A moment that changed me: a clump of hair falling out in the shower | Arwa Mahdawi

For what is essentially dead matter, your hair can have an enormous impact on your life. I found that out the hard way.

It started when I was 14. I was at summer camp in Maine. In many respects, this was one of the best summers of my life. At school in New York I was socially awkward and a bit of an outsider. At camp I got the chance to reinvent myself. I became more confident and outgoing; boys suddenly seemed to like me. The new me came with a new body. I’d always been a gangly kid, but that summer I gained weight and filled out. I developed breasts. Puberty seemed to strike all at once and, when I got back home to New York, I realised I wasn’t quite ready for it.

So I did what women often do when they feel uncomfortable in their own skin: I made myself smaller. To begin with I just became “health conscious”. I developed a keen interest in nutrition and started to exercise. I turned into one of those irritating caricatures in magazines; running five miles at 5am then subsisting on handfuls of almonds and smugness for the rest of the day.

I got steadily thinner. Seeing the numbers on the scale going down was exhilarating. Having so much control – measurable control – over something was addictive. So 125 pounds became 115 pounds became 100 pounds. At my lowest point I weighed just under 90 pounds (around 6 stone or 40kg). I was 5ft 6in (1.68m). I looked disgusting.

Want to know just how odd I looked? I grew a tail. I’d spent my entire life blissfully ignorant of the existence of my tailbone. But suddenly I had a bony little protrusion that made sitting down agony. Still, the tail didn’t really bother me. Nor did the fact that my periods had stopped. The constant warnings that my bones were growing brittle, that I was jeopardising my fertility and killing myself – all of this had very little effect on me. Seeing my family upset was upsetting, sure, but I was more preoccupied with my illness. It was the only thing I cared about.

For months I convinced myself that I was fine; that I was in control of my rapidly deteriorating body. Despite being fragile I still exercised feverishly. I did well at school. I’d lost interest in other people but other people seemed to have developed a new interest in me. The popular girls at school suddenly started to pay attention to me. I wasn’t just the dorky girl with an English accent and an Arab name any more. I was skinny – I was the skinniest. I had a brand.

I had regular appointments with a nutritionist, a doctor and a therapist. I read all I could about anorexia and attended these appointments with a certain superiority complex. I knew better than all of these people, I thought. I was in control.

Then, while having a shower one day, a clump of hair came out in my hand. Hair loss often happens with anorexia: the medical name for it is telogen effluvium. Basically your starved body enters crisis mode and concentrates all its energy on staying alive. Luxuries like maintaining a full head of hair are quickly cut from your body’s energy budget.

The popular girls at school suddenly started to pay attention to me. I was skinny. I was the skinniest

I’d suspected for a while that my hair was thinning. There had been a growing trail of evidence on my pillow, on the bathroom floor, on my clothes. But I’d never actually pulled a handful of my hair away from my scalp before. I remember feeling so sick in that instant that I almost threw up. Except, of course, I hadn’t eaten anything, so there was nothing to throw up. Holding a fistful of my hair, something inside me clicked. I realised what I’d done to myself and, for the first time since becoming sick, I actually wanted to get better. So I set about doing that. I changed schools and started over somewhere a little less nurturing of neuroses than New York.

I didn’t get better right away, of course. I gained weight fairly quickly, but my relationship with food remained dysfunctional for a long time. Anorexia isn’t a disease of the body; it’s a disease of the mind. For years I didn’t like to eat in front of people; I treated carbs like they were cancer; I had intermittent bouts of bulimia. But slowly I got better.

Today I can finally say that my relationship with food is normal. Although, in a society that encourages women to treat their bodies as their enemy, I’m sometimes unsure what normal is. I know very few women who don’t have some degree of disordered eating. I know very few women whose self-worth isn’t linked, in some small way, to their weight. And the same, by the way, can be said of our hair. Like many things in life, you don’t realise how important your hair is to you until you start to lose it. You don’t realise how conditioned you are to see your hair as a measure of your worth as a woman.

After years of my body being the enemy, I’ve finally made peace with it. It’s just a shame that it took my hair falling out for me to finally confront what was going on inside my head.

A moment that changed me: a clump of hair falling out in the shower | Arwa Mahdawi