A head full of health

 "Ooh, your hair is short again," they said.

"Wow, that is really short!" he said.

"It really suits you!" she said.

"To start over, right?" 

I nodded mindlessly while taking in the remarks. It was all of it and... none of it.

It was just hair. No big deal. It will grow back should I not like it anymore.

That is what I have always said after I tried yet another hairdo - whether short, really short, or long(er). The hair didn't define me. How could it? 

The length of my hair wasn't able to change my inner world. It didn't make me prettier when I was feeling low, or less pretty when I was upbeat.

"It was just hair. No big deal."

The length of my hair didn't have anything to do with the troubled heart I was carrying around. It didn't have anything to do with the conundrum I had become:  wanting both to stand out and fit in. Desperate to be a rebel who didn't give a shit as well as the woman I saw in others. The pretty lady with long hair, in dresses, with perfectly "painted" nails and faces.

Chopping off your own hair while being female, wasn't exactly a common trait. 

Did anyone ask me why I cut my hair so short that I could easily be a stand-in for G.I. Jane? 

Not the first

I wasn't the first woman to cut her hair short, and I will not be the last -- I'm sure. Usually, when women we see as role models - the actors, models, singers - go short, they end up having pixie cuts. But when you G.I. Jane yourself, there has to be some urgency to it.

Over the span of eight years, I had cut my own hair twice. The first time resulted in a diagnosis: "mild psychosis". Truth be told, I was in a real bad state. Decades of struggling with my identity and self-worth, being bullied for years on end, and becoming a scapegoat can do that to a person.

I still remember the moment I went for the cut. It was not a spur of the moment thing. Au contraire. It was decades in the making. The light in my eyes had decided to break up with me. There was a choice: slamming the scissors in my skin or murder my hairdo.

The second time - a few weeks ago - I was fully aware of what I was doing. The child in me wanted to get rid of the hair and commit to what I really wanted. I didn't want to be a picture-perfect. She couldn't be a picture-perfect. That is why she decided, age 12, to let a family friend cut her hair short for the first time.

Many cuts followed.

The last time, in the bathroom, in front of the mirror, I was well aware of the significance of the moment. And smiled when the white porcelain of the washstand turned ginger. Later, at the salon I frequented, the hairdresser finished what I had started. And she shared with me for the very first time that my hair wasn't what one would call: easy. It was thick, dry, there was a lot of it, and had not one, not two, but three crowns!

"I was fully aware of what I was doing."

That's when I laughed out loud. My hair is just as mischievous as I am!

I am not easy. I am not a dime a dozen. I am peculiar. And at this age, 54, I didn't give a shit anymore. I only wanted to be, me.

Not the last

No -- I didn't cut my hair for a new start. I cut it because I was - finally - trying on the me I left to please others.

It still astonishes me when I recall the story of how my life as a ginger began.

One which my mother recalled many a time:

"I was standing in the sunlight, with you on my arm. That's when your father said: 'what the hell did you do to the child's head!?' I wasn't sure what he was talking about, so I asked him to switch places. 'Ah -- I didn't put anything on her head. She will be a ginger!'"

A few weeks prior, I had suddenly turned bold - no more white hair.

So, when I say, I'm different, I don't joke around.

Buzz

I am definitely not the only one to chop off her own hair. The author of - amongst other books - Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert, recently wrote an essay about it. I found this to be compelling:

"I can still remember an article I read in The Village Voice way back in the late 1980s about women shaving their heads as an act of both liberation and beauty. 

"I remember many of the interviewees using the word cleansing to describe the act, and one woman said that the ritual of shaving her head every week made her feel not only powerful and healthy but as if her life was suddenly in perfect order. 

"My hair always baffled my mother (who cut it short for her own convenience when I was a kid, causing me to constantly be mistaken for a boy—which I hated), and as I grew older, it baffled me, too. And thus began my lifelong search all over the world for hairdressers who could “do something” with my hair."

