How a bald pageant contestant tackled her depression to compete for Miss Pennsylvania

Sam Ruland
York Daily Record

For a while, it seemed like the bad thoughts would just be something she had to get used to. The thoughts about suicide would come in waves — never something Sarah Pennington had the intention to act on, but they were there nonetheless.

Everyone has their bad days — depression really doesn’t discriminate. But she thought, how normal is it to be having these thoughts at the age of 13?

It was around this time that Sarah also started to lose her hair. 

First, her eyebrows disappeared, that’s how her mother, Michelle Pennington, describes it. But then, the strawberry blonde locks on her head became scarce and the bald patches seemed to multiply.

She looked in the mirror and felt ugly, ashamed of her appearance and scared of what people would think if they saw what she was hiding underneath her hats and headbands. 

“If you’re bald, people assume you’re either sick or old,” Sarah said. “But I am neither.”

The impulse to remove hair

Sarah has an impulse-control disorder called trichotillomania. It involves recurrent, irresistible urges to pull out hair from your scalp, eyebrows or eyelids, despite trying to stop.

And when at age 16 she couldn’t bear to look at herself in the mirror anymore, it was a red flag.

But her parents and teachers weren’t sure what to do after she resisted therapy. And Sarah, a pageant girl who once considered the stage a second home, was in no shape to help herself.

Holed up in her bedroom in Pottstown, she missed about two weeks of school, sleeping as much as 15 hours at a time, and then experiencing three-hour episodes of just pulling her hair out, she said.

Her ambition seemed to evaporate as she was struggling to fight through her meltdown, and the distress from her appearance heightened her depression and anxiety. She was unwilling — or unable — some days to garner the energy to get herself out of bed.

“I had seriously stopped functioning,” she said.

'I was not where I wanted to be'

Sarah Pennington, left, listens to her mother Michelle Pennington talk while her service dog Daisy sits at her feet.

That’s when, Sarah said, she sometimes thought about suicide. She was getting the extent of what was offered through out-patient therapy but couldn’t fight off feelings of helplessness.

There was a thread of questions playing on repeat in her mind: Why am I here? Why do I have to go through this? Why me? What’s the point?

“And I’ve now realized that’s not normal,” Sarah said. “Most people don’t go through that, but for me that was the norm.”

Sarah decided it was time to make a change. She asked her parents to find her inpatient treatment.

“I knew I needed help because I was not where I wanted to be,” Sarah said. “I wanted to be able to be a thriving individual, and at that point I was being consumed by my mental health condition.”

Inside Sarah's treatment, regaining her confidence

Daisy is trained to paw Sarah Pennington's arm when she starts to pull her hair, a compulsive order defined as Trichotillomania. Pennington competed in the Miss Pennsylvania Competition this weekend.

Sarah had seen therapists who couldn't help her. Some didn't even know how to spell her disorder, her mother said. 

"She felt like she was letting us down," Michelle Pennington said. "And we didn't know how to help her either."

Though initially skeptical about entering treatment, Sarah embraced the experience, she said, “because I thought it literally can’t get any worse.” She went to a facility in Wisconsin more than 900 miles away from her home and away from distractions. The only thing she had to focus on was getting better, she said. 

But that wasn't going to be easy. To get better, she would have to overcome insecurities she had been dealing with since childhood. 

“‘If you want to get out of the hospital," her doctor told her, "you have to take off your hat in public.’” It seemed like an impossible task, something Sarah had always been too self-conscious to do, but now it seemed like she didn’t have a choice in the matter.

“And everyone’s ultimate goal is to get out of there to be quite honest with you,” she said.

Sarah and her doctor went back and forth for weeks arguing over the topic.

More:Did a suicide website contribute to a young woman's death? Her family believes so.

“I was like, ‘I came here to stop this, I didn’t come here to be showing off my bald patches,’” Sarah remembers. “That’s not what I wanted to do.”

