At 17, I started pulling out my hair. I thought I was the only one who did it

This curious habit of mine is now in its 17th year, which is the age I was when it began. It’s hard for me to write about any of this. For a start, it has all become second nature to me. Also, it’s hard to describe any of it without having hover over me the thought of the words being read. I imagine how your face will pucker, your eyes narrow, like you’ve bitten into something unripe or discovered the source of a bad smell.

“Most people probably conceive of their hair collectively – as blond, or frizzy, or shoulder-length – whereas my attention zooms in on a single hair.”Credit: Stocksy

Implausible as it may sound, sometimes the urge to pull is a kind of zinging in my arms, a physical anticipation in the same way that the tongue salivates at the thought of food (and, like hunger, such an urge can only be staved off for so long).

Sometimes the need is like when you’ve been underwater as long as you can bear, and you can think of only one thing. Other times it’s only a faint itch, though these lesser urges can be the riskiest of all since they trick you into thinking that this time you’re in control, this time you have a handle on it.

Before I know it, my fingers are prowling for the right hair. And then they pounce. (I feel compelled to use present tense here. I have made these movements thousands upon thousands of times and they no longer feel attached to any one particular moment, but to an eternal present.)

At different times, different hairs call out to be pulled. The chosen one should be as thick as possible, and not too short, since I need to be able to get some purchase on it. About the length of a toothbrush’s bristle.

Most people probably conceive of their hair collectively – as blond, or frizzy, or shoulder-length – whereas my attention zooms in on a single hair. Before, I never thought about the hairs on my head as having individual characteristics, but they do. And it is this individuality I am on the lookout for.

This might be a question of thickness – some kinked like old wire, some whisker-thin. And each time my hands flutter up to my scalp, despite having traversed it many thousands of times, it never feels the same, like the way a beach can feel changed every time according to the season, the tides, the light.

You might imagine I would eventually run out of hairs to be pulled; that pulling as much as someone like me, you’d fast be left with total baldness.

ADELE DUMONT

Hair is anything but static: its quantity is always multiplying (or in my case fluctuating) and its texture always changing, according to when it was last washed, or brushed, and what kind of shampoo I used, and the humidity. The probing and stroking in itself can be enough to tease the hair, and so to alter how it feels.

You might imagine I would eventually run out of hairs to be pulled; that pulling as much as someone like me, you’d fast be left with total baldness. But even though the urges wax and wane quite dramatically – violently, even – I seem to have subconsciously tempered my habits so that I manage to pull at such a rate and in such a particular pattern that overall there is a basically even spread of hairs at each single stage.

By which I mean: some sections of scalp will be near-bare; these are the freshly plucked follicles, which I have noticed seem to lie dormant longer than if the hair had been shaved, and when eventually the tip does emerge it is tapered. If there is a little cluster of these tapered hairs then this growth will appear feathery, like a dandelion gone to seed. Some sections will be stubble-length, by which point the hair starts to emerge noticeably coarser. At this stage the hair is not quite long enough to grasp.

I couldn’t tell you how many days before it reaches the graspable stage, since when it comes to these matters my only barometer is touch. Once the hairs are long enough for my fingers to have some purchase on them, this is when they are most likely to end up on my bathroom floor or in my lap.

Once a week or so, I’d wash my hair. Dry, it was too massive, and felt unmanageable. But wet, it glistened itself into tightish curls, and took up a fraction as much space.

Washing it was always such a task, because it knotted so easily. More than once I remember being brought to tears because I wasn’t able to get the knots out, and my arm was tired from the sheer tugging. At some point I was washing it and I felt with my fingers right in the very centre of my head. After my shower, I took a mirror, held it over my head and then stood in front of the floor-length mirror behind my bedroom door and there it was: a patch about the size of a 20-cent piece, perfectly clean. Not just thinned, but actually 100 per cent bald.

What was the feeling I had? Shock, certainly, but mixed in with it, a kind of satisfaction (same as when a bruise surfaces, maybe). Now, I had two sets of evidence: one on my body, and one detached from it.

When he was a teenager, Tim Winton says that whenever he had the house to himself, he would go to the wardrobe and remove his father’s rifle (his father was a policeman). “I handled it soberly, with appropriate awe … [I] knew I had the means of destruction close at hand … It was such a charged and sneaky compulsion. I waited for any opportunity; anticipation was part of the thrill.”

I was nonconformist (or uncool) enough for people to assume I had especially chosen this hairstyle, however odd and unflattering it may have been.

ADELE DUMONT

Do all children-no-longer-quite-children require such private spaces to retreat to? I was a child who felt too much and who was afraid to express herself freely, afraid to take risks or make mistakes or be criticised. Did I need somewhere unwatched, a place that nobody else could join?

I don’t know if there was an exact point at which I realised I wasn’t able to stop. It must have been somewhere between when I genuinely believed I was tidying my hair up and when it got to the stage where “doing my hair” each morning (soon as I woke, before I got to the breakfast table) involved an elaborate and humiliating process – sweeping my fringe back to cover the top part of my scalp, drawing up the side wisps, and sweeping up the back and plastering it onto my head with bobby pins to keep the arrangement intact.

That point must have been in my 18th year, when I was still living at home, making the long daily commute into the city for my first year of university. I was nonconformist (or uncool) enough for people to assume I had especially chosen this hairstyle, however odd and unflattering it may have been.

I was fortunate, too, that the women in my life were not the kind to engage in conversations about hair (the kind of conversation I’d spend the next decade studiously evading). I made next to no friends at university and was obsessively in love with my first-ever boyfriend, a mountains-boy who’d been in my (all-male) circle of friends in the latter part of high school. He made up secret alphabets in his spare time and was mercifully oblivious to such things as nail polish and bobby pins.

Over the next several months, unbeknown to anyone around me, the patch grew, expanding until I had pulled out a good 50 per cent of my hair. These were the days before Doctor Google.

We had a family computer, and a modem, but I only ever used them for assignments, and even then, made sure to avoid any sites with imagery as they’d take too long to load. In any case, you need to understand that at the time, this was just something I did. It didn’t occur to me that what was developing in my bedroom and in my fingertips had any connection to anything larger than my own precious secret world. It didn’t cause me pain; even though I considered it “wrong”, it wasn’t a great source of anxiety.

Here’s the other thing: in the 1990s and early 2000s, at least in the outer suburbs where we lived, people didn’t talk about mental health with any kind of openness. (There was a public health campaign on telly in those years, warning that “One in five Australians will experience a mental illness in their lifetime” and each time, predictably, my dad would turn to each of us, pretending to need to count. Joke being: the fifth person – the crazy person – wasn’t in the room.)

Nowadays, people my age will mention “my therapist” as openly as my parents might have said “my mechanic” or “my boss”. Somebody who’s tidy will get described as “a bit OCD”, someone moody as “bipolar”. That clinical terms are used so casually and so imprecisely can be frustrating. But at least the words have entered our vocabulary.

In any case, back in my late teens, I didn’t have any sense that removing the hair from my head was anything other than a wholly physical act. The knowledge that my hair-pulling was, in fact, following an eerily predictable, pathological path wouldn’t have fazed or interested me. This all felt, from the very beginning, that it was all my own doing. And I was, by that point, already too far gone.

Edited extract from The Pulling (Scribe Publications) by Adele Dumont, out now.

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