Yellow Submarine
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I'm sitting in the same dormitory that I was 4 years ago during the summer before my freshman year when I attended summer school here for six weeks prior to the regular quarter starting as an introductory program. It was quite possibly the best time of my entire life. I was in impeccable physical condition at the time and immediately upon my arrival, several beautiful girls began flirting with me as I was moving into my room. It was really the high point of my life. I had a great senior year in high school (minus a heartbreak midway through it) and was unsure whether or not I'd be able to let go of all my friends and memories, but once I got here I knew that I would be able to do so as I had endless parties and furthermore good times to look forward to. I was flying high with making tons of new friends, exhanging flirtations with girls left and right, and feeling so optimisitc about all the times I had to come. Then, about 4 weeks into all of it, I took a shower which I will morosely remember for the rest of my life. Shampooing my hair, I looked down at my hands only to see them covered in my hair. I had a severe panic attack, turning off the shower immediately and running to the mirror to observe my hair carefully. Everything after that particular moment is a bit foggy, but I do know that was the end of my carefree and blindly optimistic life. Things have truly not been the same for me mentally ever since and I daresay they never will be.
Perhaps I should back up a minute and inform you all (or anyone who cares to read this) about some previous factors in my life which led me to be very vulnerable about my appearance in pertinence to hair loss. The most important is I have the absolute most gargantuan forehead that is possible to exist. I've read some other posts on here and observed pictures of guys who think they have big foreheads, and I would probably give up every penny that is ever going to come to me to trade places with them. Throughout my childhood ever since I can remember, I was always ruthlessly teased about it and in public places, such as restaurants in particular, I would overhear people say to one another "oh my God, look at that kid's forehead!" and look at me with wide eyes and dropped jaws. This absolutely destroyed my self-esteem for many years; I literally felt like John Merrick. Otherwise, I was always a decent looking kid, but that didn't matter too much. Girls always seemed to think I was cute otherwise, but wouldn't show too much interest in me at school because I was pretty much an outcast socially up until 11th grade. It was at this time when I finally got the clue that maybe I should grow my hair longer and use it to cover up my forehead. I had an extremely thick, great head of hair and after growing it out for several months in 10th grade was able to do so and had the whole hippie/indie rock look going which girls seemed to really dig. In 11th grade, I switched to my third high school in a row and made more friends there within 1 month than I had ever had in my entire life. I was getting a lot of attention from girls (and even gay guys too who were comfortable being out of the closet at this school due to it being performing arts based) and my self-esteem took a great leap upwards. After this, my life quality greatly improved, with my optimism growing more and more since I felt good about my appearance. But lo and behold, basing my mental state on a factor such as this obviously left me very vulnerable to encounter a harsh and easy downfall due to the existence of hair loss. Even at this time when I was 16 I knew this and was worried about hair loss in my future and blindly hoped that by the time it hit me there would be some miracle cure available. I figured it would be quite some time before I would ever experience hair loss, at the very earliest in my 30s perhaps, and so thought it wasn't a far fetched idea that a cure would be around by the time I had to deal with it. But ah, as a cruel suprise, it would hit me just slightly over 2 short years later.
So from this it is easy to understand why my mental state took such a drastic downturn after the glory of the second half of high school and in the first several weeks of college. After hair loss hit, I began wearing a hat 99% of the time (I wore it quite frequently in pre-hair loss days as well when I didn't feel like styling it, but nowhere near as much as now). Because my hair was so thick to begin with, I was still able to style it in the way that I liked which both covered my forehead and complimented my face. I still have a relatively full head of hair, but it is no longer thick enough for me to style it the way I used to and I feel extremely insecure when I go out in public without a hat because of this - I know I don't look as good as I used to when I was able to have a better style with it. I have never gone to as many parties here as I would have if it had not been for hair loss because of the gloom I feel about not being able to look as good as I was once able to. I know a lot of it is in my head, I used to be in excellent physical shape (bodybuilding supplemented by creatine and whey protein is likely what brought my hair loss to me at such a young stage) and even with a hat on I was still always able to attract some attention from females because of this. But these days, I no longer work out and have lost around 20 pounds of muscle for fear of accelerating my hair loss even more. I'm on a pretty extensive regimen, Propecia and Nizoral included for the past 2 years, with lots of other vitamins and supplements such as Green tea extract, Circumin, MSM, Biotin, Emu Oil, and several more, and plan to keep adding to it indefinitely as to always attain that little bit of hope that one more addition will bring my hair as close as possible to its pre-loss stage. My hair loss has mostly stabilized, but I still have quite a few hairs come out when I run my hands through it and I haven't experienced too much regrwoth. I could have had one of the funnest, most glory filled college experiences possible but only had shreds of this over the years at parties and with small groups of friends, having some decent times but they were usually overall ruined by the introversion that hair loss did to me and wishing that I could just take my hat off and walk around with that thick head of hair I had in high school, as I always looked better without a hat when my hair was styled. I have quite a few regrets, but I know if I got a chance to do it all over again I probably wouldn't do things too much differently since my deep-rooted insecurity does not allow me to attain the confidence to do so. Right now I'm finishing up a few classes during the summer to graduate and chose to stay in a dorm rather than an apartment due to convenience and it just so happens to be the one which in which I stayed during the summer before freshman year when the future was glowingly bright, causing me to write this. Funny, being here I'm able to actually put myself more in the mental state I had at the time with a positive outlook on things due to the setting for very brief moments, but that vanishes when I come to the sad fact that those days are over and my hair loss is the only I have left from all of it, the very thing which caused an end to that time. I really can't tell you how much I appreciate those of you who have read all of this and hope you have some things to say, good or bad, about all of it, because I'm not able to talk about this with anyone in real life, something I'm sure many of you can understand. Thank goodness for this forum, I don't know how I would have vented all of this without it, and I probably should have done this a long time ago rather than having it build up and letting all of it overall ruin the past few years for me.
