Plucked: A Memoir of Hiding

by

Katie Koppel

Jonathan Wilson, Advisor

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English

Koppel/Plucked ii

Dedication

I dedicate this thesis to my mother, from whom I have never had to hide. 143; I love you.

Koppel/Plucked iii

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following people for their contributions to this project:

Jonathan Wilson, my brilliant advisor and mentor, whose support, guidance, and words of wisdom allowed me to rediscover meaning in my college experience.

Jay Cantor, for serving as my second reader, as well as an inspiring professor.

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, my Grub Street instructor, who told me I was a writer, and made me believe it.

Christine Cooper, my dear friend and one of my greatest cheerleaders, whose insights and support for my writing, and my life, never fail to astound me.

Koppel/Plucked iv

“Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides.”

Andre Malraux Koppel/Plucked 1

Introduction

This is my routine.

Wake at 9 AM, before my roommates prepare for a 10:30 Organic Chemistry lecture. I have 60 minutes. Adjust wig so it sits flat, re-snap the back clips first (these hurt less because I have more real hair there), then side clips (these hurt a little more, the hair’s thinning), then the front clip (the worst). Ensure roommates are asleep—listen for snoring. Brush off pillow, turn around every few seconds to make sure they’re still asleep. Get duster and sweep around bed.

Slip off pajamas. Slip on Cookie Monster blue bathrobe, Barney purple shower shoes. Avoid floor length mirror. Retrieve shower tote from closet floor and walk down the hall, turn the corner and reach the boys’ hall. Then, sprint. Enter shower, shed bathrobe and hang outside shower, hang delicates bag on hook inside shower. 30 minutes left. Crouch so that head is not visible from other stalls. Unclip wig and wash with shampoo and conditioner #1, then rinse. Stuff wig in delicates bag. Scrub scalp with shampoo and conditioner #2. Plop wig on head. Dry off.

Put on Cookie Monster. Hurry down hall (netting is visible when wig is wet). Dress in closet.

Comb wig. Stall in closet for as long as possible, listen for roommates to shout “bye!” from behind the closed closet door. 10 minutes. Escape closet and face the mirror. Snap wig into place and allow for full air-drying (no hair dryers allowed). One minute. Gloss lips. Pick up backpack.

Start the day. Tomorrow morning, repeat.

When I finally confessed, after a year and a half of what I believed to be absolute secrecy, my roommate Swetha said she already knew. Not that I pulled out my hair, littering the closet and dorm room floor with follicles. But she knew about the wig because she’d noticed the glint of silver clips along my hairline. I felt myself shrink as she told me, holding my breath so Koppel/Plucked 2

that my chest cramped. Had other people seen? Was my secret more obvious than I allowed myself to believe? Swetha added that she planned to ask me about the wig at some point. “I assumed you had some kind of virus,” she said, her eyes averted. Normally people thought cancer, but she’d spent enough time with me to realize that my mysterious absences took the form of visits to the closet, not trips to a doctor’s office. “I just sort of forgot about it,” she said. I reassured her that all was okay, that she’d done the right thing by withholding her questions. But a part of me resented her. She had seen, and forgot.

I couldn’t forget.

A year and a half before my confession, I entered Duke University. I was 19-years-old, fresh out of a tiny, claustrophobic prep school in Concord, Massachusetts, itching for an independence embodied by the confident gait of 6,500 students on 8,500 acres of manicured

North Carolinian campus. My 21-year-old brother was a junior there, and my mother had attended thirty years earlier. My destiny was predetermined and meticulously arranged—I would spend four years at Duke studying public policy, graduate and go on to law school, then pursue a career in foreign policy. Life was a fan of cards on a poker table, each heart, spade, club, clover aligned like symbols in the stones of a Duke archway. Cohesive and perfected.

At the time of my matriculation, I had been plucking my hair for 12 years. I knew that my behavior had a name, Trichotillomania (trick-o-til-o-mania), and that an estimated 15 million

Americans suffered as I did. But those 15 million were like shadows, formless and out of reach. I had never met another person who pulled her hair. Their images appeared in blog posts and

YouTube videos, but those pixilated faces could not break through the boundaries of my world, interrupt my internal voices of self-recrimination with the words: You are not the only one. I was Koppel/Plucked 3

trapped in silence, enveloped in a hollow hush.

In many ways, this story is about splintering. The hapless pursuit of a double life based on the compulsion to hide. The paradox of hair pulling: a feeling of control and relief that accompanies the behavior, juxtaposed with a slow-moving trajectory of self-destruction.

Reconciling a self defined by public composure and private chaos. Duality is a hallmark of

Trichotillomania, just as it is a hallmark of life—we all exist on two dimensions, the level of external performance and internal discord. Hair pulling is a vehicle for this dichotomy, and is distinguished not by its rarity, but by its lack of acknowledgment in our current society. With new medical research and the expansion of social media, that paradigm is only just starting to change.

My story is also about everything except hair pulling. I intended to write a book about my experience with Trichotillomania—something I knew a lot about—and ended up writing about myself—something I knew little about. I had spent so much time trying to ensure that others didn’t define me by my hair pulling that I came to define myself by my hair pulling. I used to believe that the way I thought of myself, as disgusting, unworthy, and alone, was a direct product of Trichotillomania. Pulling one’s own hair seemed the most backwards concept in the world— feeling bad about myself was a natural consequence of living that backwards life. Now I realize that my self-hatred was rooted in an unrealized fear: once people knew my secret, they would not love me. People know my secret now. People love me. So why does the shame still bleed into my life, pooling into corners I have, up until this point, been reluctant to explore?

I will tell you right now: this story doesn’t end with a cure. I am still a hair puller. I still suffer. Who doesn’t? I used to dream that this story would lead me into recovery, that the final paragraphs would describe my long, flowing hair, like waves, cascading down my back. I was Koppel/Plucked 4

sick, and then I got better. Goodbye. The end.

But is anyone ever, truly cured, from anything? We can’t prevent the blows and we can’t erase wounds, not when they leave behind scars. We can forgive, but we cannot forget. We can heal. We can heal. I did not write this book so I could heal. I healed, got high off the healing, and decided I wanted to share my story with others. To bestow what admittedly little wisdom a 23- year-old woman has to offer.

When I was twelve, my family took a trip to Moscow, where we saw a collection of statues and monuments from Soviet times. The structures were displayed in a field next to a modern art museum, jumbled like discarded toys in a playroom. The display is known as “Fallen

Monument Park” and features statues of Bolshevic leader Lenin, erect and proud, Dzerzhinsky, former head of the KGB, and busts of Josef Stalin with features that were distorted by vandals.

Our tour guide Sasha, a man with large ears and a charmingly goofy grin, explained that modern day Russians don’t know what to do with these relics. Certainly they don’t belong in the streets and plazas, where generations bear the scars of decades of oppression. And yet, the items form an indelible part of Russia’s history, a history that cannot be forgotten or unlearned. And so these ghosts sit in the park of fallen monuments, silent and stoic while time marches forward, reminders of where the people once were and where they dare not return.

My one and a half years at Duke University cannot be un-lived. My memories of those years are like the Soviet statues, no longer relevant in the present, but instrumental in the unspooling of my past. No other time in my short life has been so harrowing, nor so transformational. Never have I gone to such extremes to protect a secret, and never with more dangerous—nearly deadly—consequences. I cannot let go of these memories, but I can make Koppel/Plucked 5

them let me go. Maybe, once free of the grip of my circumstances, I can better understand the spaces in between the memories, where meaning lives tucked away. There are questions that I have yet to uncover and there are those that, so long as I am trapped in hair pulling’s clutches, are seemingly unknowable.

But this I do know: Beginning in my freshman year at Duke University, I was determined to play the part of the girl I thought I ought to be. That girl wouldn’t tear out her hair for five hours a day, locked in a trance, until the soft lined pads of her fingers swelled and blistered. She wouldn’t look in the mirror every morning and see an alien who was all too familiar, her scalp made up of islands of bare pink skin. No. This person would have black brown locks that curled at the tips, could dive bomb into a pool in a string bikini, have a lover to run his fingers through her hair while whispering “So beautiful, so beautiful.”

It didn’t matter that I wasn’t that girl. My black brown wig curled at the tips. My blue eyes could deceive. My mouth could laugh.

I could hide.

Part 1: The First Pluck (1998)

My first memory of life is a memory of hair. I was three-years-old and owned a beauty salon, hard lavender plastic with a built-in swivel chair, styling supplies, and a mirror cracked in the corner. Karen the babysitter gave it to me. She was a tall, lanky middle-aged beauty, with the slightest overbite and a habit of carrying around tubes of strawberry ChapStick. Karen worked as a professional hair stylist, and she explained to me how to cut and blow-dry hair, the way it got Koppel/Plucked 6

rolled into round brushes with spikes, making a loopy curl like an inside out wave. I wanted to do what Karen did, but couldn’t because my scissors were fake. Mom kept the knives and scissors hidden. She would enforce this until I was five, then again when I was 20.

I found real scissors at the back of the kitchen drawer, behind Dad’s stash of two-calorie mints. I squeezed the blades closed with two hands on the handles, and they snapped shut like a crocodile bite, making me jump. I opened them again, more carefully now, admiring the ease of motion, the slicing sound of metal on metal. My pink feet plodded across the creamy white tile of the kitchen, until my toes curled around the edge of a bump where tile met hardwood. I made a cut at my bangs, watched in amazement as fuzz fell. Now I was in the dining room, passing the round wood table that smelled of pine needles, the complicated window of conjoined squares that made the outside world look like a paint-by-number. Every few steps I stopped to snip at the curtain receding up my forehead. Hair trailed behind me like Hansel’s breadcrumbs. I was about to reach the family room when I stopped. Pa-plop, Pa-plop, Pa-plop coming from the basement door to my left—Dad and David playing ping pong. I abandoned the scissors at the top of the stairs and lowered myself to my butt, then pushed myself down each step, into the basement.

David saw me first and he squealed. Dad looked angry—I wasn’t old enough yet to recognize the difference, which was subtle, between his concerned and angry faces. Dad headed for the phone, spoke in a hush. Mom came through the garage door ten minutes later, carrying a half empty bag of groceries, her hair swarming with the curls she just had done for the first time.

She was crying and that scared me, so I started crying too. It turned out I was having a professional photo shoot the next day, my family’s yearly tradition.

But the pictures would come out beautiful anyway, and Mom displayed them in the living room tucked into silver frames. I wore an ivory dress with lace at the collar and sleeves puffed Koppel/Plucked 7

up like clouds. I was beaming at the camera with shocking blue eyes. Mom had evened out my bang line and you could barely tell, anymore, the damage I had done.

My childhood was composed of thousands of these photographs, groupings of four by sixes, organized in plastic sheets according to location, date, and subject. I grew up in Reading, a suburban town north of Boston, populated by mostly middle and upper class families like my own. The town looked active, but felt sleepy, like one of those people who seems interesting in a resume, and turns out to be dull in person.

As a girl, I went to the Reading photo store with Mom so we could pick up the orange envelopes with penciled codes. The shop’s smell was sour and sweet from a mix of sulfur, salt, and the soft peppermints they kept in a fishbowl by the cash register. The man there had black hair that glossed like his photographs, and he always gave me extra film spools so my brother and I could roll them across the kitchen floor for the cats to chase. Mom let me peel off each photo from the stack, but I had to hold them by the corners and gently, so they wouldn’t crease.

When Mom took a picture, she spent long minutes angling the camera one way or another, her tongue peaking out of her mouth and rolling—this meant she was focused.

Inevitably, she made mistakes, shaking the camera at the last second, or cutting off the tops of our heads. My father took most of the pictures. His bear paws locked the camera in place and never shook. When we traveled for a year, Dad kept an online photo journal that he updated daily. He took shots of people: David and me with our arms around spindly Moroccan children,

Mom standing with one leg forward in contrapposto, the jagged French Alps climbing behind her. Mom loved nature, and sometimes, on uneventful hikes, Dad let her have the camera to take close-ups of flowers. Later, when I clicked through the day’s pictures, I noticed that Dad had Koppel/Plucked 8

erased them all.

After Dad retired from his business consulting job at 40, he took up photography as a hobby. In my father’s world, hobbies were not leisure activities, but fully realized enterprises.

One day Dad discovered photography settings on his iPhone, the next he founded a non-profit company to teach others how to take professional quality pictures from a cellphone. He especially liked taking our Christmas card pictures, photographs that represented the family’s highlight for that year: a graduation, a vacation, a new home. Each year Dad set up his Nikon on a tripod and had me stand alone for several minutes, where I made faces and mocked the camera—but Dad didn’t pay any attention. He only needed me as a reference point to perfect the alignment. Composition was everything. Dad was the tallest and stood in the back, while David and I settled awkwardly against our father’s legs, and Mom hung off to the side. Mom, David, and I waited in our assigned places while Dad fiddled with the camera, and then a red light blinked and Dad lunged over to us and commanded, “Smile!” just before the world went white.

The Christmas cards were hung in frames lined up chronologically on the walls flanking our staircase. When friends came over, they stopped and said, “Wow, that’s like your whole life.” I shrugged and said, “Let’s go to my room.”

Walking down that staircase, I hardly noticed the backdrops: Gothic chapels, Alaskan glaciers, Cape Cod sunsets. Instead, I focused on myself. The photographs chronicled the progression of my hair pulling, from a full head of hair and pair of eyebrows, to missing eyebrows, to thinning hair, and to wigs. My secret was in plain view. Friends and family, the recipients of the cards, remarked that I looked different somehow this year—they couldn’t quite put their finger on it. Probably just the lighting, they decided. They followed the storyline that Koppel/Plucked 9

they know: a happy family, growing together, passing through life’s many milestones. My secret history remained elusive, like one of those shimmering images that shifts, revealing something new as it is joggled. But no one thought to shift the image of my family. My cover was foolproof and my audience easily fooled, so that I moved freely in disguise, thinking If only they knew, if only they knew.

I pulled out my first hair when I was eight-years-old. One winter evening I lay on the family room couch, alone, watching “Caitlin’s Way” on Nickelodeon. We had two black leather reclining chairs that sat opposite the couch, Dad’s with the best view of the television, though he rarely watched. David and I always fought over the couch and remaining chair, and Mom took whatever was left.

Mom appeared with a bowl of veggies and Ranch dressing, a pre-dinner snack. I peeled off strings of celery with my teeth, restless.

Mom was sautéing garlic on the stove that night, and I heard bubbly bursts, inhaled the biting smell. My father used garlic as a cure-all. He claimed that, in addition to numerous antioxidant properties, garlic made your hair grow thicker. And Dad did have thick hair—black locks and bold eyebrows that he raised when he was angry. He would claim years later, when my hair came in flimsy despite my garlic consumption, that I hadn’t eaten enough.

I was bored. I put my hands to my face, thumbing my nose, eyes, mouth with the pads of my fingers. I touched my eyebrow. There was an unusual, prickly hair, and I pinched it between my thumb and pointer finger, then tugged. And tugged again, and again.

Thirty minutes later, I walked to the front door and looked in the mirror. In high school biology I would learn that the brain is programmed to put things together, to make sense of Koppel/Plucked 10

disjointed shapes. This is the enigma of a Picasso. At first the painting is meaningless. But there is life hidden within the chaos, a floating lemon that becomes the eye, a pyramid that becomes a nose. My eight-year-old face was a Picasso. I had half an eyebrow, which was suspended awkwardly, like the smudge of an eraser.

The year I started plucking my hair, I was in the third grade at Brigham Elementary, a cozy suburban public school with a teddy bear for a mascot, a fatherly old man as a principal, and mostly gentle, elderly women as teachers. Friends and classmates ran together in a mesh of

Brittanys and Sarahs, but the teachers remained distinctive. There was Mrs. Donovan, my first grade teacher, a young woman with perky blond hair, bronzed skin, and toe nails painted fire engine red with white flowers. In a picture with her, I am smiling with missing front teeth and wear a rimmed hat with inlaid blue flowers. Mrs. Donovan is crouched next to me and both of us are wearing sandals, our toes poking through and revealing matching daisies.

In the first months of my eyebrow-less life, I was taunted and laughed at and pointed at.

Mostly, boys on the bus placed fingers over their eyebrows, trying to recreate my wacky face, then called me “freak.” I disliked these people, but I was not threatened by them. Boys teasing girls was a universal phenomenon in the third grade, and I didn’t see how I was any different from the girls made fun of for having buckteeth or ugly skirts. If anything, being ostracized only served as further excuse to keep to myself and study, which was what I was best at anyway.

When I drew self-portraits, I rendered my face the way I still saw it: two eyes, two ears, two eyebrows. For now, in the third grade, I chose to see myself as whole. I believed I still had that choice.

Mrs. Donovan saw that I had a unique aptitude for art, and recommended to my parents that I take private lessons. Jocelyn, my art instructor, was a copper-skinned Brazilian, who Koppel/Plucked 11

mostly watched me pursue my self-designed art projects while providing me with an endless supply of guava juice. During one lesson, I decided to draw an internal view of my body. I used a blue colored pencil to sketch an outline of my head, arms, feet, then began work on filling in the blank spaces. I drew a yellow painter’s palette into my chest cavity, in the position of the heart. I shaded my head in fiery red, then overlay a black trash can. The trashcan was the part of my brain that housed the bad thoughts, the bad people, and the bad things. Whenever I encountered one of these items, I disposed of it in my internal garbage bin. In the drawing, I placed a brown football, a black shotgun, a green jalapeño pepper. Each portion of my body was shaded in color and cluttered with various shapes, some of them recognizable as objects, while others appeared abstract. Here, in this space, I didn’t worry about my missing facial features. My hair loss, I naively believed, did not affect me internally.

My life as a freak was simple. I woke up in the morning and pulled. I rode the school bus and pulled. I got to science class and pulled. I went outside for recess and pulled. I returned home and pulled. I fell asleep. Follicles fell and stuck to notebook paper and the pages of my books. I checked my worksheets for “sneaks,” hairs that didn’t make it to the floor where they could be easily dispersed with a swipe of my foot. My disposal methods varied according to the setting. In most rooms I was able to trust that the hairs would blend in the way that dust settles, too disparate to be noticed. The exception was white floors. I would discover this years later, when my family spent a year traveling internationally. When we stayed in hotels and my brother jumped on the bed to test the softness, I went straight to the bathroom. Most of the time, the tile would have some kind of design or texture, but occasionally it was a stark white. In that case, I had to rely on shower and sink drains, sometimes the toilet. Starting that first year of pulling, I learned to scrutinize, survey and inspect my environment, to use my creativity to overcome Koppel/Plucked 12

obstacles. I’d become an addict in training.

I was in math class studying multiplication tables. Mrs. Seurat, my third grade teacher, was a sweet old lady, but she lacked the spunk of Mrs. Donovan, and I hated math more than anything. The projector hummed as Mrs. Seurat made little tapping noises with the tip of her pointer stick, then slid the stick across the diagram following a diagonal line of yellow boxes.

Math was the only class that I struggled in. Numbers, unlike words, lacked substance or dimensionality—they could be added, subtracted, multiplied, divided, but I could not see, touch, taste “4” the way I could “apple.” Listening to Mrs. Seurat, I felt the familiar tingling in the fingertips of my left hand (I pulled with my non-dominant hand so that I could write or hold a fork simultaneously). My left eyebrow was burning, itchy, uncomfortable, begging to be touched. “The product of four and four!” Mrs. Seurat announced, to which the class responded with a jubilant “Sixteen!” My left index finger, prodding and investigating, sliding over the smooth crescent of hairs that made up my brow. “Four and six!” I came upon a coarse hair. It didn’t belong. “Four and three!” My pointer finger and thumb latched onto the follicle.

“Twelve!” shouted the class. I tugged, felt the root give with a satisfying “pop.” As usual, I had some awareness of the first pull, but little awareness of what followed. The rest of the class period passed by in a fog of products, integers, the buzz of the projector. Shiny black follicles peppered my desk, and my face and fingertips ached, and still I wanted more.

No one knew what was wrong with me. The doctors understood only what they could see: I was losing my hair. Hair loss in an eight year old wasn’t good, and that fact activated the medical autopilot. They took my pee, blood, shit. Better to play it safe, rule out all of the possibilities. Biological hair loss, also known as Alopecia? Thyroid disease? Surely not Lupus? Koppel/Plucked 13

But Lupus was still in the running, odd sedimentation levels in the patient’s blood. For weeks, my parents prepared themselves for the worst: that my own cells had rejected me and I was suffering a slow death. No one noticed the calloused and swollen fingers of my pulling hand. Or the fact that I secluded myself for long periods, only to emerge with bare red skin. Mom was a nurse with exceptional intuition, but not even she could see something she wasn’t looking for.

