Hair Growth Products: My secret hair pulling

Since I was a girl, plucking my hair has been a source of stress and comfort. It's also left me with two bald spots 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. I began, I think, by pulling out a chunk of my eyelashes. I felt a young panic over the exposure, and so I resolved to stick to my head, where my secret could be kept. More than two decades later, I’ve kept that resolution. In middle school, in a brief but intense pulling spell, I attacked the crown of my head. It wasn’t until I’d pulled a perfect circle around my cowlick that I realized I couldn’t hide the damage. I wore a side part, which helped, and wrapped my hair up into a bun, which helped more, but people noticed, and asked me why. I dreaded this question, as the only sufficient answer was a lie. Feigning perplexity, as if I’d had nothing to with it, I’d reply, I don’t know, it’s just always been like that! This remains my reply to the only people who ever see, hairstylists. Only recently have I gone to the same stylist twice, because he took my explanation blithely and hasn’t mentioned it since. But I seldom get my hair cut. The moment the stylist clips up half my wet women's hair growth products is equivalent to the nightmare of being naked in public, only real. I suspect that people repeatedly accept my implausible answer because they know the real one is unpleasant: I pull out my hair because I have an impulse control disorder called Trichotillomania, or “Trich,” the impulsive desire to pull out one’s own hair. Pluck is a more apt term than pull, however, because this is not careless work. The very tips of my forefingers are calloused from feeling out “bad” hairs, wiry strands with just the right kinky texture. If I pluck these well, without breaking the hair and wasting a good “bad” hair, I’m rewarded with the touchstone of a good pluck, the bulb, the wet sock from which the hair grows, that I drag against my fingertips and occasionally bite. I experience a momentary, but delicious satisfaction, and then I unfetter the hair. Wherever I go, I leave behind hair like a trail of crumbs.