Waiting to Be in Full Bloom Again

Inspiration for women and women entrepreneurs

It has been almost ten years since I wore an expensive real hair wig to cover my balding head during the height of my last alopecia areata occurrence. From November until April, for what seemed like five long months, the wig embraced my head keeping it warm and fashionable until my hair began sprouting like the spring grass.

Right now as I write, I am in the second week of a medical sabbatical because my alopecia roared back into my life in January. It fell out faster and more drastically this time than before. I’m lucky if I have 15% of my long brown hair remaining. I will conceal my head under my 2017 Boston Marathon hat when leave in a couple hours to have a new expensive treatment using my own blood platelets with a “concoction” of vitamins added to it to inject back into my scalp. People twinge when I mention shots to my head but I don’t anymore because I’ve been getting them regularly between bouts of the illness….and I’m tough.

As I walked in my beautiful backyard today, preoccupied with the new procedure, I felt defeated. I am a very optimistic person but today I wasn’t feeling it. I strolled enjoying the fresh cool air on my face trying to keep my friend Teresa Huggins in mind. Teresa positively tackled breast cancer by not believing it had any hold over her mentally and physically and today she is healthy. I had her words in my head as I took in the spring air, watched two ducks return to our pond and stared at the tree buds wanting to germinate but just couldn’t because the air was cold and the skies cloudy. I spoke to the buds as if I was one of them saying, “I know I want to sprout hair as bad as you want to sprout full green leaves; I guess for now we have to be patient.”

Sometimes when setbacks happen we get so lost we can’t focus on why the setback has occurred. This wasn’t true for me because I had plenty of time a month ago to sit in silence thinking about my health in a caring hospice house witnessing the last week of my beautiful stepmother’s life. I am aware I have pushed myself too hard the past five years and suffered a major mental loss as both sons moved to New York City and the true essence of pure joy was now 400 miles away. I believe that transition affected my heart, spirit and hair in ways I could not predict. During that time, I ignored a strict diet I needed to adhere to for my hair, increased my exercise training for a marathon and simply never gave myself a break to just “mourn” that loss in my life. I just pushed on. Sound familiar?

The lesson to myself today as I “communicated” with the closed buds on the trees thinking of them like my hair follicles was “I guess we have to be more patient” and wait for the sun to shine, the air to warm up and our “sprouts” to leap forward in joy for another season – hopefully a long lasting season with new, strong life.

I hope the lesson of patience resonates with you today. We simply can’t always control the changes that happen in our lives; but we can live with more intuition so we can take the step we need to heal, slow down or sprout. Time can pass slowly waiting for lessons we are to learn as we are lingering in a circumstance we can’t control. All I know right now is its okay to take the time needed to rest until we are back to full bloom again.