Something she and medical professionals didn’t know to look for.

No doctor, nor my parents, asked me if I knew what was happening. The idea that I was the source of this crisis, that this was the doing of two fingers, must have been unthinkable. Had someone asked me directly, “Are you pulling your hair?” I doubt I would have denied it. The same way I wouldn’t expressly tell Mom about a broken dish, but still couldn’t bring myself to lie once she posed the question to me directly. The chaos of that time, my parents’ outright terror, led me to understand that something was very, very wrong. I couldn’t put all the pieces together, how these medical appointments and my hair pulling were connected. But I knew when

Mom cried and Dad yelled, it was because of me.

There was another reason for my silence: Doctors cured people. They gave them medicines to kill bacteria and casts to reset bones, allowing sick people to get better. I didn’t want to get better, because pulling my hair felt good. Not in a self-injurious pain as pleasure sort of way, but soothing, like a mother’s touch or the smell of lavender. Mom wouldn’t realize until months later that there was a pattern to my behavior: I pulled the most when I was bored or stressed. This is a hallmark of hair pulling—the behavior is a direct response to under- stimulation or over-stimulation. And so began the cycle that came to characterize my childhood and young adulthood: pulling induced stress, and stress induced more pulling. That relationship was like a Monet tableau, only becoming logical with distance. At that time, understanding Koppel/Plucked 14

nothing but the raw experience, I knew that I didn’t want to be cured of something that I enjoyed.

The doctors followed red herrings, while I guarded my secret by slinking in the shadows.

Nearly a year after my first pull, Mom searched “Female hair loss” on Google, found the usual suspects and then a new one: Trichotillomania, a hair pulling disorder found most commonly in adolescent females. When Mom forwarded the information to my pediatrician, a man who hung my crayon drawings in his office, he was shocked. He hadn’t known such a thing existed. Dr. Rogers asked that I see him as soon as possible. Mom brought me in the next day.

Dr. Roger’s office was divided into two separate waiting rooms, one for healthy children and the other for sick. Mom told me that sick people had germs that spread, and I imagined that the people and their toys were coated in a layer of icky green slime, that they all needed to be in one place to maintain the office’s sterile white glow. That day after the Google search, Mom hesitated before leading me into the healthy room.

Dr. Rogers was a large bearded man and I liked him because he usually called me big words like “intelligent” and “gorgeous,” but he didn’t say those things now. Instead he lectured me on how I was destroying my face, how I needed to stop before it was too late. I nodded obediently, but I had no idea what he meant, or what would happen when it was “too late.”

Would I ruin my face? Become so hideous that I would be forced to leave my friends, my family? He moved a light over my eyebrows, putting his face so close to mine that I could see his red eyelashes, each one a different length, growing in every direction.

Mom watched Dr. Rogers, her expression stoic, and for the first time I felt embarrassed.

He might as well have been shining a light between my legs, so intense was the feeling of exposure. When he finished the exam, Dr. Rogers clicked his tongue disapprovingly and turned Koppel/Plucked 15

to my file. He sketched the outline of a face that looked nothing like mine, then reproduced my one and a half eyebrows with dashes. This procedure would be repeated every year, so that there were several of those little pictures, arranged chronologically and tucked neatly into a file to track the progression of my hair loss. When I started pulling at my scalp at 12-years-old, he gave up on the drawings—eyebrows were easy to sketch, but now I had moved into a third dimension.

The last time I spoke to Dr. Rogers was to request my medical records for college. On the form, under the heading “Other,” he accidentally wrote “Alopecia.”

One of the annoyances of having a common and unknown disorder is that clinicians too often see disorders in terms of their manifestations, rather than their causes. For

Trichotillomania, this means that professionals understand the disorder in terms of surface-level consequences. Trichotillomania and Alopecia bear virtually no resemblance to one another, short of a shared emotional experience related to living with hair loss. Mix-ups between Alopecia and

Trichotillomania demote hair pulling to a behavior that is defined by physical, rather than psychological attributes. In fact, the hair loss itself has played a relatively minor role in my experience with Trichotillomania. Individuals like Dr. Rogers may mean well, but they are minimizing the much larger issues at stake: emotional health and well-being.

At the time of my diagnosis, there was one official book on Trichotillomania. Mom and

Dad marked up its pages. Mom’s notes were in pencil, and Dad’s were in his customary ball point pen—he underlined every sentence that had to do with success stories, scrawling blue stars next to the words “hope,” “treatment,” and “cure.”

Trichotillomania research is in its nascent stages, and the little information we do have only adds to the enigma. Trichotillomania has been called a “disorder of isolation” and “the Koppel/Plucked 16

lonely epidemic”; studies reveal that nearly half of all hair pullers are undiagnosed and more than half are untreated. Only a handful of pamphlets exist on Trichotillomania, and though the disorder has been discussed on television, the context is often “the world’s most bizarre disorders” and “extraordinary” human interest stories that only further alienate the very real sufferers of the condition. My world-renowned Abnormal Psychology professor at Duke once made reference to Trichotillomania and concluded: “This just goes to show you that there’s a name for everything.” Even Microsoft Word seems to taunt me by underlining the word

“Trichotillomania” in menacing red pixels, a subliminal message of WRONG. The representation of hair pulling as a singular, even inhuman behavior is both inaccurate (the incidence rates are high) and damaging. The result is that nearly every hair puller, at one point, has believed she is the sole person on earth to do what she does.

The months following my diagnosis were topsy-turvy, like a scene from Alice in

Wonderland. My parents and I had descended into the rabbit hole and were struggling to navigate the bizarre realities of this new hair pulling world. For the first time in her life, my mother was losing control. Her panic attacks happened mostly in the evenings, after I came home from school looking increasingly alien-like. Mom would be fixing me dinner, my favorite broccoli and chicken ziti. She stirred, stirred, stirred the noodles. Then she turned, to the refrigerator for the butter, to the sink to retrieve a ladle. My hand shot up to my face, my heart beating wildly, and I pulled once, twice if I was lucky, then dropped my hand back to my side. A new maneuver: the Pull and Drop. Sometimes I could drop without letting go of the hairs and then I played with them, rolled them between my fingers and felt the wetness of their tips. None of the Trichotillomania research of the time was able to fully explain this—that hair pulling was Koppel/Plucked 17

uncontrollable, and the ritual associated with it nearly inescapable. My biggest sorrow from those early years is that my parents wanted so desperately to understand, would have given anything for the answers, but the information wasn’t there. By the time they did have that information, the damage had been done.

Mom’s panics came to me in the form of sobs, long lingering notes, like a piano’s shivery final chord. I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling, my peach quilt tucked up to my nose. My father stomped down the hall, and the carpet whined under the sole of his slippers. Mom and

Dad’s footsteps were distinctive, Mom’s weightless like a finch’s hop, while Dad’s bore into the ground and left flattened islands in the carpet. I always held my breath when a door opened, waiting for that decisive stamp of identity. Dad threw open the door and slammed it behind him.

The scene felt like the scary part of a movie, except I didn’t have Daddy to hit the fast forward button. He was in the movie now. “Look what you’ve done.” The vein in his forehead was swelling, the way it sometimes did when he was on a business call, or when we got bad service in a restaurant. That vein meant I’d screwed up big.

I was under surveillance. Mom hid behind doorframes, watching for the first move. Dad appeared behind me, making me jump in my chair. He grabbed my arm and yanked it to my side, then walked away shaking his head.

Mom:

Please stop, honey. Katie, you’re doing it again.

Just stop, please, for me.

Koppel/Plucked 18

Dad:

Stop that now. I already told you to stop.

Don’t you dare disrespect me.

This is unacceptable.

Bathrooms and closets and an empty house became my sanctuaries. I emerged hours later and re-hit the play button on my life. When Mom knocked on the bathroom door, her knuckles making soft taps, I swelled with rage and shouted, “I’m coming, leave me alone!” I was as perplexed by these reactions as Mom was hurt. Now I understand that interruption meant being caught in the act, an act that I knew was wrong and agonizing for my parents. Partly I was ashamed, the way a teenage boy must feel being caught with a pile of porn under his mattress.

But there was something beyond that, a sort of visceral reaction that felt like whiplash. Pulling put me in a trance, suspended me in a place of semi-consciousness where my movements felt automatic and involuntary. The act was out of control, but the result was soothing, stabilizing.

My ritual consumed me so that the rest of the world felt out of reach somehow, unassociated with my here and now. Life lacked urgency—it could wait. Pulling, an experience of such blaring immediacy, could not.

I saw my first therapist in a white, colonial-style house with creaky stairs and worn wooden handrails. I was nine-years-old. Mom prefaced the visit by saying it would be challenging in a new way, and no, they wouldn’t take any more of my blood. My mother wore a thick wool turtleneck and dress pants. She rarely applied makeup, but I could see powder caked into the balls of her cheeks. Koppel/Plucked 19

A tall woman met us in the waiting room. Mom followed the woman, and I followed

Mom. Dr. Saunders motioned us toward a purple suede couch. She was younger than the other doctors I’d seen, with perfectly arched eyebrows.

“We catch her when she’s doing her homework,” Mom said earnestly.

“When she is under stress?”

“Exactly!” For a beat, Mom was triumphant. Then: “What do we do for her?”

I think about how that question must have pressed her for days. For months. Mom produced her leather-bound journal and a pen. The ballpoint was poised, ready for answers.

Arched Eyebrows watched us from her desk chair, and there was pity there, though I couldn’t have known that then. She lay her notebook in her lap, laced her fingers together. “Be her mother,” she said.

Mom’s eyes softened, her chest, body, sinking like a long lost balloon descending from its short life in the skies. She nodded slowly, thanked Arched Eyebrows for her help, and left the room without looking at me.

Either I had missed something important, or Dr. Saunders was dumb, because she didn’t speak for a good two minutes, only observed me with her head cocked as if I were a mildly interesting lab rat. Then she lifted the notebook, smoothed a crease in her charcoal pencil skirt, and clicked her pen. “Do you like school, Katie?” I told her I did, and that we’d read some lovely poetry. She laughed. I hadn’t said anything funny. Dr. Saunders leaned forward in her chair and, with her sharp features and arched back, resembled a cat preparing to pounce. “You’re a smart little girl,” she purred.

Ever since my early Brigham Elementary days, adults had praised me for my intelligence, my unusual degree of creativity. I spent the majority of my recesses inside the classroom, Koppel/Plucked 20

hunched over a clean, blank sheet of paper that was turned forty-five degrees to the left because I could only write on an angle. I wrote stories, of pigs named Oinkie who saved Christmas through an elaborate series of barnyard antics, two frogs who fell in love after a spell left one of them legless. Brigham Elementary typed and printed my stories, bound them into books with cardboard for the covers and duct tape along the spines. I wrote poetry about colors, yellow as the color of fresh egg yolk, white as the color of a Grandmother’s soul. Teachers reported to my parents that talking to me was like speaking to a little adult, that I had an old soul the likes of which they had never seen in someone so young. I was well-accustomed to the “you’re smart” compliment, little-accustomed to being challenged in the way that my precociousness demanded.

Arched Eyebrows asked if I’d ever seen the show “Inspector Gadget”? No, I hadn’t even heard of it. She explained that Inspector Gadget was a robot-like man, and that I should pretend I was he, cranking my arm down whenever I touched my face.

But robots don’t have hair. I didn’t say that out loud.

I should try to get better, so that I could look pretty again. My Mom and Dad wanted me to be healthy. I should resist pulling, the way I resisted eating a cookie before dinner. I should visualize a giant STOP sign every time I had “that thought.” Not once did she say the words hair pulling or Trichotillomania. Like those people who think if they don’t say the word “sex,” teenagers won’t have it.

After 45-minutes, Dr. Saunders led me back to Mom, who was sitting in the waiting room with her head bowed. She looked up at me as I approached, her smile nearly as tacky as Arched

Eyebrows’. On the car ride home, Mom asked if I’d liked the nice lady. I told her no. She said nothing, but stared straight ahead, her eyes strained in the way that meant she was holding back tears. Koppel/Plucked 21

Writing about my mother, throwing together my imperfect, half-baked words, seems to undermine the very task of pinning her down. Like trying to coerce a kitten out from under the bed, into plain view, only to find that the more I insist, the further the creature recedes. And, in the process, an element of authenticity is lost—I have disrupted the natural order of things, used force where I needed trust. My mother suffered. She gave so much away that she hardly had anything left to feed herself. As much as everyone respected my mother, admired her, envied her, few had the guts to love her. Why be connected to someone whose devotion you will never be able to fully reciprocate? Boys and men found her attractive, but she was clearly off limits—

“too nice,” they said. Those who did love her didn’t know how to show it. I’m still not sure that I do, at least not to the extent that she deserves. If there is one thing I can say definitively about

Mom, it is that she has never gotten what she deserves.

The fall after I turned four, Mom took me to a seal colony. We walked in a guided group, most people lugging oversized Canon cameras around their necks. The wind forced our heads down so that we ourselves resembled a pack of animals. Mom was wearing my favorite coat of hers, magenta with a furry hood like a maincoon cat tail. We walked side by side, our lips flapping. Mom squinted and so did I, though all I could see were the backsides of calves and boot heels kicking up sand.

“Guess what I see?” Mom whispered, buckling her knees so I could see her face, which was full of a joy I only see flickers of now.

“Seals” I whispered back.

Mom and I loved to skip and she started skipping then, her arms flailing, unabashed before the group. When we approached the colony, Mom drifted slightly ahead of me, to find a Koppel/Plucked 22

good place to hoist me onto her shoulders. I reached up on tip toe and tugged on the tail of her coat. The word “mumma” was at my lips as she turned around, and I looked into the eyes of a stranger. The face was old and tired, like a wrinkled sheet, and the eyes a dull gray-green. The shock silenced me in that moment, and then Mom came onto the scene and scooped me up so I could feel her heart bouncing in her chest. “I’m so sorry, Katie,” she breathed, and only then did

I begin to cry.

My mother had spent her life trying to shield me from harm. Now she was faced with the prospect of watching, day after day, as her only daughter mutilated herself, all the while powerless to stop it. Mom was always with me now—as I was doing homework (which she insisted I do on the kitchen table, instead of in my room), watching television, reading, talking on the phone. She had always cuddled next to me in bed as I was going to sleep—we called each other “The Snuggle Bugs”—but now, as my breathing slowed, I could feel that her eyes were still on me, unwilling to release their watchful grip. She tried to be subtle and I didn’t call her bluff, knowing I would hurt her, that I would shatter her last illusion of control. So we went about our days as we always had, each of us convinced that the other couldn’t see the burden we now shouldered, that we were protecting one another from the pain we felt ourselves.

Neither of us was fooled by these ruses. We knew the signs too well. My mother knew when I’d had a pulling spree, and not just because of noticeable damage. Something came into my face, a purply flush. When my mother was upset, she spoke differently, her voice hushed and flat. Her lips twitched and her head drooped, turning her neck into an accordion of stacked up wrinkles. Mostly, she sighed. Not the punchy, conspicuous sighs of my father, but little puffs.

Mom’s distress almost invariably took the form of sadness. She was never angry with me, though I often wanted her to be, was desperate for hateful energy to offset the melancholy. Koppel/Plucked 23

Instead, I only felt pity for this little sighing thing. And violent guilt for having been responsible for its creation. We were locked in a cycle: the more I pulled, the more Mom worried, and the more Mom worried, the more I pulled.

In those early years, my relationship to hair pulling was difficult to define. On one hand, I was above the drama of it all—unlike many of the hair pullers I know, I wasn’t traumatized by the jeers of classmates, nor did I feel compelled to conceal my physical abnormalities from friends and family. My self-consciousness, still at the level of an uninhibited grade school girl, had yet to catch up with my circumstances.

And yet, all the while, there was something building inside of me, an uncomfortable twinge that I now recognize as shame. I knew that the moment I plucked that first hair, I had destroyed a fantasy—the fantasy that in my family, a family replete with privilege and good health, there could be no suffering. Mom and Dad were suffering now, and not because I was being attacked by my own cells or tumors or a virus. I was attacking myself. Now I understand that my hair pulling was unconscious and uncontrollable—the behavior may have been my doing, but it was by no means my fault. I wasn’t hurting my family; Trichotillomania was hurting my family. At that time, though, I believed I was responsible for Mom’s panic, Dad’s frustration and occasional anger. I thought I had irrevocably injured the people I loved most, and that my only option was to make my suffering invisible, to prevent future ruptures by going underground. I resolved to not speak to anyone about my Trichotillomania. I wouldn’t let my family see me pull. I would be the smart, composed, mature daughter that my parents wanted.

I had reached an impasse and I chose a life of hiding. I never could have foreseen the consequences of such a choice. I could not have known then what I know now: I was setting out Koppel/Plucked 24

on the silent, tremulous path toward self-destruction. Falling headlong into a dead end.

Part 2: Grey Stone (2010)

Mom, Dad, my big brother and I are arranged in front of the Chapel. We play the usual roles. I wear Wig #3; it is the end of my sophomore year at Duke. David smiles slyly, the way that looks like he’s up to trouble he’d never be capable of. A loosened tie with embroidered devils hangs from his neck. Dad has a faux-tweed sports jacket two sizes too big, but he carries it off anyway. Mom is on the outside, her head leaning in while her body angles sideways, which Koppel/Plucked 25

she insists frames the photo. She wears a new dress that I coerced her into buying, two toned, white and tan. The bodice has been altered, but there is still a gap where her cleavage should be

(Dad jokes that David and I starved as infants). I stand next to Dad and am dwarfed by him, my shoulders slumped because I forgot to roll them back the way he taught me. My dress is royal blue. It’s the day my brother graduates from Duke University, the month before I withdraw from

Duke University.

This is Christmas card 2012 and the last picture of us all together. In my mind, that image epitomizes our family life. Mom, Dad, David and I are centered in front of the Gothic vaulted opening, clustered together like wooden soldiers in formation. Only our upper halves are visible so that we float, suspended in a 6 by 12 glossed box. My imagination erases the top edge of the photo, and the chapel is extended indefinitely, like stretched taffy. Grey stone climbs toward the sky, and my family, a unit, is secured at the foundation.

Ever since I can remember, my family has loved in code. The first big number I learned was one hundred forty three. 1-4-3, painted in swabs of acrylic paints on my blue plastic easel.

Scribbled onto sticky notes before my parents left on vacation to Virgin Gorda. Printed onto lunchbox napkins in Mom’s curvy script. Representing the universal expression of one letter, followed by four letters, followed by three. Three words: I love you.

We used 1-4-3 for changing room locks, house security codes, Bank of America passwords. When I left for Spain on an exchange program, Mom held up her fingers and motioned the numbers. Dad transcribed 143 at the end of emails with bulleted “family to do” lists. David wrote it in my birthday cards. Every day, it seemed, I looked at the clock at precisely

1:43 PM—as if it were encoded in my mental alarm clock. In college, I began looking at 1:43 Koppel/Plucked 26

AM, then texting Mom to see if she too was lying awake.

One Valentine’s Day, Mom and Dad purchased pocket-sized recording devices. The devices opened to reveal Polaroid pictures that they had cut into squares, trimming the yellowing off the corners. The audio was cracked, every few words blotted out with static. But I could make out the message: “Katie is a silly sister” my brother squeaked. “Katie is going to be a prima ballerina,” chimed in my mother. “She’s a very special girl,” injected my father. Then, all together, the words: Weeee loveeee youuuuuu. I have listened to the recording again and again over the years, savoring those three syllables. I like them better than the code.

Growing up, I felt that I inhabited a carefully constructed world. My father had a procedure for his life, and our lives, a rigid set of principles that guided his movements. Chief among these were success, dedication, and efficiency. My father got things done. He kicked ass at work, but at social events, his colleagues stared at my beautiful mother in amazement, unable to imagine my father having a life beyond the workplace. Dad became a partner at Accenture right before the company went public, subsequently earning a small fortune and retiring after 20 years of employment.

When I was a child, Mom and Dad ran weekly “family meetings,” where we discussed upcoming events and vacations, or the value of honesty in the family. At restaurants, Dad taught us kids the basics of securing the best possible service: 1) Always get a table close to the host, thereby maximizing your visibility; 2) Say you’re in a rush, even when you’re not; 3) Decide on a meal quickly and, as soon as you do, close your menu; 4) Check wristwatch so the host knows to speed up the kitchen. With every appointment, flight, or casual get together, we were to leave at least thirty minutes before the time it would be safe to leave. In life, Dad taught us, it’s always best to be ahead of the game. Koppel/Plucked 27

This etiquette was the closest my father ever came to practicing a religion. Enforcement of his principles had won him accomplishment, recognition, and wealth—he wanted the same for his children. My mother may have disapproved of Dad’s rigidity, but she knew better than to challenge him. Instead, she converted.

