I’ve been combing out my curls and scraping my hair into a big claw clip and sometimes a tired scrunchie that’s losing its elastic. The frizzled, frayed ends stick out, but the top is clamped down, calmer, and it draws my face towards the ground. It takes less effort, I can ignore it. It is tidied away, unbudging, slipped a sleeping pill, but it also feels like a tiny betrayal. On a call with Annie the other day, I told her about all the knots in my head that had built up in the weeks since we’d last spoken. She untied them all one by one and wrote me new permission slips that I gripped gladly to my chest as I left the Zoom room. I texted her to say thank you afterwards, and remembered that I’d forgotten to ask one - less pertinent - question, less of a knot, more of a conundrum. Should I cut my hair short again or let it grow out?
At the end of last year, when I got home from my time in France - during which I imagined cutting it all off and scorching the dying ends of it on the fire we lit nightly - I did that, but less dramatically, more ceremoniously, with the warmest, most thoughtful person who has ever cut my hair, Ellie.
In her yellow salon, surrounded by framed photos of icons from the 60s and 70s, I told her about how it weighed me down, how the stress of the year meant it was falling out of its own volition anyhow. We both mourned the months and years it had taken to grow it to where it hang, acknowledged how growing it out had been its own healing, its own rebellion. So we settled on it, and decided to shed the dead weight, cut ties with the year that had burned me out, all the way up to my ear lobes. Ellie razored the tiny hairs at the back of my neck, and I loved running my fingers over the soft buzz, and later, washing less than a handful of thicker, healthier hair in the shower, no longer detangling the long, thinning threads that used to stick to the skin of my back. I loved running a wide toothed comb through it while it was dripping wet, through just its few inches, and letting the weight of the comb drop suddenly when the ends stopped.
Relief. Relief. Relief.
And over the months of this year of recovery, I’ve let my hair grow out again; really, I just haven’t booked in another appointment and it has been getting quietly longer while I’ve focused my attention elsewhere. It floats on the tips of my shoulders now. The point of decision. Chop or grow. Chop or grow.
So I asked Annie, because that has been the best thing I’ve done this year, asking Annie for her thoughts, getting her perspective on things, because the answer is never what I think it will be.
And she said : “I was thinking yesterday on the call it is a very good length // … I really like the energy it has rn like quite a lot of life in it // So I feel like don’t change it too much.”
On the call, I felt very aware of its bigness - it’s unruliness - no longer a swooshy little bob, tucked behind my ears, yet still not hanging long and flatter down my back: somewhere in the middle. Gravity defiant in a way. If I let it down, I have to run my fingers through the thickness of it and flip it to one side, and then the other, and I was finding it a bit much how it asked me to tend to its shifting whims, and I was thinking, maybe this is distracting for those around me. So I’ve mostly been combing it down, scraping back the muchness into the grip of a claw clip or the hold of a scrunchie, hiding it away, keeping it quiet. Tame.
But Annie made me think. There’s life in it. Maybe the volume and the frizz and the largeness doesn’t need to be tamed and defined into neat little coils, or flattened down for ease, politeness, or to be discrete. There is life in it. It carries an energy, a force. Last year, I cut off the dead weight, stubbed out and tapped off the embers, and this year, rather than accumulating more, like emptying a junk drawer only to pile other crap inside, I’ve been building something different, growing in a different direction, towards something less formal, less because I have to, and more because I’m learning I deserve to and it feels fucking good to.
I see so much refinement around me. Meticulous dressing. Slick eyebrows. Concise job titles. Neat frameworks. Quick fixes. Flawless skin. And I’ve been stressing myself to exhaustion trying to draw straight lines in the wilderness of my life and my work and apparently my hair too. And I am not so sure why. I’ve never been refined. I could cut my hair into a style and have it blow dried in a way that I could never, and would never, replicate. I could give myself a job title that would cut the crusts, the best bits, out of what I do. I could paint in monochrone, but I’d miss the rest of my palette. I could draw a road map, one straight line, and spend the whole journey looking out the window at the moon waxing and waning, and the birds flying just for fun in front of it, and longing.
Letting my hair be what it is means having to run my fingers through it, flip it to one side, and then the other. It means letting there be movement, life, frizz, irregular coils, loose waves, it means letting it catch the breeze and defy gravity. It means letting it grow and change and be full and vast some days, and softer and more relaxed on others. It means taking up space and asking for my attention, my admiration, my honouring of it. It means shifting, evolving and going its own way. No still point. No straight lines.
Letting it be
a part of me:
irregular, full of life,
changing;
a force of its own - saying something,
and not always quietly.
Just so good xxxx