How Sarah accepted she wasn't at fault

Sarah Pennington laughs during an interview. Pennington lives with Trichotillomania, a compulsive disorder defined by pulling out your own hair.  She competed in the Miss Pennsylvania Competition this past weekend.

They finally came to an agreement that Sarah would take her hat off for minute in the hospital lobby while everyone was working.

“I did it and nothing bad happened. The world didn’t implode, nobody caught fire. Everything was fine and I literally thought, ‘I’ve been hiding this for five years and for what — what’s the point.’”

Until Sarah’s own life began to unravel, she couldn’t fully comprehend mental illness. Mental health is a slippery slope and it took her awhile to find her footing, she said.

“I was so hard on myself before,” Sarah said. “It took me a long time to understand that it wasn’t all my fault, that there is a chemical imbalance here and I have a disease.”

Sarah spent three months inpatient, and returned home armed with new insights, coping mechanisms and a revamped support team that she hoped would help her better navigate the ambitions she never completely abandoned.

Part of that revamped team was her support dog, Daisy. She's a rescue dog, with a black silky coat and she rarely leaves Sarah's side. Daisy has even been trained to paw at Sarah’s arm if she begins to start pulling on her head.

'I never saw a girl with a bald head wearing a crown'

The place where Sarah feels most at ease is the stage. She returned to the pageant world, a scene she abandoned when she was 13 years old, a few months after being released from treatment — she was ready to talk publicly about her disorder.

It wasn’t an easy undertaking. Sarah admits that she’s not the typical pageant girl — “and I’ll never be.”

She faced obstacles. Judges not sure how to deal with a contestant who so noticeably didn’t fit the mold of a "beauty queen," and directors who never worked with a contestant who also came to the dressing room with a dog by her side. 

It was a lack of education, Sarah said, she didn’t take offense. What she was doing was new. 

Some of it was logistics, said Deborah Butcher, executive director of the Miss Pennsylvania Scholarship Foundation. Working out travel arrangements for a dog, too, was an added undertaking. 

"It was different for us," Butcher said. "But having Daisy around was fun."

And Sarah is a representation of how the competition has changed over the years, Butcher said, a focus has shifted from an outward beauty to inward beauty. 

"When I was growing up I never saw a girl with a bald head wearing a crown," Sarah said. "I didn't have that person to look up to."

Her own struggles launched her career as an advocate, aspiring to change the conversation surrounding mental health and using her platform to educate the public on other body-focused repetitive behaviors too.

More:Tiny York dancer has big dreams of becoming a pro ballerina

She’s not exactly sure where this drive comes from, but she does remember one quote that was hanging on the wall at the hospital in Wisconsin: "She needed a hero, so she became one." It's been her mantra ever since.  

"Bald women are beautiful and you can be beautiful the way you are. I want to show girls like me that they are being represented and they have power," Sarah said. "I can relate to them in a way no one else can." 

This week the top 28 candidates met at the Pullo Family Performing Arts Center in York to compete for Miss Pennsylvania, a preliminary to the Miss America Competition. Sarah was among them representing central Pennsylvania in the competition.

Sarah didn’t place in the competition. She wasn’t first runner up or second runner up, but she wasn’t disappointed either.

“Competing isn’t about winning for me,” Sarah said. “I feel good about the outcome either way if I touched someone or connected with someone in the audience."

And she wasn’t sure if she would ever be here — a place in her life where she feels confident and beautiful — "and strong."

Moving forward

Sarah is about to begin a new chapter in life. In the fall, she will begin classes at the Savannah College of Art and Design where she will be pursuing a specialty in motion graphics, hoping to one day work in the film industry.

A few years ago, she never would have imagined traveling that far away from home or her family. But today, it's not so scary, it's exciting. 

With Daisy by her side, she's convinced she can handle any bad day. And even though her run for Miss Pennsylvania may have come to an end sooner than she hoped, her competition days are nowhere near behind her. She's hoping to take to a stage in Georgia sometime in the near future. 

"I continue to think this is how far I’m going to get and then I surpass it and honestly I continue to surprise myself."