My parents met in kindergarten. They grew up in West Lafayette, Indiana, and their families lived a couple of miles from one another. Daddy, Steve Koppel, was the goofball and

Mommy, Paula Cherry, the nerd, her closet full of clean white blouses and paisley-patterned scarves. They flirted in the usual elementary school way, Dad pulling on Mom’s cropped brown bob and calling her names: “teacher’s pet,” “Little Miss Perfect.” When they got to high school,

Mom and Dad joined the debate team. Never before had Dad appreciated the cadence of Mom’s

Hoosier voice, or how she concealed a smoking body under oversized suit jackets. He was charmed by the way Mommy confused “Pacific” and “specific” in discussions of ocean pollution, how her cheeks flushed when protesting nuclear weapons.

Dad made the first move on Valentine’s Day, in their second year of high school. This is his favorite part of the story.

“I gave her a carnation,” he begins.

“I waited and waited for my carnation. I only expected one, from your mother, of course.

But nope, no carnation for the Pup.” It is the nickname they had employed since their marriage,

Daddy being Pup Senior and Mommy Pup Junior. Dad eventually asked her out, and they went steady for the rest of high school.

Mom attended Duke for nursing school, and Dad opted for a Computer Science degree at

Brown. My parents had agreed to see other people, but somehow it never happened. Instead, they Koppel/Plucked 28

wrote love letters, called each other on their apartment phones and hung up after one ring because they couldn’t afford the phone bill. They were married the year after graduation, at 21- years-old. Then Mom and Dad headed for Boston, where David was born three years later, and I followed two years after that.

I became a resident of Duke University in the fall of 2010. The morning of move-in day,

I waxed the hairs from my toes and wedged my thighs into denim cut offs. Wig #2 was washed, combed, ready to go. Mom painted my nails pale peach, her favorite shade, and which I would replace with red once she’d left. My mother had gentle brown eyes set into a round face, a toothy smile with the pink gums exposed. Her hair was wiry gray, and it became wispy in the summer, still lively because she’d never dyed it. Mom was made of curves and soft edges, and the effect was one I still struggle to define. Strangers flocked to her, asking for directions and spare coins, neither of which she was able to provide—the former because she had no sense of direction, the latter because she preferred not to carry change.

People who didn’t know us said Mom and I looked alike. “Is that your sister?” came the drawl of a homeless guy on the street, the exclamation of a hotel clerk. But we didn’t really. My eyes were blue, deep blue with a constellation of greens, browns, and oranges. My nose was slender, as was my face, and my lips were narrow, with a notch in the right side corner. My eyebrows dark, nearly black.

Dad had driven most of the way to North Carolina, a 15-hour odyssey from Reading.

Which he was happy to do, because Mom was terrified of night driving and I was afraid of any driving. Dad’s forehead was large, accentuated by a receding hairline, and his hair was salt and pepper pin curls. He had wild eyebrows. His nose was broad and his eyes soft. Koppel/Plucked 29

Duke University sat on the fringe of Durham, a city that the admissions pamphlet claimed had a hidden charm. But if it existed, I couldn’t find it. The place was, in words I would never have said out loud, a shit hole. Pasty cement warehouses, highrise hotels, and a layer of smog above the skyline, devouring it all.

“It’s too early,” Mom said as we drove through the city. “The lighting is bad.”

Duke was separated into three distinct parts, sensibly named East, West, and Central. All freshmen lived on East campus, and the rest lived on West and Central. West was the heart of campus, made up of large academic and residential quads, graduate schools, the student center, basketball stadium, and, visible from them all, the Duke Chapel.

Duke was composed of Gothic archways, balconies that overlooked walkways and quads, flying buttress style entryways with Greek lettering above, or intricate carved lion heads roaring like the one before a movie. There were no ugly buildings, no extraneous parts, no moments in the campus’ layout where the architects got lazy. All cohesion and authenticity. Nearly impossible to get lost because of the perpetual visibility of the Chapel, where sunlight played at the edifice, and curving spires stretched toward the heavens, arches casting little shadows while crevices receded back into themselves. Duke was my new world. The Chapel, my North Star.

This was my fourth visit to Duke, the first since I’d been accepted as a freshman. David was a junior, and several months before, had neglected a busy fraternity schedule to show around his little sis.

David was two years older than I. The age gap felt like a chasm, but not because of a discrepancy in maturity. Afterall, as I pointedly reminded him, I had never attempted to drink a gallon of milk in a minute, or kill a lobster with a toothpick, all in the name of acceptance into a brotherhood. During David’s senior year, when Mom and Dad visited him in his fraternity house, Koppel/Plucked 30

their feet stuck to the floor. They snapped pictures of the kitchen littered with Smirnoff and

Busch Light. Then Mom and Dad showed the shots to family members, who marveled at how

David was all grown up. I, on the other hand, was the little girl—nothing, not my trips abroad, money-making, or political career ambitions, could nudge me past adolescent status.

On the day of my visit, David took me to a café on campus, where we ate pesto chicken wraps and swigged Cokes. He kept looking over his shoulder, and I wondered if he was looking for people he knew. Was he embarrassed? I hadn’t seen or spoken to my brother in six months and I could hardly tell, anymore, where our relationship stood.

“I don’t know, Katie.”

David swallowed a bite, his prominent Adam’s apple sinking in his throat. “Duke is really intense, socially. I’m not sure you match up.”

I assured him that I was changing, was barely myself anymore. He smiled, and for the first time I noticed the pudginess of his cheeks, mouth, chin. I would realize later, when I witnessed transformations in freshmen boys, that it was the beer that did it. But in that moment, I felt only relief. My brother was satisfied by who I’d become, and that was enough.

Since the time we were kids, I had steadfastly sought my older brother’s approval. This often came in the form of serving as David’s partner in crime, his right hand man, for the various creative projects that he took on throughout our childhoods. One August evening on Cape Cod bay, David decided to form his own brotherhood, of which I was a member. We were growing up now, my brother almost 10-years-old. It was two hours before sunset and David and my favorite part of the day. Most of the vacationers had left the beach, driven away by no-see-um flies—but David and I were regulars, and we knew there weren’t any no-see-ums down by the Koppel/Plucked 31

water. With no witnesses, David and I were able to act as we pleased, to belt out songs and tussle. That night we decided to build a monument—David wanted to create a structure big enough to withstand the incoming tide.

We had just started digging when David decided that we needed a name. He came up with “The Diggers of Justice,” which sounded valiant to me, like a British knighthood. David and I returned to our digging, which we executed methodically. First, a layer of wet sand, the blackest we could get, establishing a strong foundation. Then a layer of dry. I added seaweed to the mix. As we set out to work, David began the chant: The Digg-ers of Just-ice, The Digg-ers of

Just-ice. I joined in and together we sang to the rhythm of our crunching shovels.

Two hours later, we had a gargantuan cylinder, rounded at the top and packed down with the heads of our shovels. We ran around the creation, admiring our handiwork, and then started to dance. My brother and I stomped, hopped from foot to foot, waving our arms as if being attacked by bees. I danced with my whole body, primal movements straight from my gut, energy gushing through my legs and into the ground, through my arms and into the air.

The next day, David and I walked onto the flats of the fresh tide and returned to the spot where we’d dug. There we found a crater, where, succumbing to the tide’s relentless thrust, our monument had imploded and melted into the sea.

Mom and Dad had bought our second home on Cape Cod when I was seven years old.

The condo was perched on top of a dune, overlooking the rolled-out dough sandbars of the

Brewster flats. That space was imbued with magic. There was the beauty of the land, but there was also the energy, a sort of gentle pulsing that reconfigured the rhythm of our lives. David’s routine hinged on the tides; my routine hinged on David. During high tide, we played in the water. The sea made a hushing sound as it approached the shore, then gurgled when it hit our Koppel/Plucked 32

toes and receded backwards. David’s toes were like Mom’s, carefully lined up from tallest to shortest. I had Dad’s. The baby toe was half the size of the previous one, a nub that looked like a mistake. When we finally stepped out of the water, my little toe would be wrinkly as a raisin.

Low tide was the time for building. We built cities of hermit crabs, which we called

“hermies,” skittish little creatures that had mini claws that didn’t pinch, with shells that were unique but always the same googly eyes. Together we collected them in buckets—they were usually difficult to see, but not for us, and we took pride in spotting even the tiniest, with shells like the insides of sunflower seeds. Certain rocks were more productive than others, but we could always rely on “Big Mama,” a huge boulder that Dad used to measure the tides. “Honey hole!”

David shouted from the other side of Big Mama, having discovered a pod of hermies in a crevice. When both of our buckets were full, we headed closer to shore, the sweet spot between the tide pools and dry sand. David used the butt of his shovel to mark the city limits, then dug out the foundation while I constructed fortifications.

One year I discovered gray clay at the bottom of a coldwater spring. I spent the next two weeks lying on my side in the wet sand, then sticking my arm down into the ice cold, bubbling sink hole to retrieve fistfuls of goo. I collected clay in a bucket, then picked through it little by little, pulling out the wormy bodies of hermit crabs who had died in the spring. By the time I returned to the city, half of me grey, David was at work on the irrigation system. I packed clay into the walls, watching my brother use his heel to create paths for the water to flow.

David and I carved out the rooms. There was a large common space, where hermit crabs could hang out. We stocked the cafeteria with cracked mussels and snails. There was the “black house” (wet sand was black when you dug deep enough) where the biggest hermit crab ruled as president. The hospital was opposite from the black house, and consisted of seaweed beds and Koppel/Plucked 33

empty shells, from which a shell-less hermit crab could choose a new home. A few feet from the city, bad hermit crabs were subjected to jail time. The jail was a deep, narrow hole where David and I dropped the crabs, then threw sand on top. After a minute, we retrieved the felon, and returned him to the common room. Those who didn’t make it were buried.

On the hottest days of the Cape Cod summer, David and I trekked out onto the sidewalk with a magnifying glass and bucket. David always spotted them first, the jet-black ants with teeny legs and long antennae. He crouched down on the pavement and tilted the magnifying glass into the sun. Sizzling. You could hear it before you saw it. The shell cracked and bubbled, like bacon on a skillet. Now the ant was dancing, costumed in little flames running down its back. I squealed, but David hushed me with a finger to his lips; he didn’t want me to tip off other ants. The ant kept dancing until it was dust, a blacken blemish on gray concrete.

As kids, my brother and I were inseparable. We declined play dates with friends to be with each other. We shied away from parties where only one of us was invited. Everywhere we went we called each other by invented names—Utti and Gutti. We wrote them out in the sand of

Cape Cod bay, and in signatures on the bottom of crayon drawings. Sometimes my mother mistakenly called me Gutti. I loved being confused with my brother.

In the fifth grade, David broke his elbow. The doctors let him keep the needle they operated with. David picked away crusty dried blood from the silver, then pulled a string through the eye to make a necklace. Mom insisted he rest in Dad’s reclining chair. For weeks, David remained glued to that chair, watching cartoons and receiving offerings of balloons, candy, and beanie babies. He got Dad’s remote. I tried hurting myself, too. I bit into a frozen chocolate bar.

It was my first loose tooth, a left incisor, and I grabbed it by the root and tugged until I tasted blood. David said that didn’t count, because I’d done it on purpose. Koppel/Plucked 34

Now, after six years of attending different schools, my brother and I were on the same turf again. David helped me unpack into my new dorm—Alspaugh—which sounded to me like some sort of bacterial virus. I was on the second floor, in a triple. Swetha, one of my roommates, had deep umber skin with large eyes and a faint notch in her chin. She came from Maryland, where she was the star of her public high school, valedictorian and class president. Sarah, the other roommate, was a round faced, silky haired Chinese girl. She had packed lightly, the majority of her possessions being Organic Chemistry books and laminated periodic tables.

Mom tinkered and fiddled, while Dad stood outside my door eyeing his wristwatch. It was time to say goodbye. I walked Mom and Dad outside, into the Carolina heat that was just beginning to soften. We stood underneath an archway, looking at each other. Dad cleared his throat. I hugged Mom first, then Dad, then Mom again. We clung on to each other, and I could feel Mom’s knobby shoulders on my chest. We stayed like that, holding on, until there was nothing left to do but go.

A couple of months after I’d been accepted to Duke, Mom and Dad sold our Reading house and bought a townhouse in the South End of Boston. They didn’t tell my brother or me, because they didn’t think it would matter. David had left the nest, and I was about to, so they reasoned that they could relocate the nest without ruffling feathers. The day I left Reading for

Duke was the day I said goodbye to my childhood home. Our departure was silent; we were no longer close with our neighbors. They had become resentful of us, Dad explained, resentful because of our success, our privilege, David and my attendance at elite private schools. It was time for a change, he said. Of all of us, my mother was the most attached to that Reading home.

Her father had drawn up the blueprints for the house and it felt like a cornerstone, the place Koppel/Plucked 35

where her old family and new family lives intersected. When my mother expressed her sadness to friends, Dad admonished her, reminding my mother that they had an image to uphold—that image did not involve meekness. Mom and Dad moved into a townhouse, decorated with art they had no taste for, and pampered two pure bred maincoons named Cooper and Raymond.

Dad launched himself into city life. He volunteered at non-profits and medical institutes, rapidly making his presence known and climbing the hierarchical ladder. My father spent his time attending board meetings, company dinners, fundraising events.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, my mother was fighting her own battles. When a friend was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, my mother spent her weeks in and out of chemotherapy and radiation sessions, organizing meetings with oncologists and surgeons and holding the friend’s hand through the entirety of her treatments. She made regular trips to Indiana to support her poly-divorced sister and cart her parents to cardiologist appointments until her father passed away, at which point she stayed with my grandmother for weeks at a time, putting her own grief on hold in order to take care of her newly widowed mother. “I’m exhausted, but I feel like I’m not doing anything,” Mom told me.

When I called home from school and asked for an update, I was given an in-depth description of Cooper’s and Raymond’s various undertakings. These were actually extensive, because Mom and Dad walked them on leashes, on the beach, in the woods, and even on canyons during a vacation in Sedona. “The score is all tied up!” Mom said, referring to the number of chipmunks Cooper had caught, compared to Raymond. Every day meant another stream of texts, pictures of Cooper’s creamy white mane fluffed up, or a close-up of Raymond’s nose, which had a crooked auburn scar running down the middle. Cooper and Raymond were always great, fantastic, angelic. As the conversation was winding down, I asked how she and Dad were doing. Koppel/Plucked 36

“Oh honey,” she said, and I could hear her sad smile. “We’re fine.”

The weekend after I moved in, Duke’s Alpha Tau Omega fraternity held an 80’s party.

Second floor Alspaugh girls went shopping at Target before the party. Jose, a tall Puerto Rican boy, came along. He carried himself like a hot guy, but he wasn’t—his smile was crooked, a wolf’s snarl.

I bought neon pink leg warmers and acid-wash jeans that I still keep tucked away in my closet, a keepsake of I don’t know what. My hair was pulled back into as high a pony as I could manage with Wig #2. I applied sparkly aqua eyeshadow and bubblegum pink lip gloss, which I’d found in the bargain bin at Target. We gathered in the hallway and giggled, relieved that the others looked ridiculous too. The group took the bus to West Campus, then made its way to

Craven Quad, one of several residential quads on campus.

From the outside, Craven was pristine. It was constructed in the customary Gothic style, with flying buttresses and elegant archways.

A window swung open. A scruffy guy stuck his head through and saluted us with a red solo cup. Rap music boomed, making the window’s glass shudder in its frame. Scruffy Guy disappeared back into the dorm, but we could hear his announcement to those inside:

“FRESHMENNN!” There was a collective cheer from the partygoers. My friends and I all smiled wide.

Inside, everything smelled of piss, sweat, and beer. The hallways were clogged with neon-clad strangers, fighting to be heard above the hum of slurred conversations and thrumming music. I was leading the group and tried to look confident, like I had somewhere to be, but shit, we didn’t know anyone. I heard my name and spotted Jose, his head floating above the throng, Koppel/Plucked 37

arms raised like an Olympian and clutching two beer cans. Jose led us through a seam in the crowd, into a bedroom with an unmade bunk occupied by five people. He retrieved an armful of warm Busch Lights. Then he produced cups of rose-colored punch. Mom had warned me about punch, saying “alcoholic” as if the word tasted bad in her mouth. But she was wrong, because this stuff was good. I took gulps, feeling a rush of adrenaline as sugary sweetness hit my stomach, then followed Jose to the common room and concentrated on keeping my drinks steady.

The common room had been transformed into a disco. We had arrived at the party, the kind I’d always imagined went on in college. It was all too good to be true.

The air in the common room was thick from the heat of moving bodies, and the strobe lights made it nearly impossible to discern who was around us. Jose wandered off for another

Busch Light, but we girls clung together, forming a circle in the back corner of the room.

Everyone started moving at the same time, as if controlled by a single switch. I tried to copy

Swetha’s movements, to mimic the way she shifted the weight in her waistline, with the arms following. But hell, no one could see me anyway. We fell into the rhythm of the flashing lights and pulsating speakers. The DJ played “Livin’ on a Prayer” and now we were belting out lyrics, shattering any ice that remained between us. I felt slimy hands latch onto my waist. A stranger, moving my body against his. I left the circle and walked into the clean night air.

I thought: How dare someone put his hands on me. I felt: angry, violated, hurt. And exhilarated. But I had a part to play, and I didn’t want the others to think this was a new experience for me, being touched by a guy. So I returned to the common room, and that’s when I saw Jose and Alexa.

They were in a corner, Alexa pressed up against the wall with her arms resting on Jose’s shoulders. Jose had taken hold of her waist, and his face resting against Alexa’s long pale neck. Koppel/Plucked 38

They danced for a few beats, then started kissing, then danced for a few more. Soon they were only kissing.

We decided to leave Alexa alone. We were too new of friends to take the chance of upsetting her by intervening. Jose lived in our dorm and he would take her home.

The next day I spotted Alexa at our all-dorm picnic in the gardens. Duke had 55 acres of them, but everyone seemed to congregate in the same spot, on the hill by the lily pad pond. The day was brilliant, though I barely noticed anymore—it had been flawless every day since I’d moved in. Alexa wore a navy blue dress with white flowers—an American girl doll. I sat with her below a weeping willow with branches that cowered. The rest of my friends sat away from us, flattening out their cotton sundresses, whispering to one another.

“So how was your night?” I said.

Alexa smiled, but for the first time I noticed the bags under her eyes, which were a bluish hue. “It was fun, I guess.”

“When did you get back?”

“I spent the night with Jose.”

Her tone was casual, but she averted her eyes. Alexa’s hands twirled around grass, the blades making little yelps as they broke free of their roots.

“What happened?”

She giggled. “I think we had sex.”

“You think?”

“Well, he started pulling my clothes off. I tried to stop him, but he did it anyway.”

I turned toward the pond and saw that the others had left. Alexa and I walked side by side through the gardens, unaware of having a destination, but instinctively heading toward campus. Koppel/Plucked 39

We said nothing. Her fingertips were stained green, and I resisted the temptation to press her hand into mine and wipe them clean. We squatted down in the grass to wait for the bus to East.

“Alexa, you might need help.”

“No, it was fine. It’s not a big deal.”

“Just remember that I’m here.”

“I will.”

The bus came. I got to my feet, then grabbed Alexa’s hands and pulled her up. We returned to Alspaugh.

During that first year at Duke, Alspaugh was my city. Inside the entrance, students posted flyers. This was where the lame learned about upcoming movie showings, mall trips, and study break parties. A short set of stairs led you into the common room, which was safe for socializing and movie watching, unless it was past 11 PM, at which point it became a hook-up spot for the brave. And, on weekends, a congregating spot for the drunk, due to the optimal positioning of a bathroom to the left, a kitchen to the right, and couches in between. The kitchen was generally off-limits, unless you wanted strangers digging into your brownies while you went to buy a carton of milk to go with them. But that space had influence, in the form of 4 AM fire alarms after someone microwaved a fork.

