When I first made this website, the idea was to get something that looked – “ok” - while I populated it, so that should anyone I know stumble across it, it would look reasonable.

Now I have populated it to a reasonable standard with a few posts here and there, I need to turn the creative juices up a notch.

At the moment the website is two colours primarily, Black and Green, which is a default theme on the builder I have used to create it.

Should anybody be reading this after the new website design is launched, this is what it looked like.

 

 

 

 

As much as I like the basic and limited styling involved in it, that is in essence what it is – limited.

I have been doing all the usual background work involved in redesigning something - visiting websites, seeing what they are doing, and picking and choosing elements of them that I want to incoporate into my design.

One of the websites I have visited has been really useful in deciding colour scheme’s and finding good ways of incorporating colour into my design is www.colorlovers.com. What it gives you are hundreds of options for colour pallettes, designs and shows colours which match really great together. So i will definately be clicking through these to decide on my colour scheme.

What I would also like to do with my website is make it pop. I’m thinking about doing this by incorporating textures from things which i’m doing in some of my FADS
So, because i’m running, I may incorporate some footprints in mud, and maybe use textures from things I use like my backpack and things like that.
Its all in the creative pot at the moment bubbling about.

The great news is that I have a friend who owns the company Gravex – here’s the link
Web Design & Development, SEO And Social Media – Gravex Web Services.
He’s a whizz who’ll be able to take my ideas, jostle them about, and make it one complete package – so I wont really have any problems there.

Anyway – back to the drawing board – time to get messy.

When I bump into people I havent seen for a while, one of the first things that is mentioned is
“what happened to your hair?”

This happens all the time, and to be honest it’s one of those stupid questions that have probably been asked around the world to 20% of the male population for as long as time has been recorded.

It isn’t rocket science, I’m going bald, but thanks for bringing it up.

Now, to be quite honest, I am actually far from being bald. I still have plenty of growth up top, but it is visibly thinning out. So for the past year and a half I have been shaving my head to a zero.
This brings up multiple questions, which piss me off so much.
“Why do you shave your head when you’ve still got hair?”
“but you looked so much better with hair?, you should grow it back”
“have you looked into hair transplants?”

Please for the love of God, mind your own business!
Some people tend to think it’s their god given right to lecture those less fortunate than themselves. They talk to you like they’re the masters of follicle growth, and talk to you like a dumbass, like you’ve never had hair before.
Mate, I know this must be incredibly hard for you to believe, but I had 24 years of having hair, I know how it works.

It’s just infuriating, what does my appearance have to do with you?

Now, like I said earlier – I choose to shave my head. People CONTINUALLY ask me why.
The definitive is answer below. So, for all you nosey people out there read it, and then leave me alone.

When I was younger, I prided myself on my hair and I used to puts lots of effort into it. The way I saw it was that I wasn’t the best looking lad around, and I couldn’t do anything to change that, but I could change my hair. I could style it and make it look really good, and I felt like that would bring my overall look up a notch – which made me feel good. So I did it.
When I hit 24, nothing had changed. I still enjoyed doing my hair, but it got to the stage where I would put some gel in my hands, run it through my hair, look down at my hands, and there would be hair all over my hands.
It became depressing, and it only got worse.
I would wash my hair in the sink, look into it, and see a mass of hair just floating about in it.

I decided to stop gelling my hair and have it flat. This meant I wouldn’t have to rub it, in theory reducing the chance of me pulling my own hairs out, and requiring much less washing which I found made it worse.

This theory ended up being bullshit, the truth is, if your hair is gonna fall out – it’s gonna fall out.

I would wake up in the morning, there would be some hairs on my pillow.
I would put a top on, hairs would fall out.
I would have a shower – hairs would be in the bottom of the shower tray.

If it’s coming out – it’s coming out no matter what you do. If your body decides to stop growing it, thats it.
The average person loses 150 strands of hair a day – so if my body decides not to grow it back? – it isn’t rocket science.

So I was walking around with this flat, un-styled hair for 6 months looking scruffy and unkept and feeling like an absolute nob – and it massively got me down. A lot more than I let on.
But I still had hair, so I thought fuck it, it isn’t gonna last forever – I’ll styling it again for now, at least I’ll feel better about myself, and won’t feel so scruffy.

So I started to style it.
You’ll be amazed how much your hair can change in 6 months.

I tried spiking it, from certain areas all you could see was scalp.
I tried messing it, left parting right, parting, straight forward, combed back.
It wasn’t working.
In only 6 months my hair had gone from thinning in places – to anorexic in places, and no matter what I did with it there would always be areas where you could see my scalp.

But I needed to do something with it, I felt like I was walking around like a tramp. So I just tried to style it the best I could.

