I was addicted to hair transplant consultations

I would never have confessed to another man what I was going through. But because we were in the same room together, we had revealed something to each other. silent brothers in the same lonely war. Between them, I felt normal and lucid. It was the closest thing I had to a support group. Sitting on a hideous mustard yellow couch under a Lichtenstein frame, tapping my foot in time with the middle-aged man with the horseshoe hairline reading a magazine, I felt restrained.

The staff at the hair transplant clinics are also excellent. Although almost always controlled by a man, these offices often employ beautiful women as receptionists and assistants. My first consultation in Dallas introduced me to a Russian woman in a white lab coat, who sat me in a chair, grabbed a thick marker, and drew a line that cut my forehead roughly in half. Such hairlines occur naturally, though most commonly in chimpanzees. Hold up a mirror. “Is that what you want?” she asked.

“No;” I guessed.

“But you ask!”

i got fired How wonderful, to be rejected, to be thought utterly insane by a cruel Russian woman in a lab coat! I was stuck. I scheduled my next free hair transplant consultation in Oklahoma City, where, again, I was told that I was fine, and also too young to have surgery, but that if I really wanted to do something, I should get palmetto pills and a laser comb. I immediately used my scholarship money to do this. Consultations may be free, but that’s only because the bald person, already overwhelmed with stress, is supposed to make some big purchases.

When I got older and started making some money, I was finally accepted for a little transplant. The doctor, who looked like a doctor in a soap opera, told me I had made a smart investment. “Young now, and you can enjoy your hair for decades,” she told me. Pleasure, however, was not what awaited me. It seemed that “hair” was not the end goal of my obsession. It was the feeling of being proactive about a problem that I was looking for. To put out the fire would be to lose the job of managing it. His management kept oblivion at bay.

This continued until last summer, when my friend Rachel shared a screenshot of an email she had received from a PR firm representing EsteNove, a Turkish hair transplant clinic that had recently gained attention for distributing procedures to American influencers like skin care kits. Rachel, like me, works in the media and, like all my friends, was completely unaware of my troubled history with the hair loss prevention industry. I asked her to forward the email to me.

Within two weeks, I was working out the details of my trip to Istanbul in September, which included a plane flight, a stay at a nice hotel, and of course, a small hair transplant from my donor area to the crown of my head. Only one thing was required of me in return. It was the one thing I thought I would never do. But it was also the thing that, if I mustered the courage to do it, would finally set me free: I had to write about it. In other words, I had to tell absolutely everyone that I was getting a hair transplant.