The first floor was all-boy. There was a triple at one end, where the exclusive pre-games took place. One of the guys in there was 21, but he was picky about who he bought drinks for. It was rumored that there was a dealer, too, who I later discovered was a goofy guy from New

Zealand. Sam, the hook-up buddy of my third floor friend Heather, lived in the room adjacent to the exclusive triple. His roommate, Doug, could usually be found sitting outside with a laptop, in Koppel/Plucked 40

a perpetual state of sexilement. Sarah had once caught Sam and Heather exchanging blowjobs on the bathroom sink, which I had initially mistaken for an off-limits territory. The only place you could ensure a peaceful pee, I learned, was the library. Further down the first floor was the resident faculty member, a kind man who hosted weekly movie nights (including brownies!), but who blew his reputation in the first week by showing a gruesome documentary about dolphin slaying. The rest of the first floor was mostly unknown to me, but I heard that their Resident

Assistant (RA) was an asshole.

There was a nook tucked underneath the staircase, with no particular designation, but which I used for phone calls home. Secrecy was a must, and my room wasn’t safe, not so long as there were people in that hall. Walls were thin.

The second floor was where I lived. If you took a left at the top of the stairs, you’d get to my hallway, which was all girls. I lived in 234, the only triple on the floor. Next to me was

Beryl, my Turkish friend, then a room of two studious, 24/7 pajama-clad Asian girls. The next room was Nikki, an orange-skinned party girl who I’d never liked. She and Alexa would become best friends by the end of the year. The rest of the girls on our hall were in the pajama-clads, a group I didn’t associate with. The two halls of the second floor were joined by the girls’ bathroom, then an adjoining laundry room. The laundry room was Alspaugh’s battlefield. We stole each other’s dryers, and pulled out a stranger’s soaking clothes to wash our own. It was also the site of a 5 AM threesome between Chris (first floor lacrosse bro), Nikki and Alexa.

Beyond the laundry room was a co-ed hallway. That’s where Alexa lived. Further down were the “wannabe” boys. There was Noah, a guy I despised for preying on Alexa. He snuck into her room at night, coerced her into his room to “study” and “see the stars.” Alexa came to staying in 234 on the nights she knew he was going out. One weekend, Noah came to 234, Koppel/Plucked 41

snatched Alexa’s phone from her, and ran back to his room crooning Come and get it, Come and get it. I flew out the room and grabbed him, screaming She’s not your fucking dog, give me the fucking phone you fucker. I’d pissed Alexa off, but I didn’t care. When it came to protecting others, my voice never failed me.

Several months ago, Swetha called and told me she had been back to 234. She was a senior now, floating in circles I no longer knew, sometimes seeing Alspaugh girls in passing but never stopping to reconnect. I laughed and asked how it felt to be there, if it was any different.

She paused to consider. “I don’t know, it was weird,” she said, and I knew this wasn’t her real answer, merely a stalling to find the right words. “I was so angry,” she whispered, “Those strangers don’t belong there. They have no idea…” We both knew she didn’t need to go on, to finish the thought that still fixed us in a metamorphic history. That place, for better or for worse, was where we learned to live.

In January of that first year, I slept outside in a tent with six other girls for four weeks to get into a Duke basketball game against the rival University of North Carolina. Duke games were free to students and non-ticketed, so you couldn’t buy your way into prime seating—you had to earn it by camping. “Tent checks” were conducted randomly, in the form of 4 AM sirens—the seven of us joined a hoard of half-asleep, often half-drunk students to be counted and checked off the list. One missing person meant a warning, and a repeat offense meant getting booted.

The tents were arranged on a quad in front of the basketball stadium, a territory known by the student body as “Krzyzewskiville” after longtime head coach Mike Krzyzewski (shə-SHEF- ski). K-ville was situated along Towerview Drive, the backbone of campus, a shadowy road lined with pines. Koppel/Plucked 42

Living in a tent involved living with more girls than in my dorm room, in a quarter of the space—a higher risk of exposure to a larger number of people. While the others developed tenting strategy, I formulated a strategy of my own: the Tent Ritual. I bought a mummy sleeping bag. This enclosed my head, ensuring that my scalp was not visible so long as I lay completely flat. Should I take the wig off at night? Tempting. Keeping the wig off allowed it to stay shaped, possibly eliminating the need for a mirror and comb. Wig off meant less risk in the daytime—I could cut out the ritual altogether—but more risk of being discovered at night.

When I had started pulling my hair, I’d had nightmares about waking up to find that I was bald. Now that I was bald in reality, my nightmares had evolved: I pop out of bed in the morning, in a roomful of girls, only to realize that I have forgotten my wig. In my mind, the girls never react—I can’t even see the girls, because my shame burns so hot that it literally melts my surroundings, bodies becoming waxy blobs indistinguishable from the walls and ceiling. No, I couldn’t take that chance. I kept my wig on at night.

Showers. Two of my days started late, 2 PM classes. That meant I could trek home to

Alspaugh: a walk to the bus stop, a bus ride to East campus, and a short walk to the dorm. On those mornings, I wore a hoodie with the hood up. Once there, I picked up Dorm Ritual. Then I made the trip back to West campus to start the day.

Morning classes were more complicated. No time to go to Alspaugh, so I defaulted to the gym. The shower curtains were shameful. I had to keep one hand securing an end, and it was all I could do to soap myself up with the other. Washing two heads of hair with one hand was next to impossible. So I skipped that step altogether. Instead, I kept my neck twisted so as to avoid the nozzle, shifting the angle of my head as I repositioned my body into the stream. I did my best to flatten the wig with my fingers, but it was useless. Every morning was a new arrangement, each Koppel/Plucked 43

one seemingly wackier than the last. I could have laughed or cried, so I laughed, because I had the day to get through.

Alone time was the biggest issue. When would I pull? I couldn’t spend hours in the bathroom the way I usually did; the siren could go off at any point, and I was not about to screw over my friends. Then I discovered day shifts, which involved one person at a time in the tent. I signed up for every day shift I could, then spent uninterrupted hours pulling and pulling as if starved.

Despite its lack of recognition, hair pulling is not a new phenomenon. French physician

Francois Henri Hallopeau coined the diagnostic label “Trichotillomania” in 1889, a name that is rooted in Greek—“Trich” (hair), “Tillo” (pull), “Mania” (madness) gives us the tagline “Hair pull madness.” In his book “The Hair-Pulling Problem,” Dr. Fred Penzel kindly points out that hair pullers are not, in fact, mad, and that the term can be misleading. But in my mind, Hellopeau was dead on. Spending five hours a day sitting in a closet ripping hair from my scalp feels a hell of a lot like madness. For me, the craziness element relates to my experience, not who I am as an individual. Admittedly, that distinction has taken me years to fully accept, as I suspect is the case for many.

One of the reasons Trichotillomania is so neglected in psychiatry is that it has yet to be definitively categorized. Currently Trichotillomania’s main diagnostic criteria include recurrent hair pulling with noticeable hair loss, tension before pulling followed by relief after, and resulting distress and impairment. Trichotillomania is officially listed as an impulse control disorder, alongside kleptomania, pyromania, and pathological gambling. But those with any understanding of the experience of hair pulling know that it bears little resemblance to these Koppel/Plucked 44

other conditions. Many believe Trichotillomania belongs among Obsessive Compulsive

Disorders. Trichotillomania, like traditional OCD, has a strong component of ritualization— individuals usually follow some sort of a routine, sometimes involving the selection of a hair

(based on color, texture, location, and more) and then biting, rubbing, or swallowing the hair follicle and its root. However, hair pulling is distinctive in the relaxing and pleasurable effect of engaging in the behavior. Conversely, individuals with OCD typically engage in their behaviors in order to escape harm or negative consequences.

Experts in Trichotillomania generally see these criteria and classifications as over- generalizing. Every hair puller is unique, and this inhibits a neat categorization, as some exhibit behavior more reminiscent of OCD and others of impulse control or addiction. Dr. Penzel lays out two subgroups: automatic pulling and focused pulling. Automatic pulling encompasses the majority of hair pullers and is characterized by little or no awareness of pulling, sometimes to the extent that pulling feels like the tic associated with Tourette’s Syndrome. Focused pulling implies more intentionality to the pulling and often involves the use of mirrors and tweezers to target particular follicles. For some, their pulling is a combination of these subgroups. For many, myself included, hair pulling constitutes a sort of trance; time stands still and the act of pulling feels addictive, like a drug. Hair pulling exists along a spectrum, and the rigidity of diagnostic criteria is incompatible with the complexity of the behavior. In truth, Trichotillomania belongs in a category of its own.

Most people with Trich (a common abbreviation, pronounced “trick”) pull from their scalp, but many pull from their eyelashes and eyebrows, and some from their limbs and pubic area. Common circumstances of hair pulling include watching television, reading, doing homework, talking on the phone, lying in bed, and driving (I have seen people pulling their hair Koppel/Plucked 45

at stoplights in front of me). Trichsters (another abbreviation, meaning “those with Trich”) usually pull alone, although children tend to be an exception due to a lack of self-consciousness.

While there is some variation in the specifics, most Trichsters would agree that pulling their hair is not painful. Doctors speculate that a repetition of pulling in one area desensitizes that area to pain. Whatever the scientific reason, the fact is that, for me and all others I have known, hair pulling is not an act of self-punishment. For most, hair pulling is gratifying in a direct, sensory way, a way that is different from the satisfaction associated with self-injury such as cutting and burning. Interestingly, many hair pullers who, for example, pull only from their scalp are horrified by the idea of pulling from their eyebrows or eyelashes. Now, not having pulled my eyebrows for ten years, I dread having to pluck my eyebrows for female grooming purposes.

This seems to point to the idea that Trichotillomania is defined by the particularization of ritual;

Trichsters are not wild, out of control deviants who know no better than to self-injure—rather, they are complex individuals with nuanced behaviors.

The Tent Routine worked. I survived the four weeks without hair-related incident, and my tent mates and I snatched up great seats at the game. The game came down to the final few seconds, during which I spewed nonsensical prayers of “Please” and “Oh God,” but Duke prevailed to pull off a historic comeback. Following big wins like this one, the tradition was to burn. Each of the dorms on both East and West campus had individualized wooden benches.

These were constructed by students and were enormous, with enough space for ten people. At the beginning of the year, new inhabitants repainted the benches in a display of inter-dorm pride.

Then, in the case of victory against University of North Carolina, they were destroyed by fire.

Duke’s student body charged toward the main quad whooping and singing, faces Koppel/Plucked 46

illuminated by the glow of cellphones pressed against ears. We all recognized the importance, the near holiness of the bench burning tradition, and we wanted to experience this magic with our closest friends. David, I knew, would be coming from the opposite direction, and I tried spotting him among the incomers, but the throng was too thick. Swetha called me over to my group of tent-mates and together we watched as flames wormed through the wooden nest of our former creations. Fire consumed the planks’ edges first, then bled into the faces, splotching like a rash of black.

I couldn’t shake the feeling of wanting my brother with me. My friends were kin, but my

David and I shared a parallel history, and that history converged here. I began walking along the periphery of the fire, pushing my way through zombified students. My brother was easy to pick out of a crowd—he was tall and narrow, with a habit of looking over people’s heads when he spoke to them. But under the sheath of firelight, all the faces looked the same. Our aspects were puzzles of light and shadow, too complex to be recognizable. I gave up my search and returned to the group.

At first, my Trichotillomania had just been another one of our games. David teased me, taunted me, or hit me. I threatened to pull my hair out. Most of the time it was simple: I made the threat, he stopped. Other times, I began to move my hand toward my face, ever so slowly, with

David clobbering me with stupids and buttfaces, until he realized he had no leverage.

“Mommmm” he yelled, the sting of defeat long behind, desperation taking its place. I could hear porcelain dishes hitting the granite, the closet door whipping open, the precursor to Mom running toward us. I had already put my hand down, by the time she got there, but she knew anyway.

“Honey, please,” she begged. I could see red anger rising into the nape of David’s neck. Koppel/Plucked 47

One September night in Italy, I lay awake listening to the peepers chirp. I was barely twelve and drunk for the first time, the three glasses of Chianti Classico too much for my 80 pound frame. We were in a Tuscan villa on top of a small vineyard, set among hills patchy with ochre and umber. The peeper chorus was interrupted by the creaking of an old hinge—Mom and

David had come into the room and David climbed into bed, setting off the groan of springs, while Mom leaned over and made a smack, smack with two kisses on his forehead. Mom turned away and her fingers found the wrought iron door handle. David’s voice interrupted the symphony.

“Mom?”

My mother returned to David’s side.

“Why can’t she stop?”

The last thing I remember is Mom’s sigh, that little puff of air.

My brother’s relationship to my hair pulling has always been a mystery, and, until very recently, not one I have wanted to unravel. Mostly I feel that I robbed David in some way, establishing myself as the family symptom-bearer and thereby distracting from the very real struggles I know he endured. When I started pulling, David’s needs were sidestepped, namely his need to know that his little sister was going to be okay. My brother experienced the same horror as my parents—after all, he too could see my hair disappearing—but without the benefit of understanding. So, naturally, he blamed me. That night in Tuscany, David asked a question that should have been addressed years earlier. This is what pains me. Had David been made to understand that my hair pulling was uncontrollable, that no one was at fault, would he have been spared that anger? Even now, I wonder if my brother holds onto his resentment, if this is what Koppel/Plucked 48

makes him cruel at times that seem unaccountable.

Now, on the rare occasions we see each other, and the even rarer occasions when we talk one on one, David doesn’t hold my gaze. I wonder if he fears in me what I used to fear in others—that his eyes are portals to some place of tenderness, of such raw sadness, that it would muddle the ghost of a relationship suspended between us. These conversations are also characterized by profound embarrassment. Each of us knows we have failed the other, that we are two ships passing in the night, needing help from one another more desperately than ever— scared shitless to ask for it.

When I told David and my parents I was writing a memoir about my life, the collective response was: “Suit yourself.” I spoke to each family member individually, reassuring them with the lie, “You’re not in it that much.” All said they didn’t care either way. I was relieved and, having gotten past what I believed to be the sticky part, continued: “It focuses on the last few years…” They stopped me.

“Just make sure you leave out Duke,” they said.

Duke University emblemized my family’s love in a way that our home lives couldn’t. For the first time since my childhood, we had something to talk about, a team to cheer for, a place where we belonged. David and I were becoming increasingly distant, but during that time at

Duke, we had a clean slate and shared ground. We spoke the same language, one comprised of building abbreviations and short hand basketball talk which, when peeled back, revealed a mutual love and devotion that I no longer believed existed. When I failed to receive a sorority bid at the start of my second semester, I called David and sobbed while he reassured me that they Koppel/Plucked 49

were all idiots, that they didn’t deserve me anyway. Then, after I’d hung up and returned to class, he texted me the message: “I love you”—not a number or filler, but the actual words in all their gorgeous simplicity.

We started group texts to discuss March Madness scores and make predictions for upcoming match-ups. When David and I went home for vacations, we were flooded with gifts of

Duke paraphernalia. Mom and Dad made several visits South; Mom reconnected with old nursing classmates, while Dad simply relished being on campus and seeing my brother and me in our element. Family members joked with me about becoming a “party girl,” and David proudly verified the rumors, saying I was a new woman. Rarely have I felt so connected to my family as those dinners in Durham on Parents’ Weekend, where our strained relationships were refortified with mutual experience, joy, and laughter, each of us acting the part of the best version of ourselves.

Three months after I wrote the description of the Christmas card picture, of my family standing in front of the Chapel, I discovered that my memory of it had been wrong. The actual photograph was taken by a nondescript academic building, one of the few on West campus constructed out of brick rather than the Hillsborough stone. Our bodies dominate the composition, David’s graduation cap nearly slipping out of the frame. Our smiles are unnatural, held as taut as fishing wire. The sun is in our eyes and we all squint and half-grimace—my mother reminded me that this was one of a dozen attempts, the only one that met Dad’s approval.

Dad’s suit is too big, but he doesn’t pull it off—he looks goofy, a clutter of mismatched neutrals.

Mom is wearing the dress she picked out for herself, blue and tan with a high collar (she had wanted to wear the white and tan dress from my memory, but Dad vetoed it because it was “too Koppel/Plucked 50

revealing”). There is no magic to the picture, no grandiosity to the setting. Through a camera lens, in the world of realism, we look just as we always have. Strained and mute, like the Duke gargoyles.

Part 3: The Reveal (2003)

The summer after sixth grade, I attended a school pool party. At that point, I was still pulling exclusively from my eyebrows, though I would start in on my scalp six months later. I wore a two-piece tie-dye print suit with splatters of aqua and turquoise and white ruffled straps.

My toes crammed up against the strap of platform black flip-flops, clunky blocks of foam that took work to keep in place. The outfit, which Mom had arranged, was new and strange, like a

Halloween costume. Mom offered compliments on my appearance, and I knew she was nervous. Koppel/Plucked 51

Maybe she had already guessed how this would end. My classmates were throwing the party supposedly for me, a goodbye before I departed for a year to travel with my family. But I knew it was all a ploy, an excuse for the others to strut in bikinis, balance oversized sunglasses on the top of their heads, run fingers through wet locks that smelled of chlorine. I was too embarrassed to ask Mom for a bikini, but I had sunglasses with black frames, and my hair was long and straight, with pin curls at the ends. Mom was right, I did look okay.

When we arrived at the house, a stark white giant, I grabbed my pink towel from the backseat and started for the front door without saying goodbye to Mom. I imagined her, neck arched toward the passenger’s window, blowing me a kiss. I didn’t look back.

I headed to the bathroom to inspect my morning’s work. My eyebrows were neat and in place—Mom had leant me one of her eye pencils and helped me sketch them out on my bald skin, making tiny dashes. I’d never let her in on my routine before, but it was easier to give in this time, her anxiety over the party being what it was. She had marked the boundaries of my eyebrows, and then, within the safety of my own bathroom, I filled in the spaces myself. I’d held my face under the faucet to test the makeup’s resistance. No smudges. That meant I could get in the water up to my shoulders, even allow myself to be splashed, so long as I didn’t dunk.

Girls were already swimming when I got to the pool, flinging from the diving board with arms flexed overhead, fingers pressed together in a prayer pose, torsos rigid with focus. I don’t know how long I stood there watching, lamely, at the edge of the deep end. Shirley, my closest friend at the time, spotted me and climbed out of the water, her bikini bottom stuck between her butt crack. “Why aren’t you in?” she said casually, wringing out her inky black hair. I smiled, hoping this would serve as a proxy for words.

It happened in a second. Shirley pushed and I was dropping into the water, the impact Koppel/Plucked 52

slapping my face hard. Then I bobbed to the surface. Shirley was laughing and I kept my eyes shut, as if my blindness would make others blind too. She watched until I reached the ladder, then jumped in the water and returned to the group. I kept my head down, collected my wedged flip-flops and pink towel, and ran inside the house.

Ten minutes later, Mom picked me up and we drove home, silent. All her work, the careful pencil dashes, had been washed away. There was nothing for me to tell—the story was written in my puffy pink skin.

After that pool party, I resolved to never see those sixth grade girls again. But I ended up staying friends with Shirley, and she was the one who convinced me to go to my first dance.

Parker Middle school, located in Andover, MA, was made up of 240 boys and girls, most of whom came from rich, white, Jewish families who lived side by side in a white gated neighborhood of white mansions. There was one black girl in my grade, and when slavery came up in my US history class, my peers excused themselves for potentially offending her with their remarks. As diversity was one of Parker’s core values, the website homepage featured a photograph of a student’s adopted Chinese-born sister. My understanding is that this 4-year-old did not attend the middle school.

The students here were elite and not afraid to show it. There was the official dress code that forbid jeans and T-shirts, and then the unofficial dress code, calling for top-brand clothing.

My peers flaunted Lacoste polos and Coach patent leather flats. I sported outfits of Old Navy collared shirts and sweatpants. Ms. Hall, my homeroom teacher, pulled me aside after my first week and said the faculty were concerned with my overly casual wardrobe. I explained that I had sensitive skin and couldn’t wear khakis and fancy tops. The truth was that I thought my clothes Koppel/Plucked 53

could hide me—if no one noticed my attire, maybe they wouldn’t notice my hair.

When I returned home from traveling, I spent six months showing up to school in quick- drying mesh T-shirts and zip off cargo pants with curry stains. I shaved for the first time on the last day of eighth grade—my hair was dark and coarse and I felt others’ eyes on me in the locker room, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. There was no point in fixing myself up—smooth legs and posh clothes couldn’t make my eyebrows grow.

The night of the dance, I paid extra attention to my routine, pushing my face close up to the mirror and steadying my brown eyebrow pencil to perfect the arches. I fought with my newly purchased blue jeans, the first pair of my life, and wondered how there could be a “skinny fit” version of these sausage cases. I wore a top from Marshall’s, shimmery purple with some kind of writing on it. I didn’t own regular makeup, but I found body glitter at the back of my sock drawer and dabbed a finger pad’s worth on my eyelids. I looked in the mirror. Good enough.

