After the wig specialist shaved the very last bits of hair I had, and having picked up my very first wig, my mom, my oldest sister and I ended up on a terrace and I felt so relieved. Let’s take a little break, bring the wine! Finally no more hair loss, but still out and about with a pretty, full head of hair - even though it was as synthetic as can be and it was wavy, which my natural hair had never been. Other people also noticed that I hadn’t gone completely back to normal. I hadn’t even finished my first glass of wine when I got a message from a friend who’d just cycled past me asking what I’d done to my hair. Of course that was all we could talk about that afternoon, but after a while, we’d used the word ‘wig’ so many times that we’d had enough of it. I wanted something different! And since my new hair was here to stay, I might as well just give it a name.
We quickly came up with a bunch of hilarious names, from porn-like to mundane, from shitty to rustic. With a lot of the names, we knew someone with that name, and so that just wasn’t a good association. So we would laugh, scream and howl a lot. All of a sudden, a friend who’d got really into it yelled ‘Tina! Why don’t you call her Tina?’ She’d just been on holiday and they’d hired a cool jeep that they’d called Tina for fun, haha! Tina, I quite liked the sound of it. Pretty spicy and short. I thought it was funny to talk about my wig as if it was a person. ‘Tina’s on the wardrobe, she has the day off’, I’d say for example, when I started daring to go out more without my wig on. Or ‘Pff, Tina’s not feeling great today’. The fact that people reacted surprised made it even funnier. My friends got really into it. When one of them gave me an Ajax jacket as a present, she said ‘When you’re not wearing Tina, you can fit right in with the hooligans!’ Awesome!
‘After Truus there was Toos, which had bangs and was way too big. Once she almost blew into an old man’s face’
From then on, I named all the hair pieces that I got. All of them start with a nice, smooth T. So after Tina came Truus, also a synthetic one. Tanja was my first wig that was partly made of human hair. After that, there was Toos, which had bangs and was way too big. One time, it almost blew into an old man’s face while I was sitting on my mum’s electric bike. Thanks to a huge crowdfunding, I was able to buy Tilly, which is made of super long, untreated European human hair. And then I got Ted when I worked with a Belgian wig specialist. Right at the end of 2020 I bought Thea, just before my health insurance company drastically lowered the reimbursement. Tina, Truus, Tanja and Toos are no longer with us, but Tilly, Ted and Thea sit happily side by side on my wardrobe. I alternate between them so that they’ll last as long as possible. I still go out without my besties just as often as with them, though. Luckily, I don’t need them to be myself anymore.
