Older email to friends- but present of the work needing to be done, and the memory of a boy.

Dear wonderful friends and family,

It's unusual for me to pass along a mass email, unless it is a
frantically hyper update from my life, but this I found too close to
home to not discuss. Below is an email I received from the Alopecia
Areata support group network about a recent shooting of a teenager
with Alopecia Areata. Speculation has it that there was teasing about
his hairloss and he was standing up for himself before he was killed.

How do I even begin to describe what I feel about this young man's lost life?

A) I first resort to fear and deep sadness that this was a boy
verbally and finally attacked for a disease that is uncontrollable.
The disease I have. Does this mean I need to hide from the world, no.
But a chill went down my back when I, for the first time, in almost 8
years with Alopecia Areata, have heard the words "Alopecia Areata" and
"death" in the same sentence.

I spoke in my social psychology class of Death and Dying about the
connection of Alopecia Areata and loss, in the terms of the process of
grief, which I feel that I have experienced strongly, but now to
encounter a mirror in which my own mortality may be threatened because
of my difference, ohhh HELLLLLL NOOOO.... as in the great words by my
campers and catch phrases often used by my HFH family in NY this is
certainly a "beastin" situation and 100% "mad whack".

B) I felt dissappointed, because there is a larger point needing to be
addressed. This has been happening throughout time with ethnic
communities, religions, sexual identities, dissabilities, and classes.
The list continues, we as people are faced with struggle and the
noting of difference in some way. There has been violence against our
differences for too long. For example in recent events to list only a
few: the struggle to ban same sex marriages, racial stereotyping in
media, and hate groups that exist today. I am scared that I have been
blinded until it hit home for me. Are we only awakened to hate crimes
and violence, when it jeopordizes ourselves? I don't want to be like
that, I want to be an advocate for change, and most importantly hope
that there is something better out there for me than a stake in the
physicality of hair to prove my worth as a woman.

Lets broaden the spectrum and change the "me" mantra into a "we"
progression towards compassion and equality for our nation, and for
the planet filled with roaming differences.

C) I am frustrated and feel deflated by this, I am keeping face about
it because somewhere in the core of my belly I know I need to keep
walking: to keep wishing for a better day in which, not just the
Alopecia Areata community can identify there difference and go on
confidently living because of their uniqueness, but other groups as
well struggling with issues of personal/ public idenitity.