My secret hair pulling

Sun, 09 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I lived a placid childhood in an interior suburb of Houston, in a green neighborhood with an annual decorate-your-bicycle parade on the 4th of July. The summers were sweltering hot and spent outside, in backyards, dodging wasps and playing beneath the rain of sprinklers, or inside, drying off in refrigerated air, complaining of boredom. It was a small, talkative world within a large, indifferent city, and along the way I began to pull out my hair.

As I write this, I have two bald spots on the back of my head, just behind my ears. These, my hot spots, have grown and shrunk over the years according to the severity of my pulling. At the moment they are more like streaks; imagine a quarter squashed on a train track and that’s about the size of each. Neither is entirely bald, just sparse with intrepid strands in various stages of wispy or stubbly regrowth. No matter how hard I pull, my hair always comes back fighting.

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My secret hair pulling