I am going to be bald by the time I graduate college. This is an utterly terrifying thought.
One day, I’ll wake up and come to the realization that after all these years, my hair — a part of me that I’ve had since I was born — is just gone. Scattered in various shower drains, trash cans, barber shops and wherever else loose pieces of hair end up.
I know it has already started, and that I will barely notice as it continues to go. It slowly creeps with the same inevitability as time passing.
Every morning when I look in the mirror, wetting my hair and pushing it back, I see the slowly receding and thinning hairline staring right back at me, mocking me. It seems to know I will not fully realize the extent of its loss until it is way too late.
I’ve looked up treatments before. I could try minoxidil, finasteride, a hair transplant or even laser therapy. It would at least slow my balding down and possibly even stop it entirely. But, I must consider that every man I am directly related to is bald or in the process of losing their hair.
I have options, but I think I’ll pass on having a 2-foot-long combover flap in the wind. I have decided to accept my baldness as my genetically ordained fate, in part, due to absurdist philosopher and novelist Albert Camus.
***
I first came to the realization of my future baldness when I was 7. I was teasing my dad for how shiny his head was. “You can laugh now, but one day you’ll have a head like this, too,” he told me with a joking smile on his face. I was horrified by the very thought of it. I would never be bald. Sure, I would grow up, but I would be the same and continue to have my head of hair. Right?
Wrong.
I started to put it together. My dad was bald, my uncle was bald, my grandpa was balding and so was my late grandpa in the final decades of his life. I may not have fully understood genetics, but that was damning evidence to my first-grade mind; I, too, would be bald.
I did my best to push the thought out of my mind. It didn’t start for my dad until he was an undergrad, and college students were ancient compared to me, after all. It seemed like I had an eternity before I woke up one day with a naked head.
It was like that for several years; it was so far away why even bother thinking about it?
In middle school, the reality finally emerged from the edges of my mind. College was only a few years away and so was the inevitability of baldness. I was self-conscious enough as a middle schooler, but now I had to contend with a future lack of hair.
My conclusion came about slowly. As I wrestled with the obvious struggles of being a middle school boy going through puberty, I kept thinking about baldness. I was 12, grappling with an existential dread of aging and losing my hair. Maybe some of these thoughts were egged on by the nearly 70-year-old middle school I was sitting in. After some internal toil, and with a little help from Camus, I reached acceptance.
Before encountering Camus, I asked myself, “What was so bad about going bald in the first place?”
To the best of my knowledge, my head is relatively normal shaped, so that wouldn’t be an issue. My hair is fairly light too, so even on the sides it wouldn’t be too stark of a contrast from my leftover hair and my shiny head. I would probably be able to grow facial hair as well, and that almost always pairs well with a bald head. I’d look okay, so what was my issue?
After spending a few free periods (and some class time) roaming random Wikipedia pages about stuff I thought would make me smart, I discovered this French philosopher who seemed to write about the exact feelings I was having. Camus spoke to me through my Chromebook screen. I realized that I wasn’t afraid of going bald because of how I would look; I was afraid of going bald because it meant I had permanently, irreversibly changed from aging.
That realization was at the heart of this entire fear of balding. I didn’t mind going bald, I just didn’t want to grow old and die. From an early age, I had existential thoughts about my mortality and was terrified of dying one day, but I hadn’t realized that my fear of going bald was an extension of a fear of age and death. I couldn’t think of many things worse than growing old and slowly degrading into nothing. I would hyperventilate and fill with terror at night when I would think about how brief life really is. Before I knew it, I would be a bald, decrepit old man who would slowly fade into whatever awaits after death. Ostensibly, my life was over.
Being in complete terror of aging and dying was not a sustainable way of living. I was miserable, riddled with anxiety and existential thoughts. I didn’t know what to do.
It felt absurd to spend my youth dreading the certainty of aging, and soon after my dread began, I found the work of Camus. And somehow, in a strange way, Camus convinced my eighth-grade self that balding was two things: certain and okay.
To very roughly paraphrase a summary of a translation of Camus, I had three options when confronting the absurdity of baldness (Camus says nothing specifically about baldness, but I find it rather absurd to lament one’s own decay and death in middle school) and the existential dread it brings: I could take a leap of faith, commit suicide or revolt and accept my fate of absurdity (and baldness).
I didn’t like two of those options very much, so I decided to revolt, welcoming my destiny to be a bald man. I would go bald gracefully, or at least as gracefully as one can.
Once my hairline thinned and receded enough, I would buzz it all. Freeing myself from the bounds of the fear instilled in me, I would walk proudly into baldness, knowing that a lack of hair is nothing to be ashamed of. With as much confidence as I can muster, I will embrace my baldness.
Fighting it may grant me temporary relief, but ultimately, what is the point? I would have to reapply topical cream every day, commit to surgery or take some odd pill if I fought against inevitability. I’d be like a Roman emperor waging a war on the ocean. I have no hope of winning, so I might as well let it wash over me in acceptance.
Baldness won’t be pretty. I’ll have to moisturize my head, throw out any conditioner I had, start shaving my head or getting haircuts every few weeks so the sides don’t grow out too much and hope that one day I can grow a beard so I don’t look like a weirdly large baby.
I’ll have to prepare for frigid Michigan winters without the warm comfort of my relatively-full head of hair. I must embrace the wooly itch of stocking caps so I don’t get wind burn all over my scalp. I’ll also have to prepare for the beating summer sun and increased exposure to UV rays. I’ll have to slather sunscreen all over my head to ensure I don’t burn and look like a stubbly cherry tomato.
But I would not have it any other way.
The train of time is going to keep on chugging no matter what I do. I have accepted my genetically preordained fate. I’m going to be bald.
There is comfort in knowing my future: I will go bald. I will grow old. I will die.
But, so what? That’s just how it goes.
Statement Correspondent Miles Anderson can be reached at milesand@umich.edu.