Growing up no one ever warns you about your quarter-life crisis. I’d only ever heard of the mid-life variety that gifted men with a new red sports car. But recently I’ve learned that the quarter-life strain of crises are far less shiny, except for the glow of prematurely balding heads.
Every now and then I still have horrific flashbacks to the 7 seconds that set off my own quarter life crisis a few years ago. The ad agency where I was employed had just premiered a new beautifully-edited video inspiring viewers to be our best selves and do our best work. There, approximately one minute and thirty-four seconds into the short film, was a cameo of myself sitting at a bench, hunched over, deeply focused on writing. Most likely I was making a grocery list. With my chin to my chest, the crown of my head took aim at the camera. Nearly glistening on top for all viewers to see was a thinning spot in my hair shaped like a malnourished alien, grinning into the camera lens. On top of my head. A head that before now I guess I’d never seen the top of.
A sour acid began creeping up the back of my throat as I gasped for air. Up until that moment, I had been under the impression I would have at least ten more years before my hair would thin. Those ten years would be key because I had big plans for them; I would locate my soulmate and convince him that I had a good history of not losing my hair. Surely, he’d then be too busy looking into my eyes to notice my increasing number of naked follicles. A decade later, it would be too late for him to leave because he loved me too much, or more likely had just spent too much time with me to know how he could possibly restart his life alone. So he’d keep his balding boyfriend by default. That’s how I saw it happening.
I've always been willing to settle for being the default. But being bald and single, that was never an option for my ego.
Looking back there were plenty of signs, like the time my mom gave me hair-growth vitamins that my own grandmother was taking at the time. I never understood why until that moment watching my agency’s video. The first twenty-four years of my life I believed that I was unbreakable and that I would be forever young. But my young adulthood was now dying with each visibly lost hair. The next three months generated what was likely the largest spike in WebMD traffic history and the single largest sale of vitamins at a Walgreens ever.
Their good fortune continued until I stumbled into a Hair Club for Men. And by stumbled, I mean the way a married man stumbles into a 21 & Up Video. Smuggled is how it felt. I had no idea how Hair Club for Men worked, but I was more than desperate enough to find out. So, I called and got an appointment.
An oasis in the middle of business park wasteland, the lobby was filled with soft lighting, wooden walls, classical rock music and the slight sting of eucalyptus. Sitting in a comfy leather chair, the only thing missing was a glass of bourbon and a burning cigar. With another man, thirty years my elder, I exchanged half-glances and darting eyes. Half AA meeting, half massage parlor, it didn’t feel like the right time to make a new friend.
From nowhere, a tree of a man, named Joseph, announced that I would be seen now. Receiving a nod of approval from my neighbor and almost-friend, I proceeded. Joseph led me to a living room just inside the office and shut the door behind us. Gray walls made grayer by the lack of lighting, only minimal daylight peered in through the window shades. For vanity’s sake, I was totally okay with natural lighting. Clipboard in hand, the tree planted himself in a chair best described as manly. I plopped myself down on a couch designed to fit ten.
Joseph was a friendly dude in an oversized suit who quickly outlined our agenda for the meeting today. A few questions, a short video, a painless exam and then a recommended solution. Great! I should be out of there and looking my age again in less than an hour. Let’s do this, I remember thinking, as my pride began to rebuild.
“How long has your hair been falling out?”
“I’m not sure. Somewhere between three months and twenty-three years. I was born with very thick hair.”
“Have you tried taking any medications?”
“No. Are there medications to take?”
“Have you ever applied a surface product like Rogaine?”
“Yes. I just started Nioxin System 1 which includes a shampoo, conditioner and scalp treatment which often freezes my hair in place for 12 hours making it difficult to style.”
“Is your father bald?”
“Not really.”
“Was your father’s father bald?”
“Yes, his nickname was the ‘Bald Eagle’ in fact. But only because he nearly lost the top of his head in a merchant marine accident. At least I think that’s true, but he was always good at telling stories.”
“Was your mother’s father bald?”
“No, but my mother’s mother had a balding spot. But only because of this medication she was on that made her head itch so badly that she eventually scratched a bald spot on her head.”
Joseph looked down at his clipboard. It was obvious that there were no check boxes for my answers. I nearly suggested he use open ended questions on the next patient.
I get this from my mother. This unsolicited need to be vulnerable and the sense that everyone can be trusted with your life story. Everyday experiences, even the odd ones, are a chance to make a new connection, to be understood. Such naive optimism is often the only savior during a quarter-life crisis.
Leading up to this phase of my life, my bigger concern had always been what to do with my thick hair, not how to keep it around longer. Perhaps I’d wished a little too hard, and God heard my silent wantings. But you don’t get to pray something away and then pray it back. I think that makes you a massive asshole. Plus, I’d have to admit that I was wrong. So, here I was. Searching for a work-around.
