This Leo is losing her mane

but hasn't quite lost her roar

I don’t know who she is and I couldn’t resist.

For decades I had a lot of thick, wavy, brown hair. I considered it my best feature, wearing it up or down, feeling lucky I didn’t have to brush or style it much. It was good hair. No, actually it was great hair.

Then about a year ago I noticed I had considerably less of it. Not only that, it also seemed to be thinning at my temples. My best feature was a has-been, a formerly, an ex. I was alarmed and had a heart to heart with my hairdresser. “How do we fix this? Look my hair is falling out!!!” She said, “Girlfriend, this is what happens as we get older. I rub a little Rogaine on my temples.”

I didn’t buy Rogaine, but I purchased liquid collagen and biotin and other flavors of hair growth products I’ve seen on Tick Tock, my guilty 3am pleasure. I’m trying these lotions and potions but nothing is improving, except my fingernails are as hard as rocks.

A month ago I turned fifty-seven. I have a habit of reviewing my failures on my birthday, the pounds not lost, the books not written, the money not made. That did not happen this year. I am grateful and joyful and feeling pretty damn good. This year I have just one complaint: I’m losing my hair.

There is this certain power, this feeling of thickness, fullness I felt before I and don’t feel it now. It is perfectly acceptable and even expected that men go bald as they age. I’m not saying they like it. My own husband battled it with strange styling choices until he ultimately gave up and shaved it all off—honestly he looks better that way. But it’s not often that a person who identifies as female shaves her head. I think Betty Dodson, or Sinead O’Connor, Pema Chodron or awfully, women in cancer treatment. That’s what bald women make me think of: a reaction to society or a reaction to a treatment for an illness. I’m not sick. I’m not reacting to anything. My hair is thinning. I’m just upset about it.

When I was a little girl my mother wrote a book about how to make doll house furniture. It was a quite a hit in 1976 and she went on book tour, morning tv shows and the like. My father stayed home and was in charge of my long blonde hair. It didn’t go so well, and when my mother returned and was faced with the snarled mop that was now my hair, she took me downstairs to the barber shop on the corner and had it all chopped off. I was miserably mistaken for a boy for the next year until it grew back.

After that I’ve never had short hair. I’ve had bobs in shades of red but mostly I’ve had shoulder length wavy hair, which I’ve colored as I’ve gotten older in more natural shades of blonde and red. Maybe this is part of the problem. I was always in control of my hair. Now it feels like my hair has taken the driver’s seat.

Hair is a symbol of femininity and of power. I think of the cutting of the hair as a sacrifice in Gift of the Magi and Little Women, as an object of real value to be traded for other goods. In Rapunzel her hair is a means of escape until the witch cuts it to retain her control. In Victorian literature there is so much brushing of the hair by maids at night, a sense of luxury in the long locks, a representation of beauty and a certain mysterious power. If hair in our culture and others represents female power, and I am losing mine, am I losing my power? That's what it feels like.

As an enneagram type eight, power is important, perhaps the most important aspect of my personality. Becoming less powerful makes me feel uncomfortable, incomplete. But this power, is just what we are fed by our culture about youth and beauty, and yes, hair.

This is just part of my aging process, the process in my body as it moves to becoming an elder. In fact, I like being older, more secure in myself, less affected by others’ perceived thoughts about me. But the hair. Losing my hair is a concrete reflection of that process. Ok self, you're strong on the inside, but can you handle looking old and possibly weaker on the outside? Is there a strength we lose in order to gain something even more potent? If I accept the changes to my body, will I gain something more important, perhaps a sense of self not buoyed by the counting of strands? Is this perhaps what is meant by aging gracefully? I'm not going to head toward sixty kicking and screaming, getting botox and scalp injections. I think it's true what they say. You can't have it all. Perhaps we don't need to want “it all.” Perhaps “all” is overrated. Maybe today, with less hair, I am actually more true to who I am, who I am becoming. I'll leave it there.

XoHanna