When I was young I thought of bald men as great men, or at least I thought they were men who had strived so hard to become something other than themselves, their original selves, that their hair had no choice but to recede before disappearing as well.

First, there was Michael Jordan, who if he wasn't bald then presented as bald, or seemed bald to me, during my absurdly hot afternoons after we moved from Canberra to Texas.

We were 10 years old, and would spend all our free time playing basketball, tirelessly, or watching those same Michael Jordan VCR tapes over and over.

Then there was Roald Dahl. This bald man was, I thought, even greater than Michael Jordan. This man who proved, through fiction, through imagination, that time travel was possible.

Staring at his bald dome on the inside jacket of that old book cover I wondered if my life was marked for any level of greatness. I remember wondering if, one day, my hair would finally leave me.

But I wasn't so sure. My dad had a thick shock of hair; he was a military man, and his hair seemed rigid or dependable, as if he had simply willed it to remain, or had cancelled the retreat all those other men had failed to prevent.

I was 11 and I was stumped. I considered my father a great man, as great as any basketball player or writer, and yet here he was with enough hair to cover them both. So I decided to ask my mum.

"Oh, your hair's going alright", she said. "You can count on that". We were at the dinner table, and she reminded us that her late father had been bald and her brothers were bald and that the bald gene came from the mother's side of the family.

I remember almost celebrating, but then growing sad, silent, because I understood, then, that the things we grow used to and the people we love would one day disappear.

As a young boy, Oliver dreamed of losing his hair. ( Supplied: Vicki Mol )

The first attempt

I have always been extremely vain, even as a child. When I was eight, before we moved to Texas, my friend and I rode our BMX bikes to the local barber. The plan was to shave our heads, but to keep the fringe, as was the fashion at the time.

But as I watched my hair fall down around me I froze, observing, in horror, as the person in the mirror became someone other than me.

"Keeping the fringe, mate?" the barber asked, but, by then, my throat was dry; I couldn't talk.

"You f***ed it", my mate said when I walked out of the barbershop, running his hands through his fringe the way a person does when they have received exactly what they want.

By the age of 14, it became apparent that none of us would play in the NBA. It seems funny or dramatic to write this now, but back then, we played, trained, so tirelessly, so hard, that we thought everything would work out.

I was obsessed with Jason Williams who played for the Sacramento Kings, the way he could pass the ball behind his back off his elbow, the way he would pull up and shoot just inside half court.

He had a shaved head and they called him White Chocolate, and one evening I told my friend's mum that I was going to shave my head again so I could be like White Chocolate too.

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"White Chocolate?" my friend's mum said, frowning, then smirking, ashing her cigarette into a pot plant.

"Don't do that, your head's so small ... you'll look like an egg!"

Perhaps she was sensitive. Only a few days earlier, her son, during PE, had pulled his own hair back in the mirror and yelled, "I'm receding, dude! No one's going to sleep with me if I'm bald!"

I was no longer 10 years old; I knew a few things — although, in truth, very little — about attraction and masculinity, but this sudden declaration threw me.

Here was my friend — the sort of alpha male of our group, the guy who made the girls laugh, who went on dates to the movies, who could, if not quite dunk, then at least touch the rim — announcing without a hint of sarcasm that his life was over.

And while I understood the practicalities of losing one's hair, I was still years away from going through puberty. I told him not to worry, that I was sure he'd still appeal to the girl whose front teeth crossed one over the other, this imperfection that we all found wildly endearing.

'In the end, I was scared of being myself'

When I was 22 I shaved my head for the second time. I told people I was raising money for cancer, that I was doing the World's Greatest Shave, and while I raised a meagre amount of money, the truth was that I did not care for cancer.

I was receding, and I wanted to know what I would look like bald.

In that Melbourne single-storey terrace on Nicholson Street, I invited a friend over who had a pair of clippers, and we shaved my head to Elliot Smith's Needle In The Hay.

It was a joke, of course, but also not a joke, and as my hair fell off I closed my eyes and pretended I was in a movie, as if I was Luke Wilson in the Royal Tenenbaums, melodramatically, mourning my youth.

Suffice to say, my hair grew back. But over the ensuing years, my hairline began to recede, further, and each morning in the shower I would pull it back, observing whether I looked the same as the day before, whether I had regressed.

I spoke to myself, as perhaps we all do sometimes: with an intense negativity that I did not understand then and I do not understand now.

But in the end, I suppose, I was scared of being myself; that I would not be liked, that I would end up alone.

I was 29, now, and after several months of quiet obsessing, I watched hours of people shaving their heads on YouTube.

I Googled Bruce Willis. I Googled Jason Statham. Perhaps, most importantly, I Googled Daniel Day-Lewis, who seemed like the man I wanted to be: someone like my father, who was strong and noble and who did not give a f***.

"In the end, I was scared of being myself", writes Oliver Mol. ( Supplied )

'And then it was gone'

Three months ago, I walked to the hairdresser on Abercrombie Street and announced that I wanted to shave my head.

Pepsi, who would become my barber, said that no one was shaving their heads anymore, that the '70s were returning, that he remembered the '70s, and then he asked if I was sure.

"I'm sure," I said. "Okay," he said. And then it was gone.

For a while, I avoided photos, or looking at photos, because I did not recognise myself or like what I saw.

I would stare at myself in the mirror, at first, only in glances, as if glaring at an imposter masquerading as me.

But then, unexpectedly, the interruptions became fewer, and one day I even burst out laughing, because it was so stupid and serious and absurd, this pathetic vanity, and because I remembered the little boy whose prayers had finally been answered — or would be answered in the years to come.

The scariest things of all are those which we cannot see and, maybe, I think now, there is something beautiful about shaving, illuminating, receding: about accepting that everything we have grown attached to, have loved, will one day end.

Oliver Mol is the author of Lion Attack!