Ayr. Menopause circle mostly, finally understanding my own sleep, and here for one post because somebody did this for me last summer and it got me through the autumn.
Timeline, plainly, because timelines are what I wanted and could not find.
March last year: started. June: nothing unusual. Mid-July: shedding began, and it was frightening because it was a lot, all at once, and I had not connected it to anything I had done in the spring. August and September: the worst of it. I bought a shower drain catcher, which I recommend for the practical reason that not seeing it in the plughole every morning helped my mood more than it had any right to. October: still shedding but less. December: I noticed there was regrowth at the front, about an inch of it, standing straight up like a hedge.
This June: it is fine. Genuinely fine. Not the hair I had in 2023 — it is finer at the front and I have made friends with a different parting — but the volume came back through the winter and I stopped thinking about it in about February, and I only realised I had stopped thinking about it when somebody asked me in here.
What I would say to the woman I was in August. It felt like something being taken away from me permanently and by stealth, on top of a year in which quite a lot had already changed. It was not permanent. But being told it was temporary in August did not help me at all, and I do not think it was supposed to. In August I needed somebody to say that it was genuinely a horrible thing to be going through. Both are true and they arrive in that order.
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