Shirley’s Mom drove us to Parker and I tried to engage in conversation, as I liked to do with adults, but I was jittery, the way I felt before an Algebra test. We shuffled into the cafeteria, which felt so much smaller, now that the tables had been cleared out and the stacks of trays hidden away. I walked away from the periphery, into the trail of the strobe light. Less visible, I thought. Unbeknownst to me, I had just learned one of the cardinal rules of dance floors: Being in the light made you inconspicuous. People on the fringe were out of the group and therefore easier to pick off. Six years later, my failure to adhere to this would change my life.

What should I do with my hands? Shove them in my pockets like my brother, who was popular, or plant them on my hips like the spunky girls in Gap magazines? Every movement felt awkward, like being pulled around by a shitty puppeteer. Shirley traipsed into the center of the floor, where we merged with a group of her friends. With thick frizzy hair and rabbit’s teeth, Koppel/Plucked 54

Shirley was far from pretty girl status. But she knew how to dress like one: Abercrombie and

Fitch tank top, Lucky jeans, and leather flats with bows at the lips. She started shaking her hips, while I remained standing with feet planted like tree trunks, still wondering what to do with my hands. I realized, with a pang, this was it—the whole dance would consist of hip shaking. Of dancing. I left the circle and sat on a ledge on the wall enclosing the kitchen. I remained there for an hour, speaking to no one save for the occasional “hey” to a passing acquaintance. When the slow songs started, there was a scene change. The girls shimmied over to the wall, giggling and pulling down skirts, pulling up blue jeans. Boys wobbled around the dance floor. A brave soul approached the estrogen wall and the first couple moved onto the dance floor. Others followed suit. I picked at my fingernails. Thirty minutes to go.

I’d been fiddling with my flip phone when I became aware of someone in front of me. I remembered the boy’s name, Patrick, but otherwise knew nothing about my strange new admirer.

He was fleshy and short, with a mop of dirty blond hair with bangs cut straight across. “Wanna dance?” I raised myself off the ledge like Frankenstein’s mate and followed Patrick to the middle of the floor. He grabbed hold of my waist, and I recoiled for a moment but passed it off as a clothing adjustment. We rocked side to side to Enrique Iglesias’ “Hero” and Patrick spent the two minutes and forty-five seconds looking over his shoulder and laughing. The song ended and we parted silently. All I’d managed to say was “yes,” in response to his request for the dance.

But that night on the car ride home, I looked out at the big dipper and believed I’d just had my first romance.

The next day I learned that Patrick had been competing with friends to see who could dance with the most girls. “Of course!” Shirley said. “Everyone danced with that idiot.” I had been the last girl chosen. Shirley grinned, pleased with herself. I couldn’t bring myself to feel Koppel/Plucked 55

angry, or to blame her. She had buckteeth and braces, pimples as big as barnacles, but she had eyebrows—she wasn’t me.

My perceived lack of sexuality made me disinterested in sex itself. Intimacy, physical or emotional, was a reality for other people, people with hair. For me, even friendly touches represented a threat, as that could mean smudged eyebrow makeup or, later on, a crooked wig.

The wig was convincing from afar, but surely someone who was physically close to me would notice the way the part started too abruptly or how it shifted slightly on my head with quick movements. Sex was impossible logistically, without even taking into account the emotional obstacles. I was damaged goods. To have expected someone to take me on, accept and engage in my life as a freak, was not only naive, but entirely unfair. Hair was something people should be able to take for granted; every man deserved a girl with basic features that, if not attractive, were at the very least in tact.

In the eighth grade, I walked out in the middle of an English class, because my teacher had made a sex joke in relation to Romeo and Juliet. In high school, I confronted a Spanish teacher about his inclusion of what I considered to be pornographic images on our homework assignments. Sex made me angry in a way most things couldn’t. I now believe that anger was a stand-in for fear. Despite my best efforts, double life enfeebled me. The hidden chaos split me in two: publicly pretty and composed, privately hideous and psychotic. I was splintered, with no way of reconciling my lonely parts.

At the end of middle school, the night before a graduation ceremony that included dresses the price of Mom’s wedding gown, the graduating class had prom. Parker parents had been planning the event for the past year and agreed on a Venice theme—enormous set pieces Koppel/Plucked 56

featuring gondolas and archetypal Italian men, and a selection of antipastos. Mari, my rebound best friend after Shirley, was a busty half-Japanese beauty with a large mole on her left eyelid that I thought made her look exotic. Mom, Mari, and I went to a bridal shop and I found a periwinkle bridesmaid dress on the sale rack. I stood on a platform in front of a mirror, trying to control my jitters as a woman fastened pins into the bodice, effectively bringing it down three cup sizes. The night of the dance, Mom bought Mari and me corsages, and the two of us got ready in Mom’s bathroom. At that point, my hair was at its most chaotic—some long strands in the back, half my bangs, short prickly spots on top and gaping bald spots on the sides. Mom had the foresight to ask for an extra piece of the periwinkle fabric, so that I was able to cover up the worst areas with an impromptu headscarf.

That night I didn’t sit on the ledge by the kitchen. I still moved awkwardly, would remain completely robotic until college and alcohol. But Mari was the life of the party and her energy was infectious, so that by the end of the night, my voice was hoarse from singing and laughing.

During the last song, a friend from the speech and debate team asked me to dance. We looked at each other, and his dweeby face lit up so that he looked almost attractive. He whispered “You’re beautiful” and somehow, in spite of my shameful, chaotic, abnormal, hairless existence, I believed him.

The causes of Trichotillomania are unknown. This is not unusual in the field of psychiatry, but what is unusual is the sparseness of our foundational knowledge. Genetic links have been implicated, based on observations made about higher incidence among members of the same family. Massachusetts General Hospital, the only hospital nationwide to feature a separate Trichotillomania department, is currently conducting genetic testing to identify potential Koppel/Plucked 57

markers and links. The silver lining of having a disorder that is new to the field of research is that the select individuals who study the disorder are extraordinarily devoted to the cause.

Trichotillomania’s newness on the psychiatric stage also means scientists can bypass methods that have already been disproven in other areas, allowing Trichotillomania to charge into the modern age of medicine. Emerging fields such as personalized medicine, which deals with the genetic tags and mutations associated with a particular form of a disorder, are recognized as the future of medicine in America. Researchers in Trichotillomania are already discussing how this development could apply to Trich—it seems likely that the subcategories of hair pulling can be attributed to unique genetic factors.

There are also addiction-based, behavioral, and neurobiological models for explaining hair pulling. Neurobiological research has produced interesting results, showing brain scans of

Trichsters that are activated in ways that implicate irregular serotonin and dopamine levels. Most of these data suggest overlap between Trichotillomania and addiction disorders. Experts like Dr.

Penzel often use a comprehensive model of explanation, one that hinges on stimulus regulation.

Dr. Penzel suggests that hair pullers have an imbalance of internal levels of stress at the neural level. This is related to genetic predisposition, which affects serotonin and dopamine levels in the brain.

When a hair puller experiences overstimulation, pulling reduces the stimulation produced by stress and excitement, bringing the individual down to equilibrium. Conversely, when a hair puller experiences under-stimulation, pulling provides stimulation to lessen boredom and inactivity, thereby raising the individual to equilibrium. Through this process, hair pulling is established as a rewarding behavior, and its repetition establishes it as a response to internal and external cues that tip the balance of stimulation. The intense stimulation that would cause others Koppel/Plucked 58

pain gives hair pullers relief, or can be so distracting that it detracts from external stressors.

Many look to interpersonal and family conflict as instigators of the behavior. There is truth to these claims. Some Trichsters remember specific events, such as a death in the family, a move, divorce, or the start of school that took place at the time they began pulling. There are even those who had a hair-related experience (lice or a bad haircut) that sparked interest in their hair prior to their first pull. However, most Trichsters are unable to isolate a single cause; in fact, many of us are outright baffled by the idea that we, of all people, developed such a disruptive disorder. Hair pullers tend to have a similar demographic to those with anorexia—we often come from wealthy, white, well-educated families who raised us in an idyllic environment of safety and shelter. Our childhoods seem to have been perfect. And our lives (save for the hair pulling) seem perfect. Why me? we ask ourselves, and this only exacerbates the shame, the feeling that we are weak, that this whole mess is unprecedented and nonsensical, and therefore must be our own fault.

In my 15 years with Trichotillomania, I have only stopped on two occasions, both times using the same technique. When I was 12 and my hair pulling had advanced to both my eyebrows and scalp, Mom discovered a hypnotherapist named Dr. Benton. My mother explained the research she’d done on hypnosis and how it could help, but I scoffed at the idea. The whole thing sounded like some voodoo bullshit. I agreed to one meeting, mostly because I was curious about whether or not my eyes would turn into spirals the way they did in cartoons. Dr. Benton and I ended up working together for four years, until I had exhausted all possible approaches to hypnotherapy, and become the longest patient relationship of his career. Dr. Benton was a short, stately old man, mostly bald with dark age spots on his skin, and shiny marble eyes that never broke off a gaze. His voice was throaty but strangely lyrical, like the notes of a church organ. Koppel/Plucked 59

According to Dr. Benton, the purpose of our sessions would be to teach myself self- hypnosis, so that I would have access to therapy wherever I went. Hypnosis involved closing my eyes and breathing until my eyelids starting twitching, at which point my subconscious had opened up and become receptive to new information. The subconscious, Dr. Benton explained, was the encoder of knowledge, and it could retain facts, experiences, and memories at a vastly higher level than its conscious counterpart. Dr. Benton presented me with images designed to reconfigure my response to external stimuli. Every time my hand moved toward my head to pull a hair, I would come in contact with a force field that protected my head. Or when I encountered stress, I would find myself on a beach enclosed in a glass dome that shut out all external forces.

After a month of hypnosis, I stopped pulling for eight weeks. Another appointment set off my longest pull-free streak to date: six months.

During one of our last sessions, Dr. Benton produced a piece of paper and a small pendulum. While I was in hypnosis, he explained that different portions of the paper represented the “yes,” “no,” “maybe,” and “I don’t wanna talk about it.” My only job was to hold the pendulum over the paper. Dr. Benton asked a few basic questions about my name and family.

My subconscious answered, triggering tiny movements in my fingers that sent the pendulum swinging. The final two questions were the most difficult. Do you know why you pull your hair?

I don’t wanna talk about it. Does your body know how to solve the problem? Yes. After, when

Dr. Benton shared the results, I was baffled. How could my body know? If my body did know, then why hadn’t it fixed the problem already? Dr. Benton only smiled and said, “Sometimes we don’t know what we know.”

My first year of high school, at Concord Academy, I threw out the zip off pants, frumpy Koppel/Plucked 60

sweats, the Addidas shoes I had kept replacing. I bought my first real bra and a rack’s worth of feminine-looking tops in colors that looked good against my skin and made my blue eyes pop.

Concord was a pristine 400-student campus with teachers who coddled us with speeches about

“common trust” and “a nurturing community.” The town of Concord was quaint and mostly wealthy, a myriad of white colonial buildings and the Minuteman Trail, where militia fought the

British during the American Revolution. As I quickly discovered, the school was largely alternative—this was my first exposure to cross-dressing and variations in sexual orientation. In my first week of classes, I spent ten minutes staring in bewilderment at a sexuality spectrum ranging from female to male, where students placed pins according to who they were attracted to, how they felt, and how they expressed themselves. When I mentioned this at dinner, Dad told me I shouldn’t buy into Concord’s liberal crap. For the entirety of my Concord career, Dad’s side of the family openly dismissed my new community and were outraged when I came home wearing shirts saying “Be the Change” and “Fighting Sexual Exploitation.” Most of them wouldn’t attend my graduation.

I bought my first wig during my junior year, when I was 17. My mother took me to a posh, celebrity-quality salon on Newbury Street in Boston. Mom and I walked through a hallway of mirrors. Then we climbed a staircase to the second floor, where we entered an expansive studio space with identical stations of flawless oval mirrors, hairdryers on steroids, and swiveling chairs of black leather. The receptionist, a young woman with blond layers and copper highlights, spoke to us crisply, tapping her French manicured nails on the computer keys.

“You’re here for a fitting?” she asked, her voice softening to match the euphemism. “Please have a seat,” she said, motioning toward a glass coffee table and an arrangement of chic furniture.

To my relief, the salon was mostly empty, except for a few stragglers who sat under Koppel/Plucked 61

hanging domes with heads of foil. A stoutly woman approached us—she must have been 60 at least, but she had an air of refinement that was in keeping with the youthful vibe of the salon. Pat had a square face and sharp eyes that were partially covered by auburn bangs, which I was soon to learn was a synthetic hairpiece. After offering us water, lime water, coffee, and ten varieties of tea, Pat led us down a hallway of framed wedding photographs. “All customers,” she said, beaming. It wasn’t until several visits later that I realized what she meant—these were women who wore wigs from the salon on their wedding days. Pat didn’t see this process as marginalizing—rather, she found it empowering. The women in the pictures were exquisite, their shining faces and bellowing veils revealing the sort of brazen confidence that I had not thought possible among the hairless.

We entered a room of human heads. Each head had distinctive hair, some short and gray, others long, brown and curly, and they were all glaring at me without eyes. I had never seen a real wig in person before, at least not knowingly, and the sight of dozens of them encircling this foreign space was, as I later told Mom, “creepy as hell.”

Pat motioned us into a private room and I sat down in a swiveling chair. “Let’s see what we’re working with,” Pat said. Carefully, I peeled off my shield—a yellow beanie—my hands shaking so badly that the hat nearly fell to the floor. “Alright,” she said, “Let’s get started.”

I’m not sure what I expected from finding a wig, but I found myself increasingly disillusioned by the ordeal. This was more like a process of creating a wig, grappling with a foreign head of hair in an attempt to make it my own. Never before had I appreciated the fact that hair reflected a person’s personality; hair may have been nothing more than an accessory, but it was one that formed an integral part of a woman’s presence. Wearing a stranger’s hair seemed Koppel/Plucked 62

wrong, unnatural, like putting lipstick on a pig. My body was one of those children’s books with the divided pages of alternating, disjointed animal bodies and heads: a scramble.

We spent five hours in the salon that first visit. Grueling hours they were, with me insisting that the piece was too bumpy, too puffy, while Pat reiterated time and time again that there was only so much they could do, that we had to work with what we were given. My mother sat in the chair in the corner, pretending to peruse one of her wellness magazines, with a look of tremulous anxiety etched across the plains of her face. Pat was kind enough, but I wound up exasperated by her stubborn pride in her craft. The truth is that I was in no way prepared to be there—I imagine that no one ever really is.

By the end of our visit, I had a spiky razor cut that stuck up funny on the sides and made me look ten years older. “Classy” my mother called it. I walked out of the mirrored hallway and into the night air. When the first winds came, I instinctively reached to hold my hat, but discovered hair in its place. Slowing my pace so as to look into every passing store window and car mirror, I floated back down Newbury Street. Several fittings later, I would recognize that this was a pattern: During the appointment, I was frantic. Then the newness was exhilarating. But as soon as the novelty wore off and the difficulties of day-to-day life set in, I deflated. Soon I would have to resist the urge to throw the thing out the window.

When I arrived home that night, Dad mumbled something about me looking good. I thanked him and climbed the stairs to my bedroom, where I crouched at the edge of the balcony and stuck my head through the bars to listen in on Mom and Dad’s whispering. “That wig is much too dark,” my father said.

From the time I was a child, people had said I was my father’s clone—like him, I was Koppel/Plucked 63

difficult to please. David liked to be held tight against Mom’s chest, drifting off to sleep with his cheeks drooping like melted wax and spit dripping from the creases of his mouth. I kicked whoever tried to touch me. When Mom lay me down to nap with her, I rolled and squirmed until

I had the whole bed, tore away sheets that might restrict my movement. Mom tried putting me in the crib, which looked like ceiling-less prison. Shouts shook my chubby body. Cries dried my throat. By the time Mom and Dad arrived at my side, my teddy bear pajamas were wet with angry tears, my face flushed purple. Dad scooped me up, strong arms holding me steady. He brought me to the family room. Indigo Girls, his favorite group and now my own, strummed guitar in the background. He clunked across the room, and I bobbed up and down with the hum of chords. There were no more tears, but a defiant pout hung on my lips. Daddy revamped his efforts, cradled my head and lifted me high in the air. He smiled, the corners of his thick black beard furling upwards. He sang, stumbling over words he didn’t know, then looked up expectantly, sang again. Until my face relaxed, my eyes closed, and my mouth hung open—

“letting in flies!” Dad always said.

When I was older, Dad called me impossible, smart aleck (later, smart ass), a real piece of work. I threw tantrums at, according to Dad, far beyond the acceptable age. I screamed when something didn’t go my way, howling, “That’s not fairrrr!” until Dad got a headache and had to lay down in his recliner. He gave out “trooper awards” for the best behaved of my brother and me. I always lost and Dad took pictures of David posed in front of a Trooper car; David smiled devilishly and gave the thumbs up. Mom eventually asked Dad to get rid of the trooper awards, because they weren’t helping anyone. He gave in, that time.

Dad used to read me a story called “Whiffle Squeak”. Whiffle Squeak was a big-eared black cat who sailed along the “briny deep” in a “kibitka boat,” and wore clothes made of Koppel/Plucked 64

octopus arms, jellyfish squish, sea-green weeds. I sat in Dad’s lap with my hands on his knees, head nudged into his warm armpit. Dad bobbed his head up and down to the rhythm of the words, jutting his chin forward for emphasis of an oo or an ee, a hissing shh. Dad had the story memorized, and I had to tug on his sleeve to remind him to turn the page. There was a monster in the briny deep, a tentacled purple dragon named Gazook Gaboot. His nostrils sputtered fire and fumes, his tongue was zigzagged with pitchfork prongs that danced through the water like red ribbon. The monster always seemed silly to me, his appearance so abstract that he wasn’t scary.

But I cowered into Dad’s chest anyway, waiting for the reflexive tightening of his arm muscles, the gentle squeeze. Gazook Gaboot ended up eating Whiffle Squeak’s clothes, the prongs grabbing at the jellyfish squish he wore for shoes, the octopus arms he wore as a hat. Whiffle

Squeak screamed with his pink mouth open wide and retracted his hooked claws. The hairs along his spine stood on end. Gazook Gaboot took everything. Then he got sick and threw it all up, choked on the kibitka boat, and died. That was the end of that monster.

In the years following my first pluck, when it became clear that Trichotillomania was here to stay, my father became increasingly detached from me. Mom was in the nursing profession, so my father reasoned that she could probably handle this stuff better on her own, without a husband to cloud her judgment. From that point forward, my father would not utter a syllable to me in reference to my hair. If conversations about my health took place, they were behind the closed door of the master bedroom, or whispered in the kitchen. The only exception was for policing purposes, when I was caught in the act.

The summer after sixth grade, before my parents pulled David and me out of school to travel for a year, Dr. Benton had created tapes of our hypnosis sessions. I was to listen to the Koppel/Plucked 65

tapes through a recorder, using headphones to ensure my privacy. Mom and Dad were enthralled by the idea—the 10-minute investment had the potential to spare them hours of waiting as I pulled from the bathroom. The morning I refused to follow protocol, Dad ordered Mom and

David to leave the room. He used one hand to drag me onto the bed, the other to grab my tape recorder. Then he charged out and closed the door behind him. He was no dummy, my father. He pressed his ear to the door and waited to hear the buzz and click, indicating that I’d rewound the tape. I rewound and let it click, then put the recorder aside and pulled my hair until it finished.

Years later, when I attended my first Trichotillomania conference with Mom, my father picked me up from the Boston Marriott. We drove on highway 93, headed north to Reading, listening to the hum of tires on asphalt. As we pulled into our exit, I broke the highway hypnosis.

“They can make mice do it,” I said, “You know, pull their hair.” My favorite workshop at the conference had been “animal models,” where I listened in stupefaction as researchers explained how they were able to mess with mice genes and induce Trichotillomania. That my hair pulling was related to science, to something logical, was a colossal source of relief. If my condition was just another illness, something physical, maybe that meant I wasn’t a mentally disturbed freak after all. And maybe, just maybe, that meant my father would stop blaming me for the trouble I was causing. I left the conference ebullient and determined to speak up before my father, to share my new revelation and cut short the searing silence. But my father only nodded and kept his eyes on the road. The silence dragged on.

