How do I get comfortable on video calls with alopecia?

A conference room never handed me a mirror. Video calls do. You sit down to talk about a deadline and there you are in the corner of the screen, lit from above, for fifty straight minutes. I have been fully bald since seventeen, I speak on stages for a living, and I still catch myself checking that little rectangle instead of listening.

So let's fix the mechanics first, because most of this is fixable, and then talk about the part that isn't.

Why does a video call feel harder than a real room?

Because in a real room, you can forget what you look like. Nobody in that room is showing you your own face. On a call, you get a live feed of yourself at a size and angle no one has ever seen you at, and your eyes go there whether you want them to or not. Researchers studying video fatigue gave it a name: mirror anxiety. It is not vanity. It's what happens when you put a mirror in the middle of somebody's workday.

Which means the first move isn't a mindset shift. It's a settings change.

What's the one setting that helps most?

Hide your own video. Zoom calls it Hide Self View. Teams and Meet have the same thing tucked under your own tile. Everyone else still sees you. You just stop seeing you.

I put this off for a long time because it felt like a small thing. It isn't. The first call I ran without my own face on screen, I noticed I was actually listening, not scanning my scalp between sentences. The self-checking wasn't making me look better. It was making me half-present.

Do this once, before your next call:

• Join early. Check your framing and lighting for ten seconds.
• Hide self-view. Then leave it hidden. All day.
• Notice what you get back. Most people feel the drop in tension inside one meeting.

How do I stop my head from glaring on camera?

Move your light. This is the tip nobody gives us and it changes more than any filter will. A ceiling light sits directly above a bare head and hits it straight on, so the camera reads a bright spot where your hair used to break up the light. That's physics, not a flaw.

Put a soft light in front of you, roughly level with your eyes. A window works. A cheap desk lamp bounced off a wall works. Then turn the overhead down or off. While you're at it, stack some books under the laptop so the camera sits at eye height instead of shooting up at you from your lap. Two minutes of work, and suddenly you look like a person in a meeting instead of a person under interrogation.

Half of what you think is your face is actually your ceiling light.

Should I just keep my camera off?

Off for a day is fine. Everybody has those. Off as a policy costs you something real, and I want to be honest about it rather than nice about it.

In remote work, the people who get pulled into things are the ones with faces. Trust moves faster when someone can see you. If your camera is off because you're wiped out, that's a choice you made. If it's off because you're hiding, then the hiding is making the choice, and I know from years under hats and du-rags how quietly that arrangement gets heavier. This is Recognition, the first of the 5 Rs I teach: name it accurately before you decide anything. Tired is one thing. Hiding is another. Only you know which one it is today.

Do I owe anyone an explanation?

No. And you'll probably want to give one anyway, once, to stop yourself from wondering all quarter whether they're wondering.

Keep it to a breath and keep going. "Quick thing before we start, I have alopecia, so no hair anywhere. Not contagious, not sick, just bald. Okay, slide two." The speed is the message. You're telling them it's a fact, not an announcement. I wrote out the longer set of these lines, including the ones for hallway questions and the joke that lands wrong, in how to tell coworkers about your alopecia.

One more thing worth doing on a slow afternoon: update your profile photo to match how you actually show up. A headshot from before, still sitting on your work profile, quietly turns every call into a reveal. If that idea makes your stomach drop, start smaller and read how confidence actually gets built first. It's built out of small repeated proofs, and a profile photo is a good one.

What happens after a few weeks of this?

Nothing dramatic, which is the point. The light stops being wrong. The rectangle stops being a mirror. You get through a whole call without auditing yourself, then a whole week, and one day you realize you've been leading meetings with your face in plain view and thinking about the actual work the entire time.

That's the shift. Not loving how you look on camera. Just no longer paying rent on it.

This is lived experience, not medical advice. For medical questions about alopecia, talk with a professional; for community and resources, start with the National Alopecia Areata Foundation.