; in some ways, it\'s a huge deal. In a lot of ways, it isn\'t. Yes, it makes you different, but as I get older I just realize more and more that everyone really is different in their own way. The longer you live, the more opportunities you have to discover that what you do isn\'t really \'normal\' like you thought it was... but at the same time, I do start feeling guilty that I let my hair-pulling get to me so much. The only thing I can think to tell myself is that you just can\'t help how you feel. Full stop. So I try not to feel bad about my feelings...
Which is NOT to say that I don\'t feel bad about my reactions. I still really, really hate myself sometimes for pulling out my hair. I can\'t help it. But I wish I could separate that from the pulling itself...
And the pictures of bald people work for a while, but I kept having to take them down when people came over. I finally just got rid of them because it was more stressful to think someone would see them when I forgot to take them down than helpful to keep me from pulling. How\'s THAT for irony.
Last, I don\'t really deal with stress. That\'s part of my problem. I can go running, which I usually do, but that only helps for a couple of hours afterward. I still get that building tension whenever I have to sit down and read for school, or when I get nervous about something. Then I can\'t sleep at night because I\'m so stressed, which just makes it that much worse. It\'s honestly made me re-think a legal career... I mean, how am I going to argue in court when it\'s so stressful I\'m just bald all the time? It\'s the first time in my life I\'ve seriously thought about giving something up because of trich.
I probably won\'t, though. I do best when i just keep my head down and power through... and I think one of the good signs is that the pulling itself isn\'t making me as stressed as it did last year. (Hysterical fits, crying, not sleeping, more crying, cleaning up piles of hair, yelling... now I just sigh and get on with my day.)
And I\'m glad I can be a muse for ya. :)