Anyone can have a chance of developing alopecia

I have had alopecia since I was 20, and I have always had some bald spots ever since. I think the total time I haven't been bald since it started is less than two years.
The size and duration vary, and it's quite a nuisance.

Sometimes I hide it with a wig, sometimes with a hat, and when I think, 'Oh well!', I walk through strong winds without hiding anything.

“Why did you go bald?”
“How did you cure it?”

It's about stories like that.

No matter how I think about it, the trigger for the onset was 'stress from the shock of repeating a year at university,' but every hospital I went to said,

“The causal relationship between alopecia and stress hasn't been clearly established, you see...”

That's what they told me. Even their explanation of the mechanism of hair loss was,

“For some reason, your white blood cells are identifying your hair matrix cells as enemies and attacking them.”

And I thought, wait, that's the explanation I often hear for life-threatening conditions like leukemia. Scary.

By the way, there are absolutely no problems with my health. The only symptom is that my hair just falls out. There was a time when almost all my hair fell out. Nostalgic.

I found a photo. Lol. Looking at the date on the album, it was about 5 years ago.

For those with truly severe symptoms, it seems that not just hair, but eyelashes, eyebrows, and every hair on their body falls out, so I guess I have a milder case.

I wondered if it couldn't be proven because it's difficult to quantify stress, while screaming in my heart every time, (I am 100% convinced it's stress though!!!).

The reason I am convinced it is stress is because it starts falling out about a month after I experience stress that I cannot process internally.

For example,

and so on.

To those of you who thought, 'No way, if you feel enough stress to lose your hair from just this, wouldn't you be unable to function in society?'

Yes, I cannot keep going.

Right now, I am desperately clinging to a job that is fully remote and not in system development.
However, since the times are changing, there is no telling when full remote work might disappear. I am writing this note today while trembling with fear. Help me.

However, at the hospital I went to recently,

“Stress is likely the trigger that is making it fall out easily, isn't it?”

!!!!

I finally met a doctor who would say something like this. Yes, that is exactly it. No matter how I think about it, stress is the cause of the hair loss.

This abnormally low stress threshold. To put it simply,

“A high school girl from the deep countryside started living alone in TOKYO and was taught a lesson.”

That is what it means.

To be precise,

“I hadn't trained to withstand the stress of the city”

feels like the correct answer.

Because it was an environment where I would only pass by cars, people, and bicycles about five times a day, and I would feel, “I passed by a lot of people today.”

I had almost zero stress tolerance.

I didn't have a part-time job, and I only went back and forth between home and school. I had a few friends at school, but we weren't close enough to hang out outside of school, and my life was filled with games until I went to sleep, so my interpersonal skills were barely developed.

Such a socially awkward person came all the way from the easternmost tip of Hokkaido, wandered into the middle of TOKYO alone, and was overwhelmed by the density of people, cars, information, temperature, humidity, and everything else I had never experienced before.

The first year was very interesting, though. There were so many things I didn't know, and just experiencing them was fun.

It was also at this time that I learned that cherry blossoms really do bloom during the graduation season.

I couldn't really get used to the humidity and temperature, and since it was my first time using an air conditioner, I think I was barely keeping my health together during the summer.

By the way, I am still barely surviving during the summer even now. As long as I am on the main island, I will probably be barely surviving throughout the summer.

Then came the dreaded second year. The level of university lectures increased, and preparation and review alone were no longer enough to keep up.
I had a useless sense of pride, so I never asked others for help and struggled on my own.

I would get frustrated when I couldn't understand things and would pull out my own hair. I didn't know it at the time, but this seems to be called trichotillomania.
To give you an idea of how much I was pulling out, every time, I would pull out enough to form a small mound at my feet.

At the time, it grew back immediately, so I didn't have alopecia at this point.

I overcame my frustration and took the exams, but I couldn't understand the content and ended up repeating the year.
It might have been better if I had asked someone about the parts I didn't understand.

Was the exam day in the summer?

