Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

In the last year of my relationship with {The Ex}, I started falling apart. I thought I was crazy. Crying at strange times, agoraphobia, insomnia. I started seeing a Cognitive Behavioral therapist and a psychiatrist who put me on Wellbutrin.

Nothing was wrong with me. Something was very, very wrong with my world, something was very, very wrong in my home, but I just didn't see it, and the person closest to me, {The Ex}, just gave me perplexed looks when I would start crying for no reason and suggest that I see a therapist. Right. I need a therapist. Right.

Once, in the month before we broke, I was brushing my hair in our bathroom, and I put my hair up in a pony tail. "That's odd, " I thought. "It feels...less...somehow." I have always had incredibly thick, sometimes obnoxious hair. I'd always had TONS of hair. Sometimes it felt like my hair grew my head, not the other way around, like I was a support device for the TONS of unruly hair that ruled my life. And it had started falling out.

A few months later, after I found out about {The Ex}'s many, disgusting, unsafe affairs, my body seemingly shut down out of grief as a mourned a person who didn't exist, and a relationship that had been a lie. I couldn't eat. The sight of food made me ill. I lost 10 pounds the first weeks, and another 10 the following month. My blood pressure went up from 112/70 to 160/120. My resting heart rate went from 57 to 155. My hair started falling out in huge clumps.

Now, I eat. Now, I'm off Wellbutrin, as the source of my feeling that something was terribly wrong with the world is out of my life. My hair is still falling out. I've started buying very expensive vitamins and shampoos. I keep putting Rogaine for Women in my Amazon shopping cart, but I can't bring myself to buy. I am not a woman who buys Rogaine. This is what my ego says before I can hit the button. In this universe, it is unthinkable that I should have to buy Rogaine. Maybe Phyto lotion, but never Rogaine. It seems cosmically unfair, but the cosmos are unfair.

So I can't bring myself to buy Rogaine, and I can't bring myself to buy Phyto lotion, and I'm avoiding my beloved stylist so she cannot survey the damage done on my scalp.

So I'm buying a Wonder Woman costume for Halloween instead, as a talisman.