Feast or Feathers: On Alopecia Areata
by Anjoli Roy
“On the day that you were born,” Mom said, “your dad nicknamed you peacock. Your hair stood straight up. Because of your two cowlicks.” She swirled her fingers like a stir stick in coffee, pointing to the crown of my head.
With my hair, it’s always been feast or feathers.
“It’s shiny, at least,” a mom of my elementary-school friend said cheerily one morning when we were getting ready for church. “Even if you can’t smooth it down.”
I remember in small-kid years how I’d have to move it to the side when I wanted to sit, how much length there was to yank, how my hair would knock the teeth right out of wide-toothed combs silly enough to step to raggedy knots that huddled like villains at the base of my head. I remember the dreaded ends.
“So much nicer than my limp white-people stuff,” Mom said when she’d tease a ponytail for me before school, hair-spraying a helmet to slick down baby hairs. I remember watching my brown forehead—the only part of me tall enough to reflect in the mirror—my mom’s careful white hands working a sticky cloud out of a shiny metal can.
I cut it all off in the fourth grade. One thick braid forgotten in a Ziploc. I traded in hair the length of my back for a bob and an undercut. Things I wanted for my southern California 80s-baby flannels. Things that were unfortunate for my braces and the neck-gear that was supposed to correct my overbite. I wore that neck-gear all day to our primarily white grammar school, even though I was only required to wear it at night. I dared somebody to tease the neck-gear-rocking brown kid. I would stand in front of my sister’s full-length bedroom mirror with the rubber straps secured at the nape of my neck, cradling the stubble of my fresh undercut, and practice saying, “Whatever! Racists!” the Ss hung up on high wires sticking out of my mouth.
I remember the anticipation of going to school the next day, of wondering what Jordan or David or Kyle—my sometimes crushes—would say, if maybe I’d get seen in a new way. I was the brown girl nobody ever had a crush on. It was an unspoken (racist and heteronormative, though I didn’t know that last word yet) truth that brown girls went with brown boys, and for most of elementary, there was no brown boy in our class to heart me back. But maybe my new hair would change that?
I was climbing the last of our grammar-school stairs when Jordan exclaimed, “You cut off your hair!” My heart knocked in my throat with preteen anticipation. Of being seen, in a good way maybe. “I liked it better longer,” he said.
I found that braid so many years later, in the back drawer of one of grandpa’s captain’s beds. I reveled at the weight of that hair’s thick foot. Its optimism. Its dark brown girlishness. I was in my twenties and had swallowed my heart, deep down my throat. There was 1) a breakup after nearly a decade together, 2) our grandmother passing after Alzheimer’s, 3) our stepdad passing too, the moment of encircling him for his last labored breaths: Mom’s, Dad’s, our middle sister Maya’s, and my hands held together in the hospital, burned into memory like a picture nobody wanted. It was then that my hair had started falling out in gleaming white patches, the result of what I would learn was an autoimmune disorder—alopecia areata—likely triggered by stress and for which there is no cure. Hair that fell with surprising frequency, new, eerily smooth patches arriving and widening like a rip in black stockings all throughout a hot and increasingly sore scalp. Acid drops on silk. And then: the panic to cover up those spots with remaining hairs. In the tradition of comb-overs, I knew that bald spots were poor inspiration for awkwardly pinned-down bangs that looked stapled to my forehead. I paddled out into the Pacific against the fear of wet hair betraying white skin. I reaped reassurance from dry fluffy bobs, low braids I wouldn’t let part, wouldn’t let betray an embarrassingly vacant stage. I worried that I would be bald. That I would have nothing to hide behind. That perhaps like the brownness of my skin amid the many white folks I’d grown up with, alopecia would be something I’d have to make peace with, try to find pride in too.
But the little saplings, with their wired, reaching hands—sometimes white, sometimes gray, sometimes black—came back, went, and debuted again. The returning hairs not unlike the shaft of a feather stripped of barbs. Something to smooth down and down.
“Come any color you want,” I told them at night. “Any texture you want. However you want.”
The nest on my head wilded.
In the single years of my early thirties, I learned to enter the water after a quick prayer to the ocean and let my hair get wet and heavy. I worked not to let my fingers drift up like a tick to check spots, to distribute hair.
Once, a young one paddled over to flirt even though the breeze was kissing my scalp. Couldn’t he see? Shouldn’t he have fled? I laughed and laughed.
“The ones who matter won’t care,” my friend Aiko had said.
I heard this but, in the midst of the madness of dating, was more likely to get completely naked than let a foreign hand loose in my hair, in the dangers where spots lurked. The thought of being with someone who wouldn’t care about my body’s pathologies was too much to imagine.
But then I did fall again, and my love disappeared into a bathroom and emerged with his own head shaved, a surprise reminder of what a myth this hair is.
Now 35, almost 36, I have accepted, finally, that my hair comes and goes like tides. A sudden rush of foamy white on salted scalp. The return of black roots to pray over and promise. The reassuring thickness of filling in that I know, nevertheless, I cannot trust. There will always be bathroom vigils, of parting hair and counting lost strands against dull shower floors. Because the white patches always come back. (Moons dawn and dawn.) But the hair comes back too, wild and nested and full. This feast or feathers. This ravenous scalp. These lessons always in swelling and shedding, of thickening fans, reteaching me who I am and the grace in letting go.
ANJOLI ROY is a creative writer and high school English teacher in Honolulu. She has a BA in individualized study from NYU and an MA and PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She is also a VONA alum. Her book-length manuscript of creative nonfiction stories, “Where the Water Is,” has been a finalist for the 2019 2040 Books James Alan McPherson Award and the 2019 Autumn House Nonfiction Contest. Anjoli is also PhDJ for “It’s Lit,” a literature and music podcast that she cohosts with Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng and has featured more than 100 writers to date. Anjoli is from Pasadena, California. She is a mashi to eight, a godmother to one, and the last of her parents’ three girls. She loves cats, surfing with loved ones or alone, and the rain that she and her partner oftentimes wake up to in Pālolo Valley. You can read more of her work at www.anjoliroy.com and find her on Twitter @anjoliroy.