The summer after I bought my first wig, I traveled to Nicaragua on a service project to build libraries in rural schools. I was nearly fluent in Spanish and had begun studying French, in which I would achieve proficiency after a 3-month relationship with a grammar textbook. On the Koppel/Plucked 66

last day of the trip, the group of five students and two teachers took a bus to the coast for a beach day. I was wearing Wig #1 and a blue and green polka dot bikini. It had been months since I’d been in water—but as of March, I had a full head of hair clipped onto my scalp, and had yet to learn its limitations. I had become close with one of the girls on the trip, Jen, a girl with pale skin, blond hair and a lazy eye. Together we waded into the green water, the drop off steeper than I expected, so that I sunk below the surface and came up gasping. Jen stayed close to shore, but I wanted to go further, out to where the boys were treading water. They saw me and called me over, waving their arms wildly, and I swam the breaststroke in their direction. I felt a grumbling under the surface and looked up to see a wave curling like the ends of a fern, coming toward me. The wave made impact, my body tumbled, and I came to the surface without Wig #1.

Frantic, I made a single grab at the foamy residue, and came up with a tangle of brown. I knew the boys were watching and I dove, cursing my own buoyancy as I fumbled with the clips.

I returned to the surface laughing, and saw that the boys were laughing too—they hadn’t seen. A friend once referred to my wig as the “dead animal,” but in that moment I thought I had never been so grateful for anything in my life. I swam back to shore, shaking. I had thought the wig was armor, a marker of invincibility—but that day, my cover had been jeopardized, and only chance had saved me. I wouldn’t always be so lucky.

In my first months with Wig #1, I realized that the closer the wig brought me to appearing like a sane human being, the more I felt like a fraud. My wig did not replicate the feeling of a full head of hair—the piece was itchy and hot, and, with the clips that snapped onto wisps of my real hair, oftentimes painful. At one point I became so paranoid about the wig staying in place that I applied double-sided tape to the edges, then secured it to my scalp. That Koppel/Plucked 67

worked well until the time came to remove the hairpiece, at which point I had to rip off a layer of skin and hair. I was determined not to let the wig limit what I did, often to the point of recklessness. When I played tennis in the spring, the battle was not between my opponent and me, but between the wig and my tolerance for discomfort. During matches, the ritual involved adjusting the wig, snapping the clips, playing the point, readjusting the wig and re-snapping the clips, playing another point, until it was all over and I had a layer of sweat between my scalp and the wig’s netting.

Wig #1 did not replace real hair, but was a backup, a stand-in for the real thing. Now others believed I was “normal” and this increased my resentment that I couldn’t be that way in reality. Why couldn’t I just stop the madness? No one else was this dirty, this weird, this disgusting. Maybe there were others who pulled their hair, but no one did it like I did it.

My hair pulling ritual—the search, extraction, and disposal process—is so bizarre, so unthinkable to the uninitiated, that I could hardly bring myself to write about it in this book. Now

I realize that excluding this dimension of the experience is a revalidation of the shame that feeds the silence. So here it goes. I had favorite pulling spots, the crown of my head, the part, the bangs. I targeted these areas initially, and as bald spots formed, I took on new territory in order to achieve the effect I wanted. There was a visual element to the behavior—if I didn’t have a choice over whether or not to pull my hair, at least I controlled the contours of the damage. Once

I extracted a hair, I rubbed the tip against my bottom lip to feel the wetness. Then I examined the tips of the hairs, observing the thickness of the bulbs, the length of the follicle. Occasionally, I came across a bulb with a reddened tip that gave the follicle a pinkish hue. The search for these rarities was obsessive, and I bargained with myself by thinking “just one good root, then I’m done.” Once I’d found the pink root, I put the follicle between my teeth and bit down, which Koppel/Plucked 68

made a crunch. Hour after hour, I pursued these special hairs, believing that finding just one would make everything alright, would put me at ease once more. Sometimes, when I was stressed and in public, I conjured up the image of a pink root to force myself to relax.

For years, I wouldn’t search the internet for anything related to hair pulling. Mostly I was afraid Mom and Dad would find out and think I wasn’t old enough for such explicit content. But one night, after figuring out how to clear the search history on Internet Explorer, I typed

“Trichotillomania” into Google and YouTube. Google: 1,350,000 hits. YouTube: 14,000 hits.

For a moment I could do nothing but stare. Then I started searching fragments: can’t stop pulling hair, pulling feels good, pink roots, wet roots. Hit after hit after hit. I read first hand accounts of experiences I could never have articulated myself—I hadn’t even considered the words I would use to describe them. And I saw videos of girls, normal girls, voicing their stories, reporting progress and sending out “pull free vibes” to all the “Trichsters” out there. That was the first time

I heard my kind described with a colloquial term, one far less grave than “person with

Trichotillomania.” These people were beautiful and smart and funny, and they all suffered like I did. People, who happened to pull their hair. I watched, listened, and read all night.

I suspect that we all have moments that catch us off guard, that unpredictably but reliably bring us closer to some higher spiritual power. In that moment of revelation, I understood that there was more to Trich than the struggle to stop. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the people in those videos were healthy. They had the silent epidemic but they were not silent themselves— they may not have conquered the beast, but they were slashing it in the gut. For the first time, I considered the possibility that I could heal without being cured. But at that point, speaking up about my Trich, sharing my story with another soul, was inconceivable. I pushed the thought away, unaware that it left an impression. Koppel/Plucked 69

Dad used to take us on the boat to watch the humpbacks; their barnacled black backs broke the surface, shivering with the force of the whale’s exhale. Then the fluke waved and she dove, releasing a cloud of emerald. The whale was hidden from view for several minutes, and sometimes I was sure she was gone for good. But she would always resurface, and the cycle continued, dive by dive, breath by breath.

My own resurfacing took place at the end of my junior year of high school, when I voluntarily divulged my hair pulling to a friend for the first time. I had met Helen a couple months into my first year at Concord and liked her immediately. Helen was self-consciously tall and thin, with bony shoulders and wide hips. She was sharp and witty, often scathingly so, which made her appear initially unapproachable. I had never before had a friend who could keep up with me intellectually, and I savored having someone with whom to share my passions, for books and art and learning. Helen and I became increasingly close, and would end up practically living together in her parents’ house during our senior year. We shared a bed, walked around campus holding hands, and kissed on the cheek in greeting. We often joked about her coming with me to a family dinner with my Dad’s parents, who were overtly homophobic, so Helen could play the part of my girlfriend.

It was the fall and Helen and I were taking our customary afternoon walk down Concord center, where colonial-style storefronts housed tasteful window displays of French wine and cheese, silk scarves and checkered petticoats. I was in an in-between phase of hair growth. My pulling had been minimal and so stubbly hairs coated the crown of my head, allowing me to apply mascara and create the illusion of fullness. The longer strands in back, where I couldn’t reach, were pulled back into a ponytail. I had already decided on what I was about to do, had Koppel/Plucked 70

rehearsed the words over and over again in my head until they became song-like. I couldn’t explain why this had to be done now, only that it suddenly felt right, nearly imperative.

“Frozen hot chocolate?” Helen asked, unaware that every menial action that we took would become part of an important narrative, a story that I would hold onto for years to come.

“Sure,” I said. We entered Main Street café, dished out the five dollars fifty cents for icy chocolate milk. Helen and I lived for these outings. We relished feeling like we were in the real world, a rhythm of life distinctive from the monotony of our daily class schedules. Our freshman year, we had sat down for burgers and strawberry milkshakes at the local diner, then left feeling satisfied by out adultness, until our miffed waitress chased after us informing us that we hadn’t paid the bill. It hadn’t occurred to either of us that entering the real world meant dealing with real world responsibilities. We were more concerned with our internal worlds, where teenage angst raged, keeping us safely sealed into our prep school cocoon.

Helen and I walked to the end of Main Street, then stopped to sit at a bench in front of a

Revolutionary War memorial. Sparrows sung from the shocking red and orange leafed maples, announcing their presence to the world, though I didn’t bother to look for the birds themselves— their voices melted into the background music. Would my story, too, simply dissipate into the backdrop? Was I wrong to call attention to myself, wrong to share something so deeply personal and particular to my life? I wasn’t afraid that Helen would not accept my condition—I knew her character—but sitting on that bench, twisting my stringy ponytail around and around my index finger, I realized that I was about to rip open my seams, expose a part of myself that would never be able to be fully resealed. Despite all of its inconveniences, its constraints, I had nursed my double life. There was a strict, self-constructed divide between my external and internal worlds, and this had simplified things, prevented either sphere from bleeding into and contaminating the Koppel/Plucked 71

other. Revealing my Trichotillomania, even if only to one person, would smudge that line— people would see me, and all of me. I would no longer be the safe keeper of a concealed, ugly thing. That ugly thing was coming up for air. I would become one, unified self, and I could not remember how to live that way. The last time I had, before my first pull, it had all come naturally. Now, I imagined, it would feel like breaking in a new pair of hiking boots. Not molded to my shape yet. Leaving blisters. Pain before relief.

But something was compelling me to take the plunge. I had begun to feel that the concealed, ugly thing was clawing at my insides. It needed to be released. I had not accepted my hair pulling, was still wracked by shame, but unleashing my secret felt like a physical necessity. I set my frozen hot chocolate beside me on the bench, turned to Helen, and began. “I have something to tell you.” Helen turned toward me breezily, her long copper hair swooshing behind her. When she saw my face, which I imagine was cinched with anxiety, Helen put down her drink and leaned forward. “What’s going on?”

I explained that I had had a strange disorder since childhood, that it had been an issue throughout my life, was no big deal, but it was kind of a big deal, and I didn’t want her to freak out, though I would understand if she freaked out, but I pull my hair out. I had canned the speech, but it came out all jumbled, like those word magnets that form complete, but incoherent thoughts. I had expected that Helen would look up at my scalp, but she maintained eye contact with me.

“So you pull your hair out?”

“Yup.”

“It doesn’t hurt you?”

“Nope.” Koppel/Plucked 72

I tried to gauge Helen’s reaction, but she maintained an eerie sense of calm. I would later learn that Helen was nearly as good of an actress as I was—she confessed that she had been shocked, outright shocked, by my speech. “I always knew there was something I didn’t know,” she said, “But I couldn’t have imagined this.”

I rose from the bench and Helen followed suit. We walked back to campus arm in arm, silent but not uncomfortably so—the quiet felt right at that moment, when I could almost hear the growl of that ugly, clawing thing being released into the crisp autumn air. All those years ago, when I felt I was hurting my parents, I had chosen a life of hiding. Now I had made another turn, a blind turn, but a shift away from that narrow pathway. I would attempt to backtrack during my time at Duke, where I would once again make the decision to hide my hair pulling from even my closest friends. But I would never fully regain the original trail. Still embedded in me was the memory of the relief, the sweet liquid relief, of laying down the burden of secrecy.

Throughout the remainder of my time at Concord, I told nearly all of my girlfriends about my hair pulling. Their reactions ranged from sadness to ecstasy (my friend Kaitlin was thrilled by the prospect of me wearing a hot pink wig), but never, never disgust. Years later, someone asked me what I felt was the ideal reaction to my reveal. The ideal: No pity. No “I’m so sorry.”

No walking on eggshells and avoiding asking the tough questions. Don’t say “It doesn’t matter.”

It does matter. That’s why I’m telling you. Don’t say, “I love you in spite of your hair pulling.”

Say, “I love you with your hair pulling.” Please use humor. Tell me not to pull my hair out over the history exam. Look up information on Trichotillomania. Tell me about a “new” treatment option you found, which I tried a decade ago. Don’t avoid the topic of hair. I have nothing against hair just because I happened to not have much myself. Above all, listen. Care. That’s all I Koppel/Plucked 73

need you to do.

During my senior year at Concord, I fell in love for the first time. Walker was a good friend and everything I thought I was looking for in a potential boyfriend: mature, intellectual, and handsome. I was in Wig #1, and my eyebrows had filled in. For the first time, I had begun to see myself as attractive, the sort of girl a guy may want to date. I started trying, and the trying came out wobbly, like a baby calf on new legs. I sought the help of girlfriends. Jackie was one of my closest friends, a granola-ey, guitar playing and fairy-drawing sweetheart. When I told her about the crush, she assured me that the feelings had to be mutual. Just ease into it, she said.

The night of our senior prom, a group of seven friends and I crashed at Kaitlin’s house.

We crammed together on a couch, tired but satisfied. Walker was on my left, Jackie to my right.

We watched Lion King, and I sat on the edge of the cushion. When the movie ended and I sunk back, I felt a hand at my back. No, two hands clutched together. One of them belonged to

Walker, the other to Jackie. I forgave her the next day, then spent the last two months of high school alternating between crying and listening to angry rock music. They ended up dating for three months, then breaking up because Jackie wasn’t up for long distance. By the time the year was over, I felt grateful for my time at Concord, but was ready for a change and more space to breathe. I had been accepted to Duke Early Decision in December. The rest of my life shone bright like the banana peel sun on a Cape Cod horizon.

Before I left for college, my friend Kaitlin wrote me a letter saying how much I’d grown.

I had started as a caterpillar, a pretty caterpillar, but now I was getting the hell out of that cocoon.

My high school years had introduced me to a wide circle of friends, friends who gently tugged me away from my crevice of solitude and into a world of mingling, buzzing individuals, with Koppel/Plucked 74

whom I could be my full, imperfect self. I felt my toes curl around the precipice of something unknown, something bigger and better than what had come before. I was slowly, softly coming into my own.

Everything was possible and one thing was certain: I was headed South.

Koppel/Plucked 75

Part 4: Princess (2010)

I met Sean on Halloween.

It was my first time in a Halloween costume since my ten-year-old Princess Leia ensemble, and I went as Audrey Hepburn. A classy choice for a classy girl, I thought. People often told me I resembled Audrey, with my dark hair and big eyes. All I had to do was wear pearls and sunglasses, and I could have walked straight out of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

My dress was black, with a ruffled collar and buttons in the bodice. I painted my eyes with black liner, applied mascara. Swetha lent me a tiara.

I took a shot of vodka. It burned the back of my throat and made my eyes water. But then warmth snaked through my chest, and I knew it was working. I boarded a bus that smelled like beer and marijuana. Sarah and I sat together, giggling as people started up choruses of “Build Me

Up Buttercup” and “Don’t Stop Believing”. We arrived at a barn around midnight. My first thought was where are all the animals. But that might have been the vodka talking. We shoved our way toward the entrance. The barn was dark and much too crowded, stuffy from cigarette fumes and sweat.

I walked to the bar, arm and arm with Sarah and Alexa. I heard someone order an apple pie drink and I asked for the same. We raised our glasses, and Sarah made the toast: “To a night to remember.”

By the end of the night, I would take eight shots. I wasn’t keeping count, not by making

Sharpie slashes on my wrist like the other girls, or getting help from a sober friend. It was simple, really. I didn’t have a sober friend. I didn’t have a Sharpie.

Sarah dragged me onto the dance floor. My hips started to swing as if controlled by an Koppel/Plucked 76

invisible puppeteer.

I danced with a boy. He had his hands around my waist and traced the outline of my groin with his pointer finger. I heard a voice in my ear and realized he was whispering the lyrics to the song. “You make me feel like I’m living a teenage dream…”

I smiled.

His lips pressed against my neck and he grabbed my head, pulling it toward him. I squirmed out of his grasp and stumbled off the dance floor. I understood what would have come next, and I didn’t want that. I was tipsy, but I still had control. This was not going to be my first hook-up. Not tonight, in a fucking barn with no animals. I went to the bar to get another drink.

That’s when I saw Sean.

He was talking to a group of friends on the other end of the bar and kept peering over his shoulder, almost like he was looking for me. Tall, a crooked smile.

He whispered something to one of the guys and both looked in my direction. Then he walked toward me, where I stood rooted to the spot. I had always thought I was a ghost.

“Wanna dance?”

He took my hand, led me onto the dance floor. “You’re a princess, baby.”

“No,” I corrected him automatically, “I’m Audrey Hepburn.”

“I’m Sean.”

I draped my arms around Sean’s shoulders and rested my suddenly aching head against his chest. We swayed back and forth in slow, deliberate motions. He didn’t try to kiss me.

We remained pressed up against one another. He was holding me up. I wanted to walk away, but my body had turned to mush. The music stopped and the barn was illuminated in Koppel/Plucked 77

florescent lights.

“Where you wanna go?”

“Home.”

“I’ll take you.”

“Okay.”

Sean dragged me out of the barn, out into the night air. There was a cab. He got in the passenger’s seat and pulled me onto his lap. Where the hell are Sarah, Swetha, Alexa? I couldn’t hold onto the idea, my thoughts sifting through my brain like sand through fingers.

“Baby.”

I turned to face Sean.

“You’re fucking beautiful.”

I was floating, drifting over the scene of two strangers in a cab, boy and girl interlocked.

He grabs her head with both hands, strong. Stubble against skin. So itchy she’s about to pull away, but doesn’t. Her face is pulled toward his. It’s her first kiss. He tastes like spit.

Pushing him away with her hands, which are so silly, so useless, that later she’ll bang them against the floor of the bathroom stall. He is too strong. She is too drunk. And that stubble hurts like needles, pricking her neck as his tongue slides down the nape, her cheek as he presses himself against her, sucking up her scent. They break away, only for a second. He wants to see her eyes, watch for desire flickering in the irises, because that will make the rest of night easier.

She focuses on the stubble. It’s blonde, with red flakes, like wheat baking in the sun. A southern boy, she thinks. Maybe his friends poke fun at him, say he looks like a homeless guy, that this is no way to look before the fraternity semi-formal. His mother will never see it, because he’ll Koppel/Plucked 78

shave it off when he goes home for Thanksgiving. He laughs and starts kissing her again, sliding his hand underneath her tights and down into her underwear. Prongs. Prodding and pushing, inside of her. She doesn’t feel it there, won’t feel that until tomorrow morning. It will seem like nothing, by then. No, she feels it in her chest, a clutching pain, as if her ribs will burst through the muscle, fat, and skin, and she’ll be forced inside out. For the first time, she feels fear, not for herself, but for her body. She crosses her arms against her chest and waits for the blow.

Sean led me out of the seat and back into the night. We held hands. I tried to keep pace but was stumbling in my too-high heels. He led me forward, gentle at first, then firm. We arrived outside Alspaugh. You don’t live here, I said. I know, he said. I started to cry and beg. Go, I said.

Go. He smiled, whispered in my ear to give him a kiss goodnight. This time I could escape, walk through the front door, and leave him behind. Him and that god-awful stubble. Instead I leaned in and kissed him full on the mouth.

My brother and I used to run from waves. They crashed onto the shore in groups of three, three sweeping walls of green. I could see them coming. David and I stood with our toes submerged, looking out at the horizon that appeared smudged, blue into blue. I wore my red and pink polka dot swimsuit, which had a tutu skirt that exposed fat white cheeks. My hair was set in dark, salt-encrusted curls. David wore electric yellow trunks, held up by a drawstring, but still falling down. For a few beats, all was calm. Then the water stirred. Ripples formed along the surface, cascading into each other until they joined ranks and moved together as one. David and I looked at one another, our knees bending, toes wiggling in anticipation. The wave gathered speed and we could hear it grind against the rocky bottom, releasing a grumble that made the Koppel/Plucked 79

earth around us shake. “Get ready, Gutti,” my big brother whispered. It crashed down, and we darted to safety, our screams only for show. We knew nothing could touch us.

The morning after the Halloween party, I ate sand dollar pancakes with maple syrup.

Much too thin, compared to Mom’s fluffy teddy bear pancakes. They weren’t the same. But I was battling a hangover and starving, so I ate. Alexa was with me, complaining of a headache I knew she didn’t feel. She had never been drunk, couldn’t stand the taste of alcohol, but she liked to play the part. We walked outside, onto the quad that remained lush with remnants of a southern summer, sat with our legs dangling over the edge of the Alspaugh bench.

“I hooked up with someone last night,” I said.

I could see last night’s mascara clinging to Alexa’s blonde lashes.

“The guy from the cab?”

My hands and face tingled, a sensation I would come to recognize as numbness.

“I was there!”

Then I remembered. She’d been in the back seat of the cab with a second floor Alspaugh boy.

I giggled. Of course she had been there. She must have found it amusing, the whole scene, me hooking up with a stranger in the front seat of a public vehicle. It was hilarious, really, the idea of it.

The previous night, after Sean left, I crawled up the stairs to the second floor and walked to 234, sliding my sweaty hands along the wall. It was 3 AM. I focused on making it to my bed.

