I am breathtakingly beautiful because…I am Sarah the Great. I used to write that as my signature when I was a kid. I found it pretty amusing. Now, I don’t have hair, I am different, and I am special. I was always special, but now I really am. 

My beauty may not be so obvious to me now, but my friends tell me I am beautiful and I want to believe them. It’s different than all the attention I received before from strangers I didn’t know. Attention that was sometimes frightening or revolting. Attention I did not care about. 

In October of 2015 the rug was ripped out from under me. I wasn’t hurt or ill, in fact I was pretty healthy, and it wasn’t a life-threatening experience, but it swept over me like an avalanche, drowning me deep in sorrow. And in truth my life did feel threatened. I felt swallowed in pain. 

I took a prescription drug that I believe poisoned my system and made every hair on my body suddenly and dramatically fall out without any warning. A simple allergic reaction or maybe a permanent transformation?

I miss the old me, my old self. My body that was not yet ravaged by the depression and lack of sleep that followed when I went through this alteration. 

Is it my beauty I miss, my hair? Or is it the me that I liked just fine…? 

This one is tough—in fact, it gets harder every day. Shock and fear seemed to have settled in me. I didn’t really care about my own beauty before. Do I now? Yes. Am I supposed to? No. 

Then why is everyone now so concerned that I think I am beautiful? They didn’t want me to acknowledge this before, let alone live up to it. I was supposed to be humble and non-threatening, but being humble now doesn’t work. Now I’m supposed to love myself. My self-deprecating charm is no longer effective. Who the fuck am I now? Some fucking Diva??

The way I had felt on the inside, is now the way I look on the outside—a strange person. A mutant, hairless cyborg human. A stranger to myself and the world I knew. Overnight my chemistry changed, and my place in the world changed too. I had wanted to be anonymous and invisible and I took myself for granted. 

In truth I always felt like an outsider, some lucky outsider that got a peak into almost anywhere. I had always covered up my lack of family or a home town that I treasured, or a place that I loved and felt part of, and I traveled the world, always searching. But I was lucky: I had a gift. I didn’t have any real money, but I had something you couldn’t buy: beauty and compassion. And I am a born survivor. All I’ve ever wanted in life was love.