It’s fair to say that it’s only recently that I’ve only begun to understand the impact of losing my hair as a young boy. Even that phrase losing my hair as if it was my own fault, having misplaced it somewhere whilst distracted. It’s a way of avoiding that sharp clinical word – alopecia. We now know that most Alopecia is an auto-immune response (so in a way it is of my own making…) to often unknown triggers. But when I was a boy, there seemed to be a general ignorance of what it was and greater still of what caused it. My parents exhausted all means of healing available to them, including some quackery and divine intervention. But completely absent was anything on the psychology of self. We didn’t talk about these things (I certainly didn’t know how to) – it was a visible medical problem and it simply needed to be solved.

It was only a few years ago when I began to understand its impact on me as trauma – both its darkness and the seam of gold it also left behind.

In the last year, I’ve started going to a support group – an open conversation between some very smooth and sensitive people. And out tumbled these stories. Some of them I’ve turned into visual thinkery, but the truth is, I’m not sure where to put them or what format they should be. I just know they need to be told.

This story is the first in the series This is where my darkness lies.

It was first shared via The Visual Thinker.