"Growing up, I was obsessed with Jim Carrey. I was just entering my teens when The Mask came out, and I can still picture myself watching Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls on TV one weekend afternoon, absolutely howling at the silliness of it. His elastic facial expressions, the energy, the stunts it was the perfect tenor of humour for a young boy."
"Around this time, I had started losing my hair. I was in my early 30s, which felt too soon. I thought I might start balding at 50, so I wasn't mentally prepared. I'd always had thick hair, even wearing it long at university, so when it began to thin, I fought it. I tried combing it over to hide the bald spots, but eventually there was no hiding it."
"In the very first episode, Carrey's character is fighting with his controlling father about the direction of his show. In a moment of frustration, he takes a pair of clippers and drags them from his forehead all the way to the back of his skull, ruining his perfect TV hair. I burst out laughing but I also felt something shift inside me."
I was obsessed with Jim Carrey from childhood, loving his elastic facial expressions and comedy in films like The Mask and Ace Ventura. In college I favored his more thoughtful work such as The Truman Show and came to admire him. In my early 30s I began losing my hair, tried to hide thinning with comb-overs, and felt prematurely aged and less attractive. Watching Kidding, a scene where the character shaves his perfect TV hair struck me as an act of liberation. That moment shifted my perception, and I began to see hair loss as an opportunity for taking back control.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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