I want to pull out my cowlick

Burning inside me is a strong desire to pull out my cowlick. Looking at me, you probably wouldn't even be able to tell I have a cowlick, but I know it's there. Oh yes, it's there. It stands out ever so slightly, leaning defiantly at an abnormal angle against the other well behaved good little hairs. Like a weed in a rose garden it grows seemingly out of sheer spite, mocking the gardener/groomer who debates whether to prune around it or pull it out entirely. I had hoped one of the benefits of chemotherapeutic baldness would be that the cowlick would not grow back. Apparently weedkiller can wipe out both plants and cancer, but not unruly tufts of hair.

There is a scientific name for this. It's called trichotillomania (pronounced puhl' ing owt yoor hehr''). I'm not generally one for psychoanalytic labeling, much less self-imposing such labels, but this is one I can't readily deny. According to healthAtoZ.com (by the way, I strongly encourage you to obtain all pertinent health information from the innerweb) trichotillomania is thrown into a category called impulse control disorders along with things like kleptomania and pyromania. Wow! I feel like I ran a red light and have been thrown in with the serial murderers. I've just pulled out a few wayward hairs and I'm on the same level with thieves and firebugs?

I first acquired this habit when I was nine at which point I gradually pulled out enough hairs to create a bald spot on the top of my head about the size of a half-dollar. My teacher was disgusted by this and referred me to the school counselor because of it. I don't know that she and I were able to reach any remarkable discoveries. The appeal of pulling out my hair soon waned and it grew back. I can't recall why I did this. Some theorize that pulling out one's hair is associated with stress, but how much stress can a nine-year-old really have? Though, come to think of it, there were those times when I had to wait an entire week for the exciting conclusion of Diff'rent Strokes.

Some twenty years later I revisited pulling out my hair, only this time the target was my cowlick. I wanted to believe this was merely for purposes of beautification, but since later attempts to shave out the cowlick with an electric razor just didn't yield the same gratification as wincing and pulling, I can only assume that there is some psychotic reason I do this. Whether shaven or pulled out, extracting my cowlick really resulted in little if any esthetic improvement. Because it was shorter than the rest of my hair, it just stuck out even worse as it grew back. My hairdresser would admonish me each visit saying, "It's gonna grow back the same way." She was right.

Further evidence that this is a neurotic behavior and not just a harmless pastime is found in Dr. Steven Phillipson's paper Hair Pulling a.k.a. Trichotillomania: a simple habit or a complex diagnosis? You see, prior to pulling out hair, I spend several minutes trying to separate out the individual hairs that constitute my cowlick. Sometimes I stare in a mirror and determine that what I think of as my cowlick is actually two cowlicks, one small and one big, seperated one from the other by a few strands of hair that actually go where they're supposed to. At times I'll wrap them around my finger and just pull -- not pull them out, mind you. Just pull. I didn't think much of it until I read this in the good doctor's paper:

Prior to hair pulling, most persons engage in a self-stroking behavior otherwise known as the "grooming" response (i.e.,hair twirling, eyebrow caressing, pubic hair tweaking, etc.) This repetitive action sets the stage for finding the specific hair or clump of hairs that become the target for the future pull.

Yikes! I fit the profile to a T. Like I said, I'm really not into psycho-self-labeling or psycho-anyone-else-labeling for that matter. I'm constantly sickened by people touting their recent diagnoses of OCD, ADD or LMNOP, but even I have to admit there may be something to this. I wonder if the manifestation of the disorder lets up when the Moon is in the Seventh House and Jupiter aligns with Mars? In the meantime, I'll have to explore Trich.org and see what I can learn. With any luck I'll find a group of caring and cultish people in front of whom I can someday stand up and proudly announce, "My name is Kevin, and I'm a trichotillomaniac."