First time telling my friends/school about my alopecia

When I got alopecia, I was very afraid of how people would react when they would find out that I have alopecia, but one thing I knew for sure, is that I wanted to be open about it right from the beginning.

When I first discovered my bald spot, I immediately contacted one of my good friends. I have been friends with her for years and I can trust her with everything. The next day I also told another good friend of mine. They were both super supportive, I even went to one of my friends right after I found out I have alopecia.

When I went to school, a few days after I found out, I was in a weird mood. For about 10 minutes I just did not care anymore and all of a sudden, I had told all my friends about the fact I have alopecia. I did regret it afterwards, since I was not close to all of them. I felt like I should have waited longer with telling them, however they were also super supportive!

The kind of support that I got overwhelmed me, I just could not believe how many people wanted to help me, not in a million years would I have expected that! When I would put my hair in a ponytail and my bald spot (that was on the back of my head) would show, they would warn me about it, when I put a hairclip in my hair and it would show my bald spot, my friends would take the hairclip out and put it in, in the right way. I was and still am very grateful for that. Time passed and my alopecia got worse, so often at school, clumps of hair would land on my back and my friends always took care of that. They told me about it or made sure the hair was gone.

As I said, more and more hair fell out. In one of my classes, we had to present something in front of the class that was about suffering or death. Since I got the corticosteroid injections, which hurt and the emotional pain that alopecia caused, I decided to use alopecia for the presentation in this class. No one, other than my friends knew about it and you could not really see that my hair was falling out yet.

I was SO nervous to tell everyone! I almost picked an other subject, but my friend supported me and so I presented my alopecia in front of the class. I typed in the word “alopecia” on google and everyone was super confused. I could hear people pronouncing alopecia and saying “what is this about??”. I chose a picture of a head with bald spots and I started explaining. I explained what alopecia is, that I have it and that I was losing my hair at that time. No one reacted stupid, no one laughed, everyone had respect. My teacher was very curious about alopecia and asked all these questions that I could not answer haha. I felt so relieved and was so proud of myself for telling people.

After the summer, almost all my hair was gone. I would wear a hat and a headband to cover it. Before school started, I told my new class, not to be surprised if they would notice that I’m bald, because I already knew most people had forgotten about the fact that I told them I had alopecia the year before. And again, no one said anything stupid.

But, we had mixed classes. So the other class had no idea. I was wearing my headband and walked into my history class, when someone made a stupid comment about my headband. Tears rolled over my cheeks, WHY? I did not do anything to you. I got a few comments like that again and then I decided to not care anymore. I would take of my hat or headband in class. During my exams I would not even wear anything. All the stupid comments stopped.

My school was big. It consisted of 3 kind of school levels. The Dutch education is different than the education of other countries. Anyway, only my level knew, since I told them. One of my friends, that was not in the same school as me, received questions of her friends on the other levels, if I had cancer. She explained that I had alopecia and everything was okay. After a while, everyone knew about my alopecia and I was not treated any different.

So, it is scary to tell people and you will never know how they will react to it, but if they are a decent and normal person, they will respect you, even the classmates that were not nice, respected me.