Girls use the phrase “bad hair day”. It’s such a true expression.
Before, I used to feel good when I did my hair; it lifted my confidence because I felt like I looked good. Like that slight bit of styling I used to do made all the difference.
Now I was trying, and failing. I would get angry and upset every day when I would try and do my hair, knowing it looked shit and patchy.
I would see photos of myself, and reflections of myself, and all I would notice was bald patches, and everytime I would see one my heart would sink. It would kill me inside. These were often nights out, moments of my life when I made the most effort to look good, where lots of time was invested in trying to do the hair the best I could.
And even then it looked shit, patchy, and to be honest like a beggar. This is where I looked my best!
Every day was a bad hair day. Every day I felt like shit.

When I was young I used to see lads who were going thin on top, who were trying to save their hair, or comb it over and think – god thats so embarrassing – why don’t they just shave it off.

Then one day I realised I was slowly becoming that person, the person I used to feel embarrassed for. I was becoming obsessed with trying to cover my thinning patches. Don’t get me wrong, my hair was never as bad as the people I sometimes see, I still had lots of hair on top, but I knew that I was slowly becoming that guy.
I wasn’t gaining anything from doing my hair either, it only got me upset and I felt like a deflated when it was done as I had given up trying to get it to look right. I was obsessive about the thin areas.

I was really really depressed
I wouldn’t go into the mirrors & lighting sections of supermarkets, because seeing my hair in the reflections made me sad, and I got paranoid that the spot lighting used on the lights highlighted the bald patches – this all sounds ridiculous, but this was my life back then, this was how sad and obsessive I had become.

It’s a horrible moment in life when you realise that it’s all over, that the expiry date had lapsed and this was your future.

I couldn’t allow myself to continue down that road which only leads to misery, desperately clinging on to the last few strands of hair that I had left, which only upset me further.

But I still had hair on my head, I knew that even if I shaved it all off I would still have the shadow of where hair grew.
I came to the conclusion that once I shaved my hair off, it would just be a regular skin head cut. Lots of people had them.
I tried to think on the basis of whats worse?

• Having long hair, and having bald patches which grew leaving wispy strands of hair dotted about the place which I would desperately try to continue to style – thus becoming that person I always felt embarrassed for. Or
• Shaving my head, and having the shadow, but letting people get used to the skinhead look while the shadow slowly, and less obviously receded to the eventual full bald stage, without all the upset and heartache of trying to style it.

It was a no brainer, I decided I was going to shave my head.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t an easy, or simple thing to go through with.
Remember I had become obsessive about keeping the hair I had left, the idea of shaving it all off did terrify me. But what could I do? It was either, do it now, or become that desperate embarrassing bloke – I had to do It.

So I walked down to Argos – with tunnel vision – not thinking about anything else other than getting the clippers. I bought them, got home, instantly opened the box and shaved a massive line through the centre of my head.
It felt fantastic, like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders.
I felt like my cancer was gone, this thing that followed me around and filled my heart with so much pain had been cut from me.
I noticed a tear running down my cheek, I was crying, but I wasn’t sad, it was relief – it felt so damn good.

Anyway, I continued doing it, shaving it all off, making it look even, and for the first time in a couple of years I felt tidy.
I knew I looked massively different, but I felt good.
I felt confident again, because I felt tidy again. All my hair looked the same, because you could hardly see any of it hahahaha.
The patches were far less obvious, because it was like one whole patch – it looked even, and I felt great.

The only way I can describe it is like this.

Imagine your front garden.
Imagine its just grass, but it’s where you park your car.
Over time the grass stops growing where the car drives over, and overall just looks messy – that’s the way my hair was before.
Now imagine you tore all the grass out, and had it all tarmac’d.
It isn’t as pretty, but it looks far better than a patchy, tired looking garden.
That was my hair now

That’s how I felt anyway.

I knew that the hardest part was still to come, though – my girlfriends and my family’s reaction to it.

I was nervous to say the least, she had been out shopping all day, and I had done this without her knowing – I didn’t want to be talked out of it.

She came home, and she was shocked at first obviously, but she could see I was happy. She knew all the shit that I had been going through about my hair for a long time, and she was just happy to see the old me back. I looked different admittedly, but I was back. The happy me, the confident me, the version of me that she loved.

I’ll never know if she actually prefers me without hair or not, I would never ask her either. She just accepts me for being me, and loves me all the more for being happy.

My family gave me the same reaction, and I have never looked back.

So to wrap this up I’m happier now than I ever was with the thinning hair I had before, and Its made a huge difference to the way I feel day to day.

So when you see someone you know in the street, whose going bald and has decided to shave their hair off, don’t be an ass.
Don’t comment on the way they used to look, and don’t talk to them like you know better. You know nothing.
People go through a lot of hurting to get to this stage, instead just be grateful that your friend feels happy.

So there you have it, my big old reason for shaving my head, please stop asking me from now on