Stoic Baldness

A crisis is inherently sudden.

A hurricane threatens the coast within hours.

A tornado does the same to a valley without prior notice.

The financial debacle of 2008 occurred overnight.

Baldness - which symbolizes the crisis for a significant portion of men - is not like that: it torments you slowly, and its progression is imperceptible until you realize there's no cure.

The paragraph above is my own story.

When I was young, I had beautiful hair, enviable for its lively curls 🤣 . Adulthood and its stresses took a toll on my hair. Alopecia doesn't have a specific reason, but according to Chat GPT, it's the result of genetic, hormonal, and environmental factors.

At nearly 40, I woke up yesterday determined to face my reality once and for all.

I told my daughter, without my wife overhearing, to shave my head. She found it an unmatched adventure to cut all of her dad's hair, and I found it somewhat liberating.

For the past 2 years, I protected the last strands as if they were gold. There wasn't much left to hide. Time did what it had to do, and stoically, I've accepted my present and future. I still have hair (on the sides), but I assume that the most dignified way to present myself to myself (every morning) and to the world is how you see me in this photo.

Before confronting my baldness, it seemed to me that the issue of male baldness was a more significant conflict than I thought.

I judged those who decided to wear a hairpiece. I ironically questioned those who, in their eagerness to cover up "the holes," resorted to paints that looked like desperate solutions to hide the unrideable. In other words, all those resources to prolong what was evident seemed like an exercise in misguided vanity. But years later, I found myself in that situation. Is it uncomfortable? Yes.

For some reason, hair loss is more significant than it seemed at the time. It's a symbol of having crossed the midpoint of life. Everything that happens after alopecia usually signifies that the days of youthful exuberance and shine are in the past. I think - because it aligns with my stoicism - differently.

The bald men I know have a particular personality.

Because they feel vulnerable, they play with that "weakness" to their advantage. If they work in sales, baldness helps them break the ice. If they have managerial positions, they rely on that same baldness to convey aggression and focus. If they are athletes, they use their lack of hair as a physical argument to overcome air resistance or to intimidate opponents. Alopecia marks a turning point in a man's life that pushes him to embrace stoicism as a philosophy of life.

Baldness is so uncomfortable due to what it represents that it becomes a sort of fuel. 

Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor and considered the father of stoicism, has this quote that I hold onto to digest the loss of my beautiful yet useless curls forever:

¡Vamos Carajo!

Fran Michavila