Just about everyone has something they’re squeamish about, that thing so dreadful that merely uttering its name can take them from zero to full body horror instantly. Mine is eye trauma.

Ugh.

It started at a young age; my parents were very strict about just about everything except what I read, and I read a lot of books that were, in retrospect, possibly definitely a bit too mature for me at the grand old age of ten. Lots of Stephen King, which meant not just the tearing and rending of Cujo the rabid dog but also Steve Kemp and the adventures of his wandering dong. Not just a murderous clown-thing-It but also the supremely awful sewer doesn’t-seem-consensual-but-even-if-it-was-it-was-gross-as-hell group sex with eleven year olds. I dunno how a person can be simultaneously sensitized to something as well as desensitized to it; somehow I managed. 

The scene that got me was short, a snippet of a book within a book, The Dark Half. Flavor text. People I’ve queried about the book who’ve read it don’t even remember the scene. I will never, ever forget it.

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Hair loss feels like such a petty, shallow, vain thing to care about, much less obsess over, until it happens to you, and then it feels like a completely reasonable sinkhole into which to fling endless resources. I’ve struggled with thinning hair since my teens, so I had it just long enough to understand its social value before it started to slide down the drain. 

Losing my hair felt like the death knell to my femininity. I often feel like I’m failing at performing being a woman in the WASP-aspirational way I was raised and which society has reinforced. I’m short, thick, rectangular, and even at my heaviest, never had much in the way of land assets. Even when the fashion-minded talk about the rectangular build and how it can look good in anything, they’re talking about the tall, sleek, uber-fit rectangles, your Gwyneths and Tildas. My measurements fit the rectangle standard but looking good in the way society deems acceptable in any clothes eludes me. So instead, I tend to refer to my body as potato-shaped. I’ve mostly come to terms with it; my frame is my frame and no amount of wishing will make it otherwise. I should know, having spent an inordinate amount of time as a child wishing that someday I could go to school and unzip my body and Cindy Crawford would step out and wouldn’t that show my bullies? Somehow? The grand unzippening never happened, so here I am, a sturdy potato. It’s just…I don’t see a lot of odes to the seductive qualities of the potato.  And that’s fine; my husband finds me attractive and being largely invisible to other men makes my life easier and safer. But sometimes it’d be nice to see an ode, you know? A “Damn! That potato could get it.”  Losing the hair on my potato made it feel like there was nothing good about my appearance at all, that every day onward would be a deeper descent into cave trolldom.

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