By Kathleen Williams

My Personal Story

1 Corinthians 11:14-15 reads: “Does not even nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair, it is dishonour to him, but if a woman has long hair, it is glory to her?”

A women’s hair is her crowning glory. It doesn’t matter what background, religion, physical requisite or financial status a women may have, a women’s hair is where her confidence resides.

This is where my hair story begins. At the age of 16, I relaxed my hair after suffering from years of traumatic experiences of comb breaking and pain staking treatments to my natural hair. I loved my relaxed hair; it was manageable and definitely neater. At first, my hair was thick and lustrous; I looked like I had weave in, but after years of relaxing, plaiting, weaving and after the birth of my second child I realised that my hair was thinning on the top of my head. My way of coping with this thinning was to wear more weaves and plaits to cover it up. Well, it went from bad to worse; I plaited my hair and was wearing it up quite often.

When I took out my hair, my hairline had taken a toll from the tension of the plaits. I asked a hairdresser what should I do? she recommended that I do the Ghanaian plaits as it catches all the little hairs on my hairline and will cover up the patches. Well, the matter become worsened by another tension orientated hairstyle (I was oblivious to this of course). My confidence went rock bottom and I chopped my hair off leaving 3 inches of natural hair growth. Over a period of years, my hair grew but the bald patches still remained. I could only cope with this condition by once again sewing weave in my hair to cover it up.

After being so frustrated with my hair loss, I had a talk with a good friend who had natural hair and she advised me on how to care for it. From there on my mission has been to research as much as I can about my condition and this I will share with you.

First Steps In Coping

The first step in coping with hair loss for women is accepting the initial feelings about hair loss as normal and expected. When you first begin to notice hair loss or when you are preparing for it before chemotherapy or other types of treatments, you may feel angry about the condition, upset about the emotional and physical consequences and scarred of the outcome or the thought of being bald. All of these feelings are expected, natural and normal. However, in order to better cope with hair loss, you need to accept these feelings and then begin moving past them.

There are many different approaches that you can take for coping with hair loss. However, for many women, preparation is the most effective. To begin this preparation you need to learn all of the facts about your hair loss and research ways that you can treat it, hide it or learn to live with it.

In the next part of the series we will be looking more on how educating yourself can be an effective tool in coping with hair loss.