When I was a kid I had a bad habit of pulling my hair. Not pull on a bunch in an attempt to ease a migraine (which I still do until now but which doesn’t really work but I don’t know why I keep on doing it), but actually pull them out by their roots, one by one, at the spot where my scalp itched.
Someone had told me that itchy scalps were caused by “dead hairs” and these were easily identifiable because they were curly, coarse and thick.
Now I don’t know if this is true, but there is something strangely satisfying about pulling out itchy hair by the root, to the point that I sometimes got so carried away that I did not stop at one and kept on pulling and pulling until I ended up with a shiny bald spot the size of a coin where my scalp had itched. Eeps.
Luckily for me, I had way too much hair so I was able to conceal such spot with the rest of my hair. It only became problematic when the hairs on this spot started to grow again and I would end up with too short hair that stood up and looked funny.
It gets worse.
When I was a high school freshman, my eyebrow started to itch.
Can you see where this story is headed?
I started pulling my eyebrow hair while lying in bed drifting off to sleep, so sleepy that I wasn’t really thinking about what I was doing.
The next morning when I woke up and saw my face in the mirror, I wanted to cry when I realized that half of my left eyebrow was gone.
I couldn’t hide this particular bald spot with a comb-over so I panicked. Then I remembered that my mom had an eyebrow pencil lying on her dressing table. Yes! I quickly ran to get it and used it to draw on my missing eyebrow.
Unfortunately, my mom used one of those black pencils that are way too dark and in no way matches my real eyebrow shade so I thought it looked quite obvious.
But no one noticed, or at least, no one said anything for the next couple of weeks that I had to slip into this disguise except for one time when my then best friend Imee stared at my fake eyebrow and asked me accusingly, “Are you wearing eyebrow pencil?”
This was back when makeup was taboo and I would rather admit my stupidity than be thought of as a shallow wannabe-pretty kind of girl (if my thirteen year old self could only see her thirty year old self).
Caught, I explained my predicament, and like a true best friend, she spent the next five minutes laughing very hard and telling our other best friend Lyn about it so they could both laugh about it for another five minutes.
Then they both never brought it up again, and our other classmates never found about it. Not to my knowledge anyway.
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