Hair Doesn't Matter

Hair doesn’t matter.

What? Me, a woman so obsessed with hair that I started a blog to talk about my daily preoccupation with the state of my own locks – I am now telling you that hair doesn’t matter.

Well, it doesn’t.

You’re not your hair. You aren’t defined by it, and no one loves you based on whether you have beautiful hair or not.

So, why am I saying this today? For a few reasons. First, we will all sit down to celebrate Thanksgiving Day later this week, and hopefully we’ll take a little time that day to think about the things that really matter. Second, November is Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month, and so I’ve been thinking a lot about a friend, Kate, who succumbed to this awful disease last year.

Kate had gorgeous hair. It was the first thing I noticed about her when I met her. But as I got to know her, I also discovered what a wonderful person and friend she was. She was funny. She always had time to listen. She was my "techy" friend who convinced me to get an iPod and to start a Twitter account. We loved shopping and meeting for lunch and working out together. Our dogs had play dates together. When I was single, she'd bring her husband to my house to fix things. When I was hurt in a car accident, she helped me with things I couldn't do, like grocery shopping.

When she told me she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I knew it wasn't good. But for the first year-and-a-half of her diagnosis, it was easy to believe that Kate would beat that disease because she kept her hair. She was on a “smart” chemo, one that attacked the “bad” fast-growing cells like cancer, and left the “good” fast-growing cells, like hair, alone.

But eventually, that smart chemo stopped worked. As she was leaving her oncologist’s office, after hearing this news, another patient, a woman with stage 1 breast cancer and no hair, stopped her in the hallway. "You’re so lucky!” the woman proclaimed. “You still have all your hair! I’d switch places with you in a second!”

The woman’s husband must have caught the look on Kate’s face because he urged his wife on before Kate was forced to respond.

Kate shared this with me later that same day. She was always so brave, but this was one of the few times I saw her crumble. “I’d trade my hair for my life if I knew I’d have a life,” she said. It broke my heart.

We all complain about something related to our looks, don’t we? Our nails, our skin, our weight, our hair. I love that as women we care about what we look like, but I want all of us – myself included – to remember that we shouldn’t measure our worth by our looks. We are more than the sum of our body parts.

The things I remember Kate for most are not her physical attributes. They are her generosity of spirit, her bravery, the way she thought of others more than herself even when she knew she was dying, her adventurousness, her accomplishments on behalf of others with cancer. She was beautiful with her hair, but without it, her lovely, wonderful spirit shone through brighter and brighter.

Ladies, you are all wonderfully and beautifully made, created by God. And while I want you to have the best-looking hair you can possibly have, I hope you never judge yourself by it. Instead, think about what those inner qualities are that make you a beautiful person. Make a mental list of those and focus on those more than on the exterior. I promise you, your friends love you because you’re kind, patient, generous, funny or encouraging, not because you have perfect hair. 

I'd like to end this post by mentioning the Pancreatic Cancer Network (www.pancan.org). Kate was very active in this organization, which is dedicated to fighting the disease. If an early detection test could be developed, it would save so many lives! If you or someone you know is battling this cancer, it is a wonderful resource. 

Thank you for continuing to follow my blog! I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving, and I’ll see you back here next week!

Love,

Bethany