I'm not vain...

It was never about being vain for me. That’s why I don’t show my face. No. Somewhere along the way, I just wanted to be comfortable showing the pieces of me that no one else sees.

The raw wounds that still seep from where they were created years ago. The ones I never properly treated because, for a very long time, I didn’t know how. So I learned to mend myself together instead.

Piece by fucking piece.

It was never about being vain.

Not showing my face became a way to hide. A way to exist without constantly being subjected to this flesh bag I call a body, this husk of a self that I’ve spent years trying to understand. A way to be free without having a face to turn back to. I could be the person standing in your checkout line. The stylist who cuts your hair. The woman sitting across from you at the coffee shop.

I could be anyone and everyone around you, and you would never know who I am. I could walk through the world without the fear of someone recognizing me as that woman. The one who bleeds on the internet.

Who bitches and whines about how her parents didn’t love her enough. How her stepmother beat her. How her father turned a blind eye. How family and friends kicked her out when she needed them and locked her away because they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—witness the end of me.

Except I didn’t die. That’s the part people seem to forget. I didn’t become some massive, self-destructive cautionary tale.

I grew.

I read.

I learned.

I picked myself apart and put myself back together. Humpty fucking dumpty it. I found myself. I found someone who loved me as I was. I built a life that existed outside of the darkness.

And I don’t know that I ever really got better.

I think I simply started to understand myself more. Learned there was darkness in me. There probably always will be darkness in me. Learned that sometimes it’s okay to reach into it. To write from it. To let it have a voice.

Just don’t stay there.

For a long time, being faceless made that possible.

It started with Vocal, writing about my wounds and figuring out what worked. What people clicked on. Why they passed over. Seems a lot of times, people want the heartache. They need to relive moments that most people are too afraid to touch base on.

That’s what made them stop scrolling for long enough to recognize themselves in something I had written. People weren’t there to look at me. They were there to feel whatever emotion needed to be felt. Maybe to recognize something that was inside themselves. To realize they weren’t the only person who has ever felt that way.

And maybe, most importantly, to understand that they were allowed to simply exist inside an emotion without immediately being told how to get out of it. I never wanted to write the kind of healing that feels like a forced stitch over a wound that is still bleeding.

Here. You’re healed now. Move on. Call it growth. Call it resilience.

Let’s slap a bow on the trauma and tell everyone how beautifully you overcame it.

I never believed in that. I never wanted that. Sometimes you just need to sit in the sadness for a while.

Then I found Substack.

It became not showing my face for security.

A boundary between the darkness I write about and the parts of my life I desperately want to keep in the light. I realized I didn’t need to put a face on the internet for people to actually see me. They could feel it through my writing. See the dark parts through the words etched into this publication.

For a while, I thought maybe I would eventually let the mask fall away. Maybe one day I would stop hiding in the shadows. To finally be comfortable in being seen.

And then I started losing my hair.

Suddenly, it became about vanity.

Or at least, that’s what I called it. Watching your hair fall out in clumps does something strange to the relationship you have with your reflection. Especially when you are already exhausted from trying to convince someone else that there is something wrong.

Something wrong— even if the tests came back normal.

You don’t have the markers for this or that.

Everything looks fine.

Except it doesn’t.

We still don’t know why you’re bleeding. We still don’t know why your iron keeps disappearing. We still don’t know why your periods can feel like they are taking twice as much from you as they should.

So the questions just become more fucking questions. Round robin of things. Tests and more tests.

And somewhere in the middle of all this is me— trying to figure out why my body seems determined to revolt against me.

I worry now.

Imagine people judging me for the days when I spend the majority in bed. Picturing them thinking I’m lazy. The whispers behind my back—

Maybe it’s depression.

Maybe it’s not trying hard enough.

Sometimes getting out of bed makes me winded. Standing for too long makes me feel like I’m losing the battle. There have been times when my body has simply decided that the floor was my home now.

Throughout all of this, my biggest fucking concern has been my hair.

Am I vain?

Some hair grew back. But a lot is just there. What was once thick locks of long dark brown hair so full I had to use almost two hands to hold it. Now, it’s barely a fistful.

I brush my child’s hair and feel how thick it is, and I cry every time. It’s not enough of a loss to warrant a wig. Not enough for someone new to look at me and immediately think that something is wrong with me.

But it’s enough that I know.

I see it every time I look in the mirror. When I run my fingers through what’s left. It is enough that I’m embarrassed about it.

I’m vain.

Maybe that’s okay?

Maybe I could be vain about one thing. After years of telling myself that my body was just a vessel carrying around all the pieces of me that actually mattered. I think I’m allowed to mourn something as stupid and superficial as my fucking hair.

Because it isn’t really about the hair. No, not entirely. It’s about watching another piece of myself disappear while I’m already spending so much of my life trying to piece myself back together.

It’s about looking in the mirror and seeing the evidence that my body is struggling even when every test result keeps telling me I should be fine.

It’s about not being able to recognize myself anymore.

I chose not to show myself because I wanted the freedom. I wanted to write without the weight of that being pushed back and being recognized. I wanted my words to speak for themselves and not my husk.

And now, I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to show my face—so let anyone see what I see. Not as the woman who bled out onto pages, survived things she was never supposed to survive, or learned to live in the darkness without allowing it to swallow her.

I want to be known as the woman who built herself up and into the light. Whose body reminds her that survival doesn’t always look like triumph. Another fistful of hair down the shower drains.

Sometimes it looks like admitting that something so small and superficial as your hair can still break your fucking heart.

Maybe it isn’t vain at all— maybe it’s just what makes me human?

Maybe I can finally say:

This fucking sucks.

But I’m still here. I’m still writing. I’m still changing. Still putting myself back together—

piece by fucking piece.