A Memoir of Hiding

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.

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