After hearing the results, my mental state collapsed, and I felt physically unwell due to the heat, so I developed something like a panic disorder.
I didn't go to a hospital, so it's just a guess that that's what it was.

For about a year, I couldn't ride the train and became a shut-in. In exchange, the panic disorder-like symptoms subsided.

I wasted a year, but I was already repeating the year anyway. I just stopped caring.

And so, my life with alopecia began from here.

I noticed it when I tried to brush my hair back.

Why are my fingers touching my scalp so much?

I checked the side of my head in the mirror.
At a glance, it looked like I had hair, but when I lifted it, my scalp said, "Hello!"

Hey, are you serious?
When I lifted the hair on the other side and the back, my scalp greeted me there too.

Well, it'll grow back soon, I thought, so I didn't seek treatment and left it alone.
Actually, the first time, it grew back relatively quickly. Was it my youth?

And so began a life of hair falling out and growing back repeatedly.

The scary thing is that I was working a part-time job at the time. It was in a restaurant kitchen.
That said, I often worked during closing hours, and there wasn't much cooking to do, so I don't think any hair got into the food.

However, I didn't take any precautions regarding my hair.
The back of my head was so bald that it couldn't be hidden by the surface hair, so I'm sure the people at my job saw it.

Even knowing that, I didn't hide it. I had been poisoned by TOKYO, so I had this nonsensical idea that this was just diversity.

Seriously, what is this guy talking about?

After that, I went bald every now and then. The sides of my head in particular wanted to fall out quickly, so I just accepted it and wore a two-block style haircut.

Even after becoming a working adult, it fell out relentlessly. It was common for a mound of hair to form at my feet.
It's a fond memory now that my boss asked me, "Are you okay in the head?".

Around this time, it started taking longer for it to grow back.
Even so, I didn't have the option of getting treatment at a hospital.

I even went on marriage hunting while I was losing my hair. Am I crazy?
That's when I met my current husband. Is he sane? I'm truly grateful.

It was only after my husband told me to that I finally started going to the hospital.

I don't even want to remember the first hospital. As soon as I went there,

"Well then, shall we do an injection?"

Huh??????? No, my skull is right there, and you're going to inject me? Where is the liquid going to go?? Ouchhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!

The needle pierced me without mercy. I feel like I was poked five or six times.
As anyone who has had an injection in their head knows, it is incredibly painful.

The pain is incomparable to a blood draw from the arm. There's also the fear of whether such a thin needle will break when the bone is right there.

I stopped going after that one time. Because it hurt.

After that, I hopped from one hospital to another.
My skin also got incredibly rough due to the medication.

That's how I found my current hospital and was finally able to encounter a peaceful treatment.

The last time I went was around March of this year. I'd like to stop needing their help soon, but I wonder what will happen.

Currently, it is peaceful.

To maintain this peace, the best thing is to live a life without stress, so I am searching for ways to do that every day.

Apparently, stress relief is best, but for me, stress relief is "doing nothing and spacing out", so as long as I am working or raising children, that is quite difficult.

Therefore, at the very least, I am looking for a job with fewer restrictions so that I don't end up in an environment like the one I wrote about at the beginning.

For a while, I even thought, could I just give up and live as a stress checker?

Well, even if I did that, it wouldn't improve the workplace, nor would it pay for my medical expenses, so I immediately discarded that idea.

As long as I continue to experience stress, my alopecia will likely recur at any time.
There is no stress in the hair loss itself, and since it's at the level of "Oh, it's started again," I'm even enjoying it to some extent.

If you happen to experience hair loss while you're young, well, there's no need to worry too much. It will grow back eventually.
I can guarantee that, having lived with baldness for over 15 years.

If you want to grow it back right away, you can go to a clinic, and the fact that you don't have hair also has the advantage of letting you enjoy whatever hairstyle you like with wigs.

We are in the Reiwa era now, so if there's anyone who laughs at your appearance, you can just think to yourself that they are the ones who are bald at heart.

Let's accept hair loss due to aging.
It's fun to shave your head and enjoy fashion with different wigs every day.