And after chopping it off:

"Most of all, I love the radical independence that this hairstyle affords me. I have spent more days of my life than I care to count sitting in a chair as if I were some incompetent 18th-century aristocrat while others tried to “do something” with my hair. But now I do it all myself. And yes, each time I buzz my hair away, it feels like a cleansing—and like a reclamation of my true spirit. I actually find it weird now to look at pictures of me from when I had hair. The prettier my hair looks in the old pictures, the sadder it makes me feel—to imagine that I gave so much of my time and attention and money to trying to look like something I am not."

And shouldn't we just be something we feel we ARE? Whatever that may be? Hair really is just part of who we are, and the sooner we learn this, the better it is for our (mental) health.

I'll show you

Who am I? What am I supposed to be?

A writer? A poet? An artist? And WHY didn't I recognize them as building blocks of The One True Self earlier in life?

Here's my tale of how I needed to derail before I understood creativity got game.

Writer

I started writing poetry when I couldn't escape the words that kept popping up in my brain. Poetry was there during the hardest of days. The cruelest of nights. When mental illness wasn't "elsewhere" but right here, right now. 

Even before mental illness became a reality, I wrote to understand life. Life asked me to take notice, and so I blogged about subjects that mattered to me. The subjects varied - yet, injustice, (animal) cruelty, and suffering were returning topics:

Elephants abused by circus employees who wounded them by using metal hooks.

A young man in Russia killed by former classmates by pushing a bottle so far up his ass that he bled to death. Just because he was gay.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Mexican Gulf destroying nature and wildlife.

At the time, I didn't recognize that I was - in fact - attempting to suffocate my own suffering. I would reason away my torments - yes, I was in pain but these awful stories needed a voice! What I didn't know was that the mask I had on for ages was slowly fading. A friend asked the one question I didn't want to face:

Why do you continue to write about injustice and abuse when it hurts you this much?

It wasn't right that I was bawling my eyes out every single time before I could write another blog post. The first signs of my deteriorating health were there; I needed to work on myself rather than focusing on animals and people I didn't know.

Art

Things would get worse before they got better. I had been wandering through life all the way into adulthood failing miserably. I didn't fit in. I was paddling between heaven and hell without knowing the waters. As a teenager, I figured:

The Adults are in the know - I should listen to them. 

The multi-cultured working-class adults, that is. The ones who lived by the How to become a successful Regular Joe For Dummies. The index of the handbook quickly informed me: getting off the beaten track isn't in here.

Employment, earning good money, face value, family life, and security - that was what one should strive for!

Art just wasn't a realistic career goal. I needed to secure a job, a life - a better life - that included a steady income and - yes - raising my own family. 

But that wasn't for me. I became the one black sheep of the family - sandwiched between "suit yourself" and "boh", which roughly translates into I really don't get you or See if I care.

At least, I did fulfill one wish: I earned good money, more than they had hoped for. Which - oddly enough - made me even more of an outsider.

In time, my trying times turned into disgust. Not only didn't we get along, the love I once had for the family, left me completely. I got diagnosed with PTSD, and lost the will to live.

After decades of struggling, I was sure that my inability to fit in was exactly what was wrong with me. 

But - as it goes - in the struggling one can find the answer:

You forgot how to play! 

Authenticity

Yes - while wanting to be accepted for me, I totally forgot what me, myself, and I used to love:

DRAWING!

And so, after decades, I decided to get back on track. I derailed for a reason. The career did serve me for a while but now the time had come to (re-)claim my authenticity. 

I am an artist. And at 54, I better stay with it.

I don't need a label. I am not just a writer. I am not just a blogger, a poet, or what have you. I am not just an artist, a creator.

I am like a rope: strands tied together, different layers, different principles.

"I did my best in trying to understand what life is - now I would like to start living."

I didn't become an artist and a writer earlier in life because The Adults taught me I wouldn't stand a chance. They made decisions based on their own experiences, and I can't blame them. We are responsible for our own right AND wrong-doings.

I do blame myself for using their measuring stick for far too long. 

Authenticity really is the only point of measure that matters.