Hair Loss: Ordinary trauma is making our hair fall out
We all have a narrative mind jogging alongside us in daily life.
Chatterboxes who are introverts have strong narrative minds.
Who said that?
Exactly.
Those words have to go somewhere and if you're spending vast amounts of time talking inside your own head, putting some of those words on the page might be a good idea. Something might come of it. Or not. Sometimes just getting them out is enough to keep you sane.
A friend recently remarked how she wished her narrative mind would stop swirling, stop keeping her up at night.
I told her of the time my narrative mind shut off during a time of great illness, when my body was too busy to be thinking poetic thoughts.
I read recently that a side effect of the pandemic is hair loss... great big gobs of hair falling out around the globe. Sure, it is happening with those who have COVID. The body is too busy to nourish superfluous hair follicles so the hair falls out. The weird bit is that those who don't get COVID are experiencing hair loss as well. WHY ARE WE NOT TALKING ABOUT THIS?!
The article states:
One type of loss is responsible for the pandemic hair-loss spike: telogen effluvium. TE, as it’s often called, is sudden and can be dramatic. It’s caused by the ordinary traumas of human existence in all of their hideous variety. Any kind of intense physical or emotional stress can push as much as 70 percent of your hair into the “telogen” phase of its growth cycle, which halts those strands’ growth and disconnects them from their blood supply in order to conserve resources for more essential bodily processes. That, in time, knocks them straight off your head.
The ORDINARY TRAUMA of the pandemic is piled onto lives that might already be running on adrenaline and caffeine. And our hair takes the brunt of it. Just as well we were in lockdown. Serious bad hair days for all of us.
TE so common I don't know why we aren't talking about it as a regular thing.
My husband lost all his hair after a significant death in his family.
My friend lost great gobs of the stuff while going through fertility treatments.
Another friend lost handfuls of hair after childbirth.
My sister lost hair while I went through chemo treatments (where I also lost my hair but that was because of the chemo killing all rapidly dividing cells, healthy and cancerous, and not due to TE).
Four examples from my inner circle clearly experiencing TE, something you probably haven't heard of before. And what was the solution? Incessant search for products to cure it. Throw money at it. Only time and distance from the trauma, it seems, cures TE. The hair came back... eventually.
What does this have to do with the narrative mind?
In addition to hair loss, ORDINARY TRAUMA can shut down the narrative mind. We berate ourselves for not writing through dark times, having been told by writing coaches that this is all rich material we can use later.
And I say to that: Later is probably a better time to write it all down. Now might not be the time.
In dealing with the ordinary traumas in life, my journal entries change. Instead of writing about my FEELINGS (bla bla bad who cares), I record the events of the day. This is also what I do when I am traveling. I list the details to remember them later, from the song playing at the airport lounge, to the man feeding pigeons at the Pantheon in Rome.
When you're in ordinary trauma, your writing material is more reporting, less feeling. You're too close to the situation. Only time and distance can lure the narrative mind to work through it all later once the dust settles.
So if your narrative mind has left, or if your hair is thinning, now might be a good time to report on the events of the day through lists in your journal... and scrounge around for a hat.
