Wigging Out: How I Found Beauty in Baldness
Posted byNika
on March 11, 2013http://www.autostraddle.com/wigging-out-160360/Hi. My name is Nika and I'm a wig addict. It's been four months since my last confection.
Waaaaaaaay back in high school an undisclosed number of years ago (let's just say that it's more than seventeen), I had long strawberry blonde hair. It was never thick or all that luxurious, but it sure looked pretty. It was my one 'socially acceptable' expression of femininity that was still in line with the masculine image I tried to present.
There were still homophobes who called me '->-bleeped-<-' and other slurs despite the fact that I dated only girls. It didn't hurt so much as bewilder me. Still, I was glad that they didn't guess my shameful secret that I had mostly repressed (surprise! I'm transgender). They didn't know I was a girl. I was safe.
A few years later, I dreaded cleaning out the shower drain. Hair... and more hair.
Fast forward through a dozen years of deep depression, self-imposed isolation and several hats and other head coverings. It wasn't all about the hair. I'm not quite that vain. Being bombarded during this time by images of beautiful women with long hair while having male pattern baldness certainly made it easier to repress being transgender.
Having worked through a lot of things in the swamp gas between my ears, I finally came out in public on July 19, 2012, as a woman... wearing a wig:
I found my own beauty in baldness. I like me a lot more now. I'm expressing beauty much more consistently with my own internal image of myself. The hard part is remaining true to yourself. Pinnochina has gone from being a plastic doll to being a real girl. Wigging over and out!