As I walked through the door, I stumbled and knocked over the microwave that sat above our mini-fridge. I started sobbing. Swetha brought me to my closet and undressed me, put me in Koppel/Plucked 80

pajamas. Months later, she’d tell me she knew something was up, more than just my being hammered, because I kept saying No, No, No. I pushed her away. There was only way to calm myself, and it involved me and me alone.

I dragged myself to the bathroom and into a stall, crumpling to the floor. Wig #2 was ripped off, and hair fell from my fingers by the clump-full. When I had worked the pads of my fingers to blisters, I returned to the room and went to sleep. Later that night, an alarm went off in

Alspaugh. Some idiot had started a fire in the kitchen.

In the afternoon, I began work on my Public Policy memo, a policy recommendation on privacy rights. People dropped into 234 throughout the day, saying How was your night, I heard it was a good one. Alexa wasn’t the only one amused by my story. The fact that Sean and I had hooked up in a cab, a cab for God’s sake!, earned me extra points. Tack on a few more for having managed to take eight shots without getting sick. Lucky, they said. I had high tolerance.

By the end of the day, it was a standing joke that I would be writing an apology note to the cab driver. No one seemed to judge me, not like they had with Alexa. We’d all become desensitized to these kinds of things.

Taxi guy became part of second floor legend. The story was held up as an example of the spell of this place, something in the water that made good girls go bad. When one of the

Alspaugh girls had a wild night, Remember taxi guy? Someone drank too much, Remember taxi guy? A pause in conversation, Remember taxi guy? I jumped at every opportunity to talk about that night, to trivialize what had happened so no one would become suspicious. Years in the

Koppel family had taught me that silence and withdrawal were dead give aways that something was awry. Putting the night into words, constructing the story and making my own additions and subtractions, sapped the event of meaning. The same way that expressions, used over and over Koppel/Plucked 81

again, devolve into cliché. These were last-ditch efforts at maintaining control—those efforts fooled my friends and, for a time, my own mind, but my body knew—knew that control had been ripped from my clutches by a pair of probing hands, that the violation could not be unwritten.

Over the next several weeks, urges to pull my hair reached fever pitch. It was no longer clear—and I no longer cared—why I was pulling at any given moment. The question was not

Why am I plucking? but rather, Why not? The line between relief and self-punishment blurred, so that pulling my hair felt paramount to my survival and simultaneously the antithesis to living.

I couldn’t imagine getting through the day without a trip to the closet, but nothing was more deadening, numbing, than the experience of emerging from a trance and bearing witness to hair peppering the floor, raw skin newly exposed, a day gone by in a haze.

Hair pulling places me in an alternative state of being. There is a miniscule gap between the moment my brain has an urge and my body responds to the urge. Even when I catch that split second handoff, I am rarely inclined to stop myself, not when the urge burns so strong. Then there is the return to reality, where I am forced to confront the damage I have incurred and the acrid shame that accompanies such a damaging, obtrusive act upon myself. The discomfort of this transition between trance and reality doesn’t teach me to not pull my hair—that is my body’s overwhelming compulsion—but rather to hate myself for not being able to control pulling my hair. This is why demands to “just stop” are so damaging—they don’t reinforce the wrongness of the behavior; they reinforce the wrongness of the individual herself.

During those weeks and months following Halloween, the voices of my past reached a crescendo, so that self-blame and self-hate seemed to pervade the air I breathed—everywhere I Koppel/Plucked 82

went and everything I did, I was a good for nothing piece of shit. If Sean had hurt me, then I deserved it. If I felt violated, then I deserved that too.

Despite my best efforts to maintain a public state of composure, I was in a near constant state of agitation. In the evenings, I texted each of the second floor girls asking about dinner plans, paranoid that I was being left out. I was sure that everyone was talking behind my back, that they’d been offended by that joke I made at brunch, or maybe were growing tired of the same old people, the same predictable routine. That panic made me wild. I stopped paying attention in class, instead focused on thinking up elaborate plans for the upcoming weekend. I needed to go shopping. I needed to ask David to get me booze. When Friday came, I painted myself with mascara and lipgloss. The second floor girls pre-gamed in my room and I sucked down mixers, then, when no one was looking, snuck in an extra two shots.

One night that winter, Beryl (second floor Turkish friend) and I followed two upperclassmen to their dorm on West to hang out in the common room. We ended up in one of their rooms, the boys selecting one girl each and pulling us onto the couch, squeezing our shoulders. My guy got up to make me a drink and Beryl stood suddenly and announced we were leaving. I was furious. “He spiked your drink!” she said as we walked out into the night. I was flattered that someone wanted me that much.

At the beginning of the year, Beryl and I decided we would have occasional “hypocrisy nights” to cast morals aside and play the part of promiscuous college girls. Now hypocrisy nights were my standard. When we went out to clubs, I let boys grab at my chest, groin, get themselves hard and then flip me around so they could kiss me with beer breath and cigarette tongues.

Swetha said, What the fuck do you think you’re doing? And I said, Girl, it’s been in me all along. Each time was meant to be the last. One more would make it right, one more would put Koppel/Plucked 83

this whole Halloween bullshit to bed. Looking back, I can’t help but think there was more logic to my response than I’d like to believe. Those nights out were no different than my nights in the closet—just another self-injurious way of soothing myself.

At some point during the night, after the house parties and tailgates and raves, most of us wound up at Shooters. Shooters was an Old Western-themed bar and restaurant in Durham, a short walk from East campus. During orientation week, one of the second floor girls got tipped off that it was a “foam party” night. None of us knew what that meant, but we could guess that it would be messy, so we suited up in old T-shirts and gym shirts, running shoes. We arrived at

Shooters, where we stood among hoards of straightened blond hair, air-tight black dresses and three inch heels, all of us suspended in a wordless daze. Definitely not foam party night. We scurried out, the bouncers chuckling as we passed.

That spring, we were older and wiser. There would be no more false tips; we had improved our tactics, discovered who could be relied upon for accurate information. Jose alerted us that tonight was a foam party and Beryl, Alexa, and I took the bus back to East. As was customary for a Saturday night, there was a vicious struggle to get aboard the bus and once we’d made it, three buses later, the drunken choruses commenced, the usual “Build Me Up Buttercup” and “Don’t Stop Believing” with several alterations in the lyrics based on state of inebriation. As we pulled into East, someone shouted “Shooootahhs!” and we all cheered and whistled. The three of us trekked into Durham, chatting animatedly about the previous night’s excitement: three second floor wannabe boys had competed in leaping over the trash bins in the hallway, and no one came out the victor.

We came upon a throng outside the door that seemed like hundreds. It was generally acknowledged that Shooters was a blast, but that you had to be in a particular mindset to stomach Koppel/Plucked 84

the experience. Arriving at that mindset required excessive amounts of intoxication. Also, expect to be stepped on, shoved, doused with alcohol, and suffocated by clouds of cigarette smoke. All this before you even stepped through the door. The whole production of waiting in line made me think of the descriptions in my history book of Americans flooding the banks during the first

Wall Street crash. Eyes burned with desperation and our bodies were possessed by animal instinct—it was every man for himself. Over an hour after arriving, Alexa, Beryl and I catapulted through the front door, carried by the collective thrust of the crowd behind us. A police officer checked our IDs and shined a flashlight in our eyes. The bouncer branded the backs of our hands with black Sharpie X’s. You could tell a lot about a Duke student’s activities by the backs of their hands. Some of us took the courtesy of scrubbing at the marks, while others came out of the weekend looking like tic-tac-toe boards.

The entrance of Shooters featured the establishment’s only bathroom, where I saw girls and boys relieve themselves in sinks and trash bins, vomit two to a toilet, and “freshen up” at mirrors that were steamed over from our collective body heat. Further in was the bar, a long counter top that ran along the perimeter of the dance floor. This was also where the old creeps plotted their pursuit of freshmen girls—generally these men were as old as our fathers, with smoky-smelling hair and acrid breath, sagging bodies and wilted features. At Shooters, we always said that anything goes. But most of us drew the line at associating with the old creeps.

Shooters numbed the senses. The building itself resembled a dilapidated shack; the whole place was dark, certain parts were pitch black, and the entire interior was suffused with a mass of smoke, so thick that my eyes never stopped watering. Alexa, Beryl, and I coughed and pushed through the old creeps until we hit foam. The foam machine was against the front wall and bluish bubbles streamed through a spout, amassing on the floor beneath, creating a blob that spread and Koppel/Plucked 85

slithered.

We waded toward the spout, clasping hands. The foam was thicker now, and by the time we reached the heart of the crowd, we were buried up past our belly buttons. To our left, someone straddled the mechanical bull, which was one of Shooter’s trademarks—I had promised friends that I would ride the bull myself the fall after I turned twenty-one. A bouncer dressed in black knelt down and flipped a switch, and the beast lurched into life, squeaking with every toss and roll. The rider howled and lifted a bottle in the air, while onlookers called out as they were showered in beer. Towering over the dance floor, a steel ladder led up to “the cage,” a six-walled box held together by thick bars. Here, Shooter’s pluckiest females weaved limbs through gaps and back around, performing ad hoc strip teases until a bouncer shouted from below: “Only five in the cage! Five!” Number five huffed and descended the ladder to wait her turn, and the cage routine proceeded.

I turned back to the foam and saw that Alexa and Beryl had wandered off. I smiled impishly and waited. Ten seconds later there were soapy fingers at my waist. I slid my hands on top of his and turned to face him. Alexa was grinding with a stranger, and Beryl was in the middle of a make out session with Jose. I looked for Alexa’s reaction but when she saw me, she shrugged and went back to her stranger. Soapy fingers touched my cheek, What’s wrong, baby? I laughed and stifled my words with his lips.

At the beginning of the spring semester, I received a scattering of strange emails. Their subject lines read: Blackout. FIASCO. Handcuff. The messages were cryptic but seemed to be invitations to a party, brought to you by the brotherhood of ADPi, Pike, DTD. Generally the parties began at 1 or 2 PM. I thought that was a joke, but when I asked my brother about the Koppel/Plucked 86

invitations, he told me this was the norm for “that kind of a thing.” It turned out “that kind of a thing” was known as a “Progressive,” a highly secretive practice exercised by select fraternities as part of the initiation of new pledges. The brothers sent out the invites and gathered the attendees together (all girls) to feed them gross quantities of alcohol. The girls were then shepherded into groups, one group for each room. As the name suggests, there was a progression to the arrangement. The first room was for making out. The second, for hand jobs. The third, blow jobs. The last, sex. Pledges funneled through while the brothers delivered instructions.

Publicly, Duke was aware of the “problem” and taking steps to eradicate it. Privately, fraternities didn’t give a shit. These ceremonies and routines were all part of the pledging experience—Progressives calibrated pledges’ dedication, pushing them to new extremes so the brothers could determine who would survive.

I assumed David knew about Progressives through word of mouth. I wouldn’t consider the alternative.

As a rule, my brother and I didn’t talk about our personal lives. David started dating his first girlfriend during his senior year of high school, Jane, a silky skinned girl with lustrous red- blonde hair. They had been dating for six months before David brought Jane home for dinner with the family. When I heard them come in the house, listened to a strange sugary laugh mingled with the one I knew, I hid in my closet. “Katie, we’re home!” David announced as they giggled up the stairs. I stayed where I was. At dinner I twirled my spaghetti as we learned that

Jamie was the captain of the hockey team, had taught herself Spanish and was on the Honor

Council. Mom and Dad were jittery with excitement, interrupting each other with questions for this new “nice girl.” David tickled Jane’s arm. It was 2007. It had been eight years since David Koppel/Plucked 87

and I were sidekicks, since David had referred to me as Gutti. But that night, he called her Baby.

In December of my first semester, David invited me to “Rockstar,” one of the biggest parties of the year. A bus took us down a familiar path, and I realized I was returning to the barn.

I stepped onto the dance floor, where I’d first seen Sean six weeks before. Then I made a beeline for the bar. I spent the night trying to dance with guys. Trying, but mostly failing, because David kept intervening. My brother was not confrontational, but he had a short fuse when he was drunk. He tore the guys away from me, and they spat Who do you think you are? to which David responded, I’m her fucking brother. Then they disappeared. David’s fraternity brothers saw what was happening and tried to calm him down, but my brother was inconsolable. David took on a new approach. He came behind me and grabbed my waist, then commanded me to dance. At the time, I assumed he was wasted, but once my head cleared I realized he’d been trying to protect me. The next day at brunch Alexa said, “I wish my own brothers loved me that much.”

I determined that David was not like the other fraternity brothers. With his butt chin and beer fat, he may have looked the part, but I knew my brother—Utti was who he was: soft, kind, too loving for his own good. He still built hermit crab cities and maintained his fascination with fire, though he was now too inhibited to burn ants on the concrete. When we saw each other, we

“shook paws,” a maneuver that we developed on our yearlong trip that involved imitating

Saharan squirrels on their hind legs. My friends disliked my brother because David gave them the cold shoulder—but I defended him, explaining that his apathy was all an act. My future boyfriends would call him an asshole because David wouldn’t make eye contact with them when they attempted to make conversation. I conjured up more excuses. Family members called David the “frat boy” and I changed the subject. Koppel/Plucked 88

But at some point during that first year at Duke, David yanked the wool off my eyes. I learned he had taken part in a Progressive when he was pledging in his freshman year. David described how he was blindfolded, force-fed drinks, and then ordered around by slurry-voiced female police officers, who handcuffed him and did some other stuff. He shrugged and concluded, “That’s just the way it is.”

Fiction: I never told my brother about Halloween because he would be angry. He would want to find out who did it and knock his teeth out. David would blame himself for not being there, for not having saved me.

Fact: I never told my brother about Halloween because I feared he would shrug and say

“That’s just the way it is.” I knew then and know now that Sean was not an outlier. David likely lived with Seans, ate with Seans, formed friendships with Seans. My brother had established loyalties with Seans. Maybe he was a Sean. I wouldn’t have been able to survive that blow, so I kept silent and clutched the belief that Utti, my protector, was alive and well.

One March morning, I looked out my streaky dorm room window, made a mental note to get the screen fixed (a rogue squirrel had managed to claw its way through), and thought: What a shitty day for a pirate party.

Springtime in Durham, North Carolina had been reliable. Each day was sunny and warm, a luxury for me, having been accustomed to six months of precipitation. But today the whole sky felt different, lower somehow, the clouds droopy. There was a drizzle, cold and sporadic as the trickle off icicles. I texted the message “Meh” to my older brother, a family word expressing a

“this sucks” situation. He responded: “This is nothing.” I was David’s guest at tonight’s party, an annual event thrown by his fraternity. I’d been given the invitation reverentially, made to Koppel/Plucked 89

understand that this was both highly coveted, and conditional on the following: 1) I had to go all out, 2) I had to get smashed, 3) I was not to tell my mother a thing. I was allowed one guest and picked Alexa, who I knew was game for anything involving boys and booze.

Black spandex clung to the curves of my thighs, and a scarlet tank top gathered at the pouch in my belly. I traced my eyelids in black liquid liner, with a crescent moon flare at the corners—my trademark Audrey Hepburn style. I wore black fishnets with black boots, a black leather jacket. Navy blue bandana secured into Wig #2. Gold hoops.

Ten minutes before we were supposed to leave, Alexa was still in her underwear, rifling through her Lily Pulitzer boutique of a wardrobe. “You’ll look great no matter what,” I said and meant it. She scowled back a smile. Alexa was a red-headed mermaid beauty, with a bright schoolgirl smile and melancholy eyes. She tossed back her flaming waves and nibbled her bottom lip, concentrating. Thirty minutes later, she’d settled on a one-shouldered white T-shirt, leggings, a bandana tied in her curls like a Girl Scout, and a pair of silver hoops, the only non- pearl earrings she owned.

The bus was slick and silver, more like an alien spacecraft than a transporter of shit-faced college kids. Outside, rain fell in puffs. By the time we arrived at the party, it would be 35 degrees and pouring in sheets.

The stop was so arbitrary that I felt sure we had broken down. We were parked in an enormous field of coppery wheat, which was matted down by the rain like a cowlick on a red tabby cat. Surrounding the field were more fields, stretching out into the fuzzy horizon. Alexa and I stepped out and into a line of eye patches, black stilettos, and white legs. We trudged through mud, some of us bare-footed. I saw a clearing with people, and knew we’d arrived. Koppel/Plucked 90

The party consisted of long white tents, sagging under collected rain, the kind they have at wedding receptions. There was a general booze tent and a drug tent (the only one that was sealed), then smaller individual tents for shots. At the entrance stood a gigantic structure of wooden planks nailed together so sloppily that I thought it was wreckage. That turned out to be the party’s trademark—a pirate ship, gutted so that it doubled as a stage, constructed over the course of the year by dedicated freshmen boys hoping to join “the brothers.” David had proudly served as the project supervisor. I imagined this was what he meant when he boasted of campus leadership positions at Thanksgiving dinner.

We found David right away. He was hard to miss, stumbling toward us half-shaven, with stubble peppering the cheeks of his face, patches covering the cheeks of his butt chin. I knew he was drunk because that was the only time he ever hugged me, and he hugged me then. That made me giddy, being noticed by my brother. David led Alexa and me to the booze tent. We felt glad for the cover—we were cold, though this would not last, not after we left the tent with Kool-Aid spilling down our fronts. David handed me a drink and I consumed it in several quick gulps, inhaling black raspberry sweetness. I don’t know how long I stood in the booze tent, my tongue now blue, the imprint of my pink glossed lips on the rim of the cup. By the time we left, it was storming out, and I was drunk and ready for the night. I pulled Alexa by the arm in front of the ship, where the dance floor was designated by the presence of uprooted grass and muddy foot holes. I held my drink high, collecting the rain, the other hand clinging to Alexa’s slippery palm.

At some point, after lots more Koolaid at the general booze tent, three vodka shots at the shot tents, I let David know I’d be hooking up with his best friend. He replied that Jake liked dirty sex, and he wouldn’t have his sister sleeping with a guy like that. Turned out, I never even saw Jake. The night might have been simpler if I had. Koppel/Plucked 91

The fraternity brothers constructed a bonfire, consisting of a near 10 feet high pile of wood left over from the pirate ship. Flames towered over us, emitting a smoke that I could taste in my drink. Alexa and I huddled together, holding our hands out as close as we dared.

I hadn’t seen David for at least an hour. When I finally spotted him from across the fire, he was long gone. Arms and neck limp, his head drooped like an infant’s, and his skin was blanched. He was barging toward the fire pit, stumbling and shaking. I ran toward him, the world pivoting sharply into clarity. When others saw him, they laughed and pointed, and I wondered if these were David’s friends, if any of these people gave two shits about my brother. I trailed behind David, my hands fumbling, trying to hold him steady. He wanted to get closer. I’m cold,

I’m cold he said. Then, when that didn’t work, You’re embarrassing me, let me go, let me go. I was sobbing now, my tears leaving soot trails, strangers coming at me from all sides to pull me away from my brother. It’s okay, they said, He’ll be okay. I let him go. David made it to the fire and I only saw his back, which was tilted forward, his knees bent too far so that he was rocking, teetering. I pushed my way back and drew him away from the flame. He looked into my eyes with sudden focus, then said words I wouldn’t remember until four years later: “Katie, I thought you were my sister. I’m fucking ashamed of you.”

The next morning, David texted saying sorry for being so drunk. He couldn’t remember anything, but people were saying he’d been sloppy. Towards the end of the party, he had given up on the fire, then passed out somewhere in the next field over. While I was searching for him, someone elbowed in the back of the head, and I had received a minor concussion. The party ended, but I refused to leave. One of the brothers told me I had to go, that this was the only bus and I’d be stranded. He knew where my brother was and would bring him home. David made it Koppel/Plucked 92

back around sunrise.

I texted David back Haha, it’s all good! He responded, Did you have fun? I said, Yeah, except I sort of got concussed. He said, That’s so bad ass. I’ve never been prouder of my little sister.

In the days following my concussion at the pirate party, I had headaches that radiated through the tips of my fingers. My eyes were set behind a pair of dusty sunglasses. Concentration was nearly impossible. I started seeing double in the middle of a public policy exam and when I tried to explain what had happened, my professor told me she couldn’t do anything without a doctor’s note. Why don’t I go get my head checked out and report back to her? I never went. I knew they would have to touch my scalp and that they would feel the netting of Wig #2.

I’ve heard it said that truth comes in blows. I understood in that moment what that little girl running from the pool in sixth grade must have fleetingly grasped. Beginning in college, I had vowed to shed my ugliness, to don a costume and live from party to party, day to day, sheltering a hidden truth. But so long as that little girl lived, my efforts would be futile. My disguise was unsustainable—sooner or later, I would have to be me. Now was my moment. I could share my secret with Swetha, Sarah, Alexa. I could wake up every morning and worry about my microeconomics exam, not about the hair on the ground, not about whether my roommates would be out long enough for me to have closet pulling time. I could breathe. I could live.