Perhaps I should back up a minute and inform you all (or anyone who cares to read this) about some previous factors in my life which led me to be very vulnerable about my appearance in pertinence to hair loss. The most important is I have the absolute most gargantuan forehead that is possible to exist. I've read some other posts on here and observed pictures of guys who think they have big foreheads, and I would probably give up every penny that is ever going to come to me to trade places with them. Throughout my childhood ever since I can remember, I was always ruthlessly teased about it and in public places, such as restaurants in particular, I would overhear people say to one another "oh my God, look at that kid's forehead!" and look at me with wide eyes and dropped jaws. This absolutely destroyed my self-esteem for many years; I literally felt like John Merrick. Otherwise, I was always a decent looking kid, but that didn't matter too much. Girls always seemed to think I was cute otherwise, but wouldn't show too much interest in me at school because I was pretty much an outcast socially up until 11th grade. It was at this time when I finally got the clue that maybe I should grow my hair longer and use it to cover up my forehead. I had an extremely thick, great head of hair and after growing it out for several months in 10th grade was able to do so and had the whole hippie/indie rock look going which girls seemed to really dig. In 11th grade, I switched to my third high school in a row and made more friends there within 1 month than I had ever had in my entire life. I was getting a lot of attention from girls (and even gay guys too who were comfortable being out of the closet at this school due to it being performing arts based) and my self-esteem took a great leap upwards. After this, my life quality greatly improved, with my optimism growing more and more since I felt good about my appearance. But lo and behold, basing my mental state on a factor such as this obviously left me very vulnerable to encounter a harsh and easy downfall due to the existence of hair loss. Even at this time when I was 16 I knew this and was worried about hair loss in my future and blindly hoped that by the time it hit me there would be some miracle cure available. I figured it would be quite some time before I would ever experience hair loss, at the very earliest in my 30s perhaps, and so thought it wasn't a far fetched idea that a cure would be around by the time I had to deal with it. But ah, as a cruel suprise, it would hit me just slightly over 2 short years later.
So from this it is easy to understand why my mental state took such a drastic downturn after the glory of the second half of high school and in the first several weeks of college. After hair loss hit, I began wearing a hat 99% of the time (I wore it quite frequently in pre-hair loss days as well when I didn't feel like styling it, but nowhere near as much as now). Because my hair was so thick to begin with, I was still able to style it in the way that I liked which both covered my forehead and complimented my face. I still have a relatively full head of hair, but it is no longer thick enough for me to style it the way I used to and I feel extremely insecure when I go out in public without a hat because of this - I know I don't look as good as I used to when I was able to have a better style with it. I have never gone to as many parties here as I would have if it had not been for hair loss because of the gloom I feel about not being able to look as good as I was once able to. I know a lot of it is in my head, I used to be in excellent physical shape (bodybuilding supplemented by creatine and whey protein is likely what brought my hair loss to me at such a young stage) and even with a hat on I was still always able to attract some attention from females because of this. But these days, I no longer work out and have lost around 20 pounds of muscle for fear of accelerating my hair loss even more. I'm on a pretty extensive regimen, Propecia and Nizoral included for the past 2 years, with lots of other vitamins and supplements such as Green tea extract, Circumin, MSM, Biotin, Emu Oil, and several more, and plan to keep adding to it indefinitely as to always attain that little bit of hope that one more addition will bring my hair as close as possible to its pre-loss stage. My hair loss has mostly stabilized, but I still have quite a few hairs come out when I run my hands through it and I haven't experienced too much regrwoth. I could have had one of the funnest, most glory filled college experiences possible but only had shreds of this over the years at parties and with small groups of friends, having some decent times but they were usually overall ruined by the introversion that hair loss did to me and wishing that I could just take my hat off and walk around with that thick head of hair I had in high school, as I always looked better without a hat when my hair was styled. I have quite a few regrets, but I know if I got a chance to do it all over again I probably wouldn't do things too much differently since my deep-rooted insecurity does not allow me to attain the confidence to do so. Right now I'm finishing up a few classes during the summer to graduate and chose to stay in a dorm rather than an apartment due to convenience and it just so happens to be the one which in which I stayed during the summer before freshman year when the future was glowingly bright, causing me to write this. Funny, being here I'm able to actually put myself more in the mental state I had at the time with a positive outlook on things due to the setting for very brief moments, but that vanishes when I come to the sad fact that those days are over and my hair loss is the only I have left from all of it, the very thing which caused an end to that time. I really can't tell you how much I appreciate those of you who have read all of this and hope you have some things to say, good or bad, about all of it, because I'm not able to talk about this with anyone in real life, something I'm sure many of you can understand. Thank goodness for this forum, I don't know how I would have vented all of this without it, and I probably should have done this a long time ago rather than having it build up and letting all of it overall ruin the past few years for me.