It was time for me to move on. Grabbing a DVD from the back of his clipboard, Joseph slid it into the player connected to a large LCD monitor at the front of the room. Having seen this presentation fourteen too many times and having no need for more hair himself, he excused himself so that I could watch in privacy.
The gorgeously-produced video, which I half-expected to feature my own cameo writing on the bench from my company’s footage, viewed more like a romantic comedy instead. Helpless, balding man distraught with life discovers Hair Club for Men, jumps into a pool and emerges with a full head of hair.
Baptism by hair was the metaphor I believe.
Maybe it was just me that wanted to make it into a spiritual moment. But sitting in this room in a business park just south of Nashville, I realized how lonely a crisis can be. Surrounded by countless friends who voiced their love and support constantly, yet inside the phase it felt a lot like depression, like I was the only one. I looked around and all of my friends appeared uniformly happy. Their instagrams were filled with their beautiful families, each member smiling with their perfectly white, aligned teeth. I even tried to walk down the worst neighborhood streets hoping that I would run into someone else who was unhappy. Misery loves company so long as it doesn't show up smiling.
As much as I love vulnerability, you won't find me sharing much until after the crisis is over. I couldn't bring myself to ask for help from my friends, or even share how I was feeling. I guess I felt a little ridiculous for feeling so deeply attached to my hair. So instead I started to listen more than I was talking when hanging out with my friends. And probably because it was then important to my surviving, I noticed something that I hadn't noticed before. Almost all my friends have had or are beginning to have their own version of my crisis. Mostly it’s because we’re nearing thirty, and we always thought that we would feel more adult than we do. We imagined that things would be more together; we’d be married by now with a kid on the way, a nice house with a fenced in yard with that still yappy dog that we’d adopted during college.
Instead, we’re single. Or not. But things aren’t quite as easy as we’d hoped. Relationships and life itself aren’t always all butterflies and a late brunch.
It’s easy to tell when a woman is in her quarter-life crisis because you’ll hear her talk about a ticking clock. She knows exactly how much time she has left until she has no time left to have children. She knows because people constantly remind her. The closer she gets to this clock’s end time and is still single, the closer we all are to death.
There isn’t a clock for men, and I think that takes the pressure off us a bit. But secretly, we don’t like being alone any more than women do. We also ache for companionship and to be loved. But when we try to talk about these things, it sounds a lot like silence. We’re often not as open about our emotions; and in many cases it feels like people would rather see us shut up and smile rather than show we care.
Joseph popped his head back into the living room at the very moment the now happy actor emerged from the pool hair-intact, snapping me out of my spiritual moment at the Hair Club for Men. It was time for my exam.
Joseph introduced me to a shrubbery of a man who then led me to what I believe was a closed dentist office. Surrounded by three and a half thousand fluorescent bulbs, I sat back in a sticky vinyl chair surrounded by four pristine white walls. The buzz of the overhead light ran laps between my ears. With a straightened back, the short man examined the crown of my head using a digital camera, which he kept calling a microscope. Almost instantly, pictures of the top of my head appeared on a larger than life screen in front of me.
This experience can only be described as mortifying. It felt as though I was attending my own funeral where everyone was now openly discussing how ugly I had always been. The office employees gathered around to mourn the loss of yet another full head of hair.
Sometimes I worry about how much I worry. And this was one of those moments. I began to imagine that I had probably brought on this massive hair exodus due to the previous years of anxiety. But just as two negatives don’t make a positive, worrying about how much you worry doesn’t regrow hair. I had only one solution according to the short man: a weave.
This is when I found out that Hair Club for Men has weaves for white men. I was about three minutes away from becoming a caucasian rapper named Toupee Shakur. I’ll never know what that life would have been like; I left quicker than you can say the words: drive-by.
The only thing that actually died in that exam room, besides a few more hairs, was my pride. Even I knew it was time for it to go after having spent the previous three months on its death bed being fed Cheetos as life support. Pride, the loftiest kind, is a curious thing that makes us believe that we’re in control and that life is best when it's flawless. But life doesn’t always play out that way. Sometimes we just are single without knowing why, sometimes we just aren’t able to have children, sometimes we just can’t keep the weight off. Sometimes our hair just falls out early. And with it, we lose a piece of ourselves, who we think we are, the image we had planned to put forward. The loss creates a challenge to our identity and we’re forced to let go of who we planned ourselves to be, so that we can be free to be so much more.
To this day if I’m given the chance, I’ll filter the hell out of my social media photos; just like I’d love to do with the words in this post. But that’s not real life. Real life leads you to empty business parks where strangers stare at your hair follicles under fake microscopes and tell you it’s time to get over yourself.