Sphynx Cat: How I Learned to Appreciate Having Alopecia

What I gained from losing my hair

Writer Lora Berg, who has alopecia, wears wigs

I still wake up entangled in a Don Quixote body, tilting against itself—my immune system rumbling its ancient wagons of war, killing follicles. I’m impressed by its conviction, the way it imagines demons to take down.

Just over 30 years ago, I stood outside my diplomatic residence in Morocco raising my arms like wings. I’d been diagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy and was waiting for my husband Karim to pull up; I would undergo surgery that day.

I remember saying, “I’m sorry,” as I came out of anesthesia—sorry to my absent parents that I could no longer carry on our lineage, sorry for my husband. This lost pregnancy haunted me.

My breasts filled with milk, imagined babies. Trouble seemed written in my body, in several languages and remnants of stitches. My dear three-year-old son, an only child before we were fortunate to adopt two daughters, told me he wished he could climb back in through my belly button.

When I brushed my hair in those days after the surgery, clumps appeared in the brush and on the floor. After I recovered physically, I still imagined I was having more ectopic pregnancies. One day, spelunking alone among stalactites, I felt a sharp abdominal pain, no doubt psychosomatic, and ran out of the cave I had been exploring, fear shadowing me.

The doctors found nothing. Avoid stress so more hair won’t fall out, they said, their counsel itself a stressor. Bigger and bigger clumps of hair appeared in my hands over the ensuing weeks.

Alopecia areata. Aren’t those melodious words, like the name of a hand-built sailboat, an island, or even a galaxy?

“My hair is falling out,” I told Karim, as I stood before him with hair on only half my head.

“No, it isn’t,” he said.

Lucky for me, my husband lived in dreams and my son was too young to be embarrassed by his mother. Yet alopecia remained my banner of mourning. At first, I thought my hair would quickly return, but no.

My father back in America brainstormed with Karim over the phone. A biologist, he had a penchant for inventing cures and would send me homemade potions.

“Really?” my beloved husband yelled into the receiver. “Lora’s great grandma was bald too? Does it run in the family? Oh, was she Orthodox? Shaved her head? A wig sounds good!”

“It’s my body,” I called out from the next room. “I will never wear a wig. I’m a natural woman. I’ll only wear hats. Let me talk to my daddy!” I burst in, took the phone, and complained to my patient dad. My men bolstered me, as did my wider support system of family and friends. I knew I should be thankful, as I thought of people for whom alopecia would be even more unsettling, such as children, and singles seeking mates.

A French-trained Moroccan dermatologist tssk-ed as he held his magnifying glass to my scalp, suggesting vitamins and ultraviolet rays. “Mais, Madame!” this physician observed, raising his eyebrows and voice. “C’est une pelade totale. Vous risquez de perdre tous vos cheuveux.” (It’s alopecia totalis. You risk losing all your hair.) And indeed, I did.

Bald could now enhance my list of peculiarities as an American diplomat in the Arab world: female, Jewish, left-handed, married to a Muslim, Tunisian man. Besides my being a woman, I wasn’t sure which of these things my host country interlocutors knew about me. I did more listening than talking at work. But I must have seemed on the odd side even before my hair fell.

I did understand that in Arab culture, communication passes through warmth and charisma. At a subliminal level, I clicked in North Africa, a place that runs on intuition, poetry, warmth. In that atmosphere, baldness didn’t really change my ability to work. Also, life isn’t so easy for people there—difficulties are understood.

In those days, I daydreamed of a bald world where I could stride about without disguising my alopecia. Our housekeepers, strong and stout with smooth black hair, Warda Ait and Mona Alami (not their real names), fussed over me, said their hair was falling too, and yanked out tufts to convince me. “You have to sit in the sun,” they counseled, dragging big Berber pillows onto our balcony. I sunned there, where neighbors couldn’t see.

Wardatold me, “My mom says hot peppers could cure you.” She made a paste of pepper, then massaged it into my head.

“Ow!” I cried, my scalp turning scarlet.

“My mom told me it’s bad blood,” said Mona. “You have to let it out. You should make razor scratches on your scalp in a crisscross pattern, then rub in garlic and kohl. Our neighbor did it. Her hair grew back overnight.”

“Hmm,” I said, keeping my mind open. “Maybe not the razor, but garlic.” She mixed some garlic with henna to rub on my head.

“In any case,” Warda and Mona reminded me in unison, “you shouldn’t think too much.”

People in Rabat would blame the onset of alopecia on the water, air, worms in wool blankets, stress, genetics, tooth infections, pregnancy, shock, or a mix of the above. Everyone knew a woman who had lost some hair.

In fact, about one-third of women worldwide experience hair loss at some point. And by age 35, two-thirds of all men do. It is so ordinary, it hardly seems problematic, and yet we are socialized to see it that way.

After I began wearing hats, advisors appeared all around me. They knew what I hadn’t told them. Abdesalam, the waiter at the café where I often had tea, vouched for a recipe from the Rif, Morocco’s hashish heartland: hash seeds heated over a slow fire, mashed in the mortar, mixed with olive oil, and rubbed in. “That’s what we do in the mountains,” he said.

Abdelhamid, a Sufi embassy driver, proposed Sudanese pepper mixed with ashes of the blue paper used to wrap sugar. “When other cures fail,” he said, “try mine. And remember I told you.”

My Arabic teacher took me to visit a barber with a gentle smile, a known healer. In a soft, reassuring voice, the barber offered me the razor-on-scalp treatment, but I turned him down.

