'When I started losing my hair back in 2018, I felt like I was losing little pieces of me'

Her hair was her everything – and then it began to fall out. Mary Cate Smith on coming to terms with alopecia – and why she’s never felt as free

Mary Cate Smith: Hair has played a major role in representing identity, social status and ideology.

I’ve always had a complex relationship with my face. A malleable instrument of constantly-changing emotion, it seemed to express with greater intensity than other faces. Comedy was my safe space; funerals, a series of macabre quagmires. More often than not, my overactive visage betrayed my thoughts.

But my hair? My hair was everything. From the flaxen pigtails of my childhood to the Friar Tuck-inspired bob inflicted on most children of the 80s and the long, thick, lustrous hair I cultivated from my teenage years into my 20s. Who did I think I was? I was the proud owner of desirable hair.