But I did none of those things. Instead, I dug in my heels, committed myself to my public policy class to make up for the bad exam grade. When the headaches worsened, I pulled my hair, savoring the momentary release. I continued to kiss strangers. I snuffed out the memories with my masks. I drank and pulled, pulled, pulled. I was rapidly ascending the ladder of self-injury. I Koppel/Plucked 93

jubilantly announced to my parents that I was loving life, thriving, succeeding. My hair pulling hours increased, I was climbing and climbing. I became Editor-in-Chief of the Duke Journal of

Public Affairs. Reaching for the next rung. Basketball game against Georgetown—let’s camp out again. Last day of class—let’s take shots during lecture. Beat down the anxiety and agitation, it’s in the way. Closer and closer to the top. This ladder will take me into the sky!

Six months later, I would reach the top rung. I would grope around for the next one, the way your foot falls heavy to the ground when you think there’s another step. It would occur to me to look down and finally, alarmingly, I would see how far from the ground I had come. A slight breeze could send me falling, the way the Cape Cod gulls drop clams from high above, again and again, until the soft shells splinter.

Koppel/Plucked 94

Addendum (2012)

The annual Trichotillomania Learning Center conference was being held in Chicago, which meant passing through O’Hare airport. Oh hair, indeed, I thought as we landed, collected our luggage, and boarded a bus that would take us to the Marriot. Dr. Marks had insisted that Dad and I go, and Mom stay behind—in her mind, my hair pulling was the quintessential roadblock in Dad and my relationship, and it was best to handle the problem by diving in face first. Riding the bus into the city, it had occurred to me that many of the passengers likely were headed to the conference too. But when I saw that the girl across from me, no older than ten or eleven, had bare eyebrows and eyelashes, I couldn’t help but feel shocked. One of the idiosyncrasies of having an unknown disorder is that the sight of another sufferer feels as familiar as it does surreal. There is an immediate sense of recognition—almost as if I am simply looking in the mirror and regarding my own image— followed by a flash of incredulity that reverberates through my chest cavity. A hair puller?

Here? In real life? The way a cult member must feel, I imagine, after catching a glimpse of a fellow human’s concealed tattoo, a physical marker of selective belonging. Hair loss in plain sight seems inherently paradoxical—is a secret, hidden, clandestine thing still that thing if brought into the light?

I would come to realize that yes, trichotillomania was still trichotillomania when it lost its shroud of secrecy. But it was like a monster that had lost its teeth, or become blinded in a battle with the hero: still the same beast, less powerful. The difficulty of hair pulling lies not within the disorder itself, but in the social norms constructed outside of and around the disorder. Trichotillomania only has significance when placed side by side with Koppel/Plucked 95

“normalcy”—the words that are used to describe such a condition, “disorder,” “abnormal,”

“malfunctioning,” imply that there is a standardized, agreed upon form of order, norm, and functioning. The discrepancy between hair pulling and the remaining non-hair-pulling majority is the space where shame blossoms and spreads. Certainly trichotillomania presents challenges in and of itself—the consequences for one’s appearance and functioning are notable and burdensome—but many of these factors would fall slack if not measured up against a constructed, often contrived, notion of normalcy.

The bus girl’s eyes met mine; I smiled and she looked away quickly—with my wig, I realized, I did not bear any physical signs of belonging to the hair pulling community. Part of the agreement with Dr. Marks was that I would take my wig off for the entirety of the conference. Though I respected Dr. Marks’ opinion more than I cared to admit, I had no intention of going wigless. Dad had hardly ever seen me in that state, and I couldn’t stand people’s looks of pity, the quick glances and the looks away that I anticipated. If I were to go wigless, I reasoned, I might as well have forgotten to put on pants, or a bra. My plan for the conference was to project confidence and an I-am-fully-functioning-and-not-like-you attitude. I was going to be the exception to the rule, a diamond in the rough of the hairless.

How could she be a hair puller? They would say. She’s too perfect.

Too perfect. That’s who I wanted to be. Someone who had risen above her disorder.

A person who yes, had trichotillomania, but no, wasn’t a Trichster. I was a hair puller who did not meet the profile of a hair puller. Who was better, stronger than the others. It shocks me now, to recognize the narcissism, the pride and stubbornness that compelled me to try to distance myself from fellow pullers. One of the conflicts of having a chronic disorder is that you both own and don’t own the condition at once. I want to own my trichotillomania Koppel/Plucked 96

in so far as it allows me to relate to and connect with other sufferers. I hope that embracing my hair pulling will push against the isolation that, at times, threatens to swallow me whole. And yet I do not want to be defined by, identified by my hair.

Several weeks ago, after a spin class at my local gym, I overheard a conversation between two women. I had started to wear bandanas to the gym, so as not to spend the entirety of my workout session panicking about the wig shifting, and feeling hugely uncomfortable due to the sweat accumulating in the gap between my scalp and the netting of the hair piece. I was standing a few lockers down from the two women, but had showered and was now wigged. They were remarking on the fact that I was a newcomer to the group: “Oh yeah, the girl with the bandana.” I froze in place, certain I was on the verge of an awkward moment. But they continued their conversation, and I understood that, now wigged, I was a different, unrecognizable person.

At the time of the conference, I had not resolved this conflict of how to identify myself, only knew that being wigged made me appear like the normal, nondescript woman

I wished to be. In hindsight, I can see the irony of the situation—I didn’t want to be characterized by my hair or lack thereof, but I myself associated the wig with composure, even modified my behavior according to the hair-related persona I was attempting to embody.

Dad and I arrived at the Marriot, were checked in by a receptionist with black hair pulled back into a tight bun. We were both starving and so ventured out in pursuit of deep dish pizza. Once we had settled into a cherry red cushioned booth, Dad considered me from across the table, waiting for me to say something. I studied the menu. “So, Katie, how do Koppel/Plucked 97

you feel?” There was a calculated casualness to his voice, as if he were exerting a tremendous amount of effort to make his speech seem effortless. I met his eyes and suddenly it struck me, the enormity of the task that lay before my father. I had spent most of the previous weeks and the plane ride to Chicago contemplating how I would get through a weekend one-on-one with Dad, never mind a weekend at a hair pulling conference. I had never paused to consider how it must have felt at his end, where he was faced with the prospect of making amends for 12 years of silence and neglect on the subject of my trichotillomania. Now, looking into his strained, faintly bloodshot eyes, I felt a surge of guilt, and anger, toward no one and nothing in particular. The truth was that I didn’t want Dad to make amends. He had never been a part of this struggle and I couldn’t stand the idea of him being part of it now. I knew my father, and I understood that he believed that this would make up for it all, that a weekend of engagement in my hair pulling would surely override any resentment I clung onto from my younger years. Dad was a believer in the quick fix and, sitting across from him and bearing witness to his earnestness, I knew that he did have a sincere desire to repair any damage he had done.

In a way, Dad and I had arrived at the point I had always wanted, where the two of us were together, not to discuss upcoming school projects or future career ambitions, but to talk about the issues that underlay these superficial concerns—the issues that were hidden from view but penetrated every facet of my day-to-day life. But now that we had arrived at this place of openness, I found myself uncomfortable, to the extent that I felt the impulse the lay down my menu and walk out of the restaurant. Dad and I ordered pizzas and discussed the workshops we wanted to attend—I could see, in the way that Dad listened intently, that he wanted me to share more, to reveal something that would form Koppel/Plucked 98

the hinge between our disparate selves. But he didn’t know what to ask and I was in no mood to offer up unsolicited personal information. And so we talked and skirted around the hot topics, inching closer to substantive conversation but never quite making it there.

Dad and I returned to the hotel and prepared for the opening talk. My first impression, walking into the ballroom dressed in dark jeans and a flowery top, was that I’d come late to the party. Groups had already formed, circles of giggling teenage girls and the shy, downcast younger ones who remained at their mother’s sides and peeked sheepishly at one another from across the circle. Most people were younger than I, though I later came to realize that this was mostly an illusion created by the fact that adults tended to be more artful in disguising their hair loss. I spotted a girl who appeared to be about my age and motioned Dad toward the table. Laurel was a 22 year old college student, studying journalism at Northwestern, with light brown hair and a fringe bang, soft green eyes set in a round face. She told me this confidently, but with an earnest intensity that suggested that she was nervous and just as anxious to make friends as I was. “Lashes and brows,” she added, as if this were the natural progression from discussing journalism lectures. “Since I was five, was a scalp puller then.” “Scalp,” I said, my voice shaking ever so slightly. “Since I was seven, was a brow puller then.” She nodded. I heard the “pat pat” of a microphone and looked up to see Jennifer, the executive director of the Trichotillomania Learning Center, standing at the podium and beaming, poised to speak.

“Before I begin, I’d like to say thank you, for being my family. Everyone who comes here is a warrior in his or her own way…” I scanned the room. Headscarves, bandanas, beanies, baseball caps, hats, headbands, ribbons—we were a collection of coverings, a rainbow of concealment. I would come to understand that each of us was unique, in terms Koppel/Plucked 99

of how open we were with others, how much hair loss we experienced, how far we went to hide our baldness. But we were also a roomful of clones—we had all experienced bullying and teasing, had all been mortified when a teacher asked that we remove our hat during class, had frozen in place as classmates gasped in horror at the follicles littering the floor around our desk. Most of us were mature, often too mature, and the majority had spent at least some of their lives believing that she was the only one, that she was a freak, that she was to blame. Some of us had parents who were divorced, started pulling shortly after, many of us had been abused, physically, sexually, or emotionally. We were all comforted, excited, but we were terrified in equal measure. We were firmly grounded in a reality that finally made sense, where we could see with our own eyes that what we experienced was real, that we were not alone, while simultaneously believing this must be a dream—a ballroom full of people who plucked their hair?

Jennifer was winding down her speech. “Finally, did anyone else notice anything interesting about these hotel rooms?” The crowd erupted in laughter. I was confused for a beat, then it hit me. I had noticed it too. Perched on the bathroom countertop was one of those enormous mirrors, magnified to the extent that I could see every bump, blemish, and hair on my face and scalp. For the first time since I’d arrived, I felt happy. What was once a source of personal hilarity, a sigh or a chuckle, could now be shared externally, in a roomful of strangers who somehow knew me in a way that not even my closest friends could access.

When Jennifer finished speaking, we rose from our seats and dispersed into various sessions. Everyone was hugging one another. We didn’t know each other but, by virtue of our attendance, we knew each other, knew one another’s deepest, darkest secret without even knowing names. How could we not embrace? Each one of us had been through our Koppel/Plucked 100

own versions of hell, but it was a hell that we shared a stake in, that had fundamental guiding principles to which we were all accustomed.

One of my promises to Dr. Marks had been that I would try out some of the experiential, what I considered to be touchy feely, sessions, which were designed for people to share their stories. Dad went off to a research panel, promising that he would take notes for me, while I shuffled into a room set up with dozens of chairs arranged in an enormous circle. I sat next to an embarrassed-looking, extremely attractive girl about my age, with shoulder length blond hair, long dark lashes, and peach pink lips. Elizabeth, as it turned out, was almost exactly my age, and came from Wisconsin, which became obvious in the way she articulated long, intonated vowel sounds. She was attending state college after transferring and taking time off—this was the sort of girl who you knew had been through hardship not in what she said, but in the skittish look in her eyes. Elizabeth pulled her eyebrows and eyelashes—she told me that she spent significant portions of her day either drawing in her eyebrows and applying fake eyelashes, or panicking that her makeup had smudged, or a lash was falling off, so that she kept emergency kits with her wherever she went. “I just can’t stand hair,” she said with a shrug and light laughter. I would come to find out that Elizabeth also pulled from her legs and that they were covered in scabs and scars—for this reason, she wore long pants even on the hottest of summer days. Elizabeth also struggled with an eating disorder and obsessive compulsion disorder, landing her in an inpatient facility for several months. Elizabeth didn’t talk much about her family or friends, but I gathered, from her talk of severe social anxiety, that few of them knew about her trich. Koppel/Plucked 101

The discussion began. A very tan girl with orange-red hair spoke. She described how she had been dating an ex-boyfriend for several months before finally telling him about her trich (she pulled from her scalp but was able to conceal most of the damage with hair extensions). The guy dumped her on the spot, calling her a freak, and the next day Brittany walked into class to find that the entire school had found out. She dropped out of the school soon after. The teenagers talked about being bullied in school, about not being able to go to the eighth grade pool party or go to gym class, opting out of the Senior prom because bandanas and scarves didn’t go with a fancy dress. One girl, no older than ten years old, shared that boys in her class often snatched up her hat and then called her baldie, alien, freak, weirdo. Another said someone came up from behind her, pulled off her wig, and then played monkey in the middle with it with his friend. I felt an immense sense of pity for these young girls, and profound sadness at knowing that, despite how much I wanted to tell them otherwise, things would not necessarily get easier. The bullies would mature and gym class would not longer be mandatory, but there would be other challenges, more clandestine but equally as debilitating. I felt sorry for the rocky futures that lay ahead of these young girls, but also a distinct awareness that they were incredibly fortunate to be where they were. I thought about my experience of being eight, twelve, sixteen, still believing that I was an oddball, that I would never speak about my hair pulling with a single other soul, let alone speak about my hair pulling with 500 individuals with an identical condition.

After the discussion, Elizabeth and I paired up and spent the afternoon attending sessions together, with her initial skittishness wearing off, replaced by a quiet but blunt sense of humor. That night, we went to a discussion group that was arranged ad-hoc, made Koppel/Plucked 102

up mostly of women in their 20s and 30s. At first everyone was quiet, each of us desperate to share and hear the stories that seemed to hang in the air, unspoken but ripe for the telling. I noticed a girl about my age to my left, with deep hazel eyes and, her most distinguishing characteristic, a buzz cut dyed hot pink. A couple of the girls next to her were complimenting her, and she giggled and gushed about how she likes to change up the color—last month was neon green. Someone suggested we go around the room and introduce ourselves: name, hometown, age of first pull, pull zones. There was Nancy, a scalp puller from Chicago, started plucking when she was twelve, after her father died. Jane, lash and scalp puller from Toronto, started plucking when she was four or five, doesn’t know why. Rachel, brow puller and occasional skin picker from Montana, first pluck was at eighteen.

Jillian, hot pink buzz cut girl, was the first to share her story. She had been a scalp puller most of her life. Like most of us, she had a fear of hair salons, and, also like most of us, had been teased and prodded about her unusual hair. One hairdresser had even called over her co-workers so they too could see Jillian’s hair, as if she were a particularly interesting specimen. After that incident, Jillian had refused to enter a salon for several years, until finally, a few years before, she decided to schedule an appointment at a posh salon because she figured they “had to be nice to me there.” She was disgruntled to discover that she had been paired with a male stylist. But as she sat in the chair and braced herself, he looked at her patchy, multi-lengthed hair and said jauntily, “What do you want to do with your hair today?” A year later, Ben and Jillian were dating. Two years after that, they became husband and wife. “I married the first hair dresser who was nice to me,” Jillian Koppel/Plucked 103

announced, sugary delight on her face. She didn’t struggle with trich anymore, but enjoyed keeping a buzz cut and playing around with the color, to make a statement.

Ashley, the girl who sat directly across from me, was an extremely petite 22 year old from Michigan, with a wide lemon wedge smile that dominated her face, large dimples, and brown-green eyes that shone with fervent intensity. She had no eyelashes, but the black eyeliner she wore along her upper and lower lids would have hid that fact from the uninitiated, non-trichsters of the world. No eyebrows either, replaced by two thin reddish- brown line, carefully curved along the brow bone. These drawn on features gave her face a sculpted, artistic look that was pleasing to the eye. Ashley wore a stylish bandana with loose strands of hay-colored hair falling to her shoulders. She had been a puller since the age of eleven, which was about the time her father left her mother. Ashley had a boyfriend back home, and he was incredibly supportive of her trich, and regularly kissed her bald spots. Evan had once made that suggestion that, every time Ashley had an urge to pull, that she make an origami dragonfly. From that point on, Ashley made dozens and dozens of paper dragonflies, so that they littered her house and she came to the realization that she needed to share this strategy with others. She started “the dragonfly project” and held dragonfly-making workshops to raise awareness for trich. Hair pullers and non-hair pullers from around the country sent Ashley dragonflies they created after watching her instructional YouTube video. Everyone in the group agreed that we wanted to make dragonflies, and Ashley promised to bring supplies to teach us the next day. We also collectively agreed that Jillian and Ashley’s partners were absolute saints, and did they have any brothers? Koppel/Plucked 104

After Ashley and Jillian shared, the rest of us could barely wait to speak. We talked over each other, called out “Yeah!” and, so frequently it became almost annoying, “Me too!

Me too!” We had been cracked open and now were spilling our contents, spilling and spilling because we were finally being given permission to do so. These stories, our words, had been beaten down, talked down by ourselves and others for most of our lives—now, at last, we could be heard. Never before and not since have I felt so liberated. The isolation and entrapment that accompanied my trich would always be there, but it was just a feeling.

It wasn’t a reality. I was not alone. I was not alone.

The next morning, I woke up feeling invigorated, more energized than I’d been in months. Dad had already left the hotel room for an early morning session. I showered, slid into a tank top and skinny jeans, then slipped out the door, wigless. I held my breath as I headed for the elevator. When I saw a maid in front of me, I willed myself to not freeze like a deer in headlights, but to keep moving forward. She looked at me and nodded, then turned back to her work. I stepped onto the elevator, knowing that I was headed down to where there were conference participants, but also regular, civilian hotel guests. The doors slid open and I stepped into the bustling lobby. I imagine I had had surreal experiences before that point, but nothing could have prepared me for the feeling of disembodiment, of being separate from my body and examining myself from above. My body moved into the conference room and I hesitated before spotting Elizabeth at a nearby table. She looked up at my as I approached and I saw that she had foregone her makeup, was now eyebrowless, eyelashless, and as beautiful as ever. We beamed at each other and I sat down in a seat beside her. “You look awesome,” she said. “Likewise,” I said. Elizabeth and I started a debate over what was worse, pulling from one’s scalp or pulling from her eyebrows and Koppel/Plucked 105

lashes. My argument was that the scalp was harder to conceal, short of wearing a wig, which was itchy and uncomfortable and just a pain in the ass. Elizabeth countered that the eyebrows and eyelashes were defining qualities of the face, and that without them she looked like an alien. She also explained how, when showering, shampoo ran into her eyes because she had no follicles to stop the flow of water. “Hash tag trich problems,” Elizabeth quipped, picking up on the Twitter social media slang.

I used to have a recurring nightmare. In this nightmare, I was walking through a hallway full of people I didn’t know, and I was bald. I had forgotten my wig. This truth hit me in one blow and tasted like acid on my tongue. I wore clothes, but I was naked, and every single person could see it and was ashamed of me. Not a single one of them knew me, cared for me, but every single one of them was disgusted with me. I was being indecent. I was exposed. How dare I. I tried to run, to retreat, but it was like moving against a Cape Cod riptide. Exertion but no forward motion.

I was walking through a hallway full of people I didn’t know, and I was bald. I hadn’t forgotten my wig. It was tucked into my tote bag, just in case, though I never even thought about it that day. These strangers did not know me, but they were proud of me. Some of them told me so. Most made eye contact with me, smiled or nodded, then kept walking. One woman told me I’d inspired her to take her wig off in front of other people for the first time.

Another that I should run for the Miss America pageant. That day at the trichotillomania conference, I felt like a rock star for the same reason I had once felt like an outcast.

Koppel/Plucked 106

***

My brother and I used to read a story called “The Velveteen Rabbit.” The book is about a farm of talking stuffed animals. Skin Horse is the oldest animal, and he has bald patches and ripped seams. One day, Rabbit asks the Skin Horse what it means to be Real.

Skin Horse explains that it has nothing to do with how you’re made, or what you look like.

Instead, being Real means being loved. Does it happen all at once? You become, Skin Horse says. It takes a long time, and that’s why those who break easily and have sharp edges can’t become Real. Being Real involves having your hair loved off, your eyes dropped out, your joints loosened. “But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Those words are now written on a pink sticky note on my desk. They remind me that, after a fifteen year long masquerade, the jig is up. I am a Skin Horse. I am Real. I am myself. And I am not cured, not from my hair pulling, not from my trauma, not from years of hiding and lying and pretending. Not cured, but healing.