I kept thinking alopecia was my fault, something wrong at my core. I cried a lot, as hair began to disappear from my legs, arms, armpits, crotch. A last effort, Amina and Amina took me to see a sorcerer in Takkadoum, a popular neighborhood on the fringe of our upscale section of Rabat. Outside this man’s shop, we joined women waiting in a long line. Once we made it inside, the portly, cheerful provisioner with well-oiled skin invited us to sit down. He stood before a wall covered, floor to ceiling, with shelves holding dozens of bottles of ingredients—from dried bits of animals, insects and plants, spices, and perfumes, to a rare Yemeni honey.

“Even government officials come here,” whispered Amina Mama.

“And how can I help you ladies?” he asked, to which Amina and Amina offered a description of my woes. “Allah is miraculous. I see, I see,” he responded, taking a paper and tallying numbers which added up to over 100 dollars, a lot for that area at that time. A dab of that precious honey ran up the bill.

“We’ll think it over,” I said, firmly grasping my friends’ arms and heading for the door, but to my consternation, they turned and went back in, ordering potions for ailments of their own. I had become pretty savvy about prices and felt this healer hadn’t set his high price based on my foreign look, but maybe on his estimate of how much I needed a cure. I worried Amina and Amina might be had. But if a potion gives a person confidence, maybe it is worth the expense. And maybe his cures actually worked. What did I know?

All those suggested cures made me feel cared for and gave me a sense of belonging, even if the traditional approach could sometimes go too far. For example, before my arrival, a medical disaster had stalked my office at the American Cultural Center. My predecessor had developed multiple sclerosis, and our staff suspected the space might be inhabited by a jinn. Therefore, an exorcism had been carried out by an imam just before I came. Yet the jinn must have hidden under the desk, stirring up mischief with my alopecia. At least it would seem so, if a person believes in jinn.

To manage my alopecia, I tied a scarf with a bow behind my head and perched a hat on top. If prior I may have appeared as a loose Westerner in the eyes of some who wore the veil, I now became an even stranger bird, a veiled one. To some, the hat must have appeared as my effort to cover myself, as per scripture, in modesty. Never had I felt the pressure that surrounds veiling so intensely. One day on the train from Rabat to Fez, I sat across from an unveiled woman who said, “I work every day and do all I should. Yet I am criticized for not covering my head. And now I have to sit across, Allah help me, from a Western woman wearing that get-up?”

Should I pull off my hat, I thought, and scare this person who lectures a stranger? But I felt sympathy for her. The veil discussion took up so much space when I lived in the Arab world, crowding other conversations. I closed my eyes and kept my mouth shut. I would also have been thrilled to not think about veils. But during my years in the region, I constantly heard variations on the great veil discussion, to cover or not to cover, through my big ears under floppy hats.

This was before the prevalence of the internet. Only when I arrived back in the U.S. did I learn that Moroccan folk cures for alopecia were spot on, matching those of American doctors I consulted: ultraviolet rays, garlic, capsaicin, irritating the scalp. Inhibitors of the 21st century weren’t around yet.

A nurse practitioner who was an old family friend told me as she tried to dampen my expectation of hair growing back, “I’m fat. You’re bald. That’s just how it is.” Somehow, that made me feel much better. Facts of life.

Also in the U.S., it finally occurred to me I could, after all, wear a wig—and I have ever since. I chose a short one with a color lighter than my original walnut hair and have stuck with it. Wigs started to seem like a blessing—no hairdresser needed. No confusion about my motives for covering my head.

Now I’m in my sixties but wear a wig with no gray. I’m not sure what people notice when they see me, perhaps an older woman hiding her age with a wig? It doesn’t matter, because I’m at ease. Ever more the sphynx cat, I smile and stretch. I don’t want to try new medications with all their side effects. The older I get, the less I want my hair back.

Without hair, I feel smooth and fresh in my skin. Lately I’ve lost even my eyelashes. Autoimmune conditions come in suites, and I sometimes fear that my immune system may now turn its energies against a more necessary organ.

But as far as hair is concerned, women often try to remove hair from every part of their bodies except eyes and heads, while I am free. Why want hair? Being hairless is a way we distinguish ourselves from other mammals. I often feel light, airy, as if I could fly. In summer I feel cool, and in winter I wear a hat. There is a myth that people with alopecia tend to be sensitive and even kindly, and I like to believe this.

It is as fine to be bald as to be hairy, yet for profit, the hair potion industry underwrites research and launches campaigns to make us perceive baldness as a problem. I have yet to venture out without a wig in public, no matter how often I claim that baldness can be graceful and even signify power. Maybe this essay is a first step. As my son, now grown and a tech founder, tells me, “For god’s sake, mom, Bezos is bald!”

This is my code, my DNA, and at least as far as baldness goes. I’ve been on a journey and finally come to appreciate my condition. DNA is itself like a culture, the culture of my body, set in its ways. I’ve come to appreciate it, just as I appreciate the old-world culture I was raised in, with all its inherent illusions. Besides, don’t innovations, discoveries, improvements, often come about by “mistake?” Maybe we aren’t a bald species, but we might become one someday. Bald and wrinkled as a sphynx cat, I’m learning to be at ease with myself.

One day on a mountain top, a wish (without an eyelash) wafts to mind, and I understand the distance I’ve come to appreciate alopecia: I don’t wish on an eyelash, since I have none. It’s not that I miss them. Hairless, I dance in my silken body. I wish to wish, and so I do, on shooting stars, raindrops, ladybugs, dandelion puffs. My wishes rise, undeterred to glide in the wind, bright as swallowtail kites. I wish for people to know, it can be beautiful to live this way.

Lora Berg wrote The Mermaid Wakes, a collaborative book with visual artist Canute Caliste, and has published poems in Shenandoah, Colorado Review, The Carolina Quarterly, etc. She served as Poet-in-Residence at the Saint Albans School and holds a Johns Hopkins MFA. Lora worked abroad for many years at U.S. embassies as a cultural attaché. She is a grandma in a vibrant, multicultural family.