No Hair Day
When the whole world can see you changing
Welcome back to Eat The Strawberry, a newsletter about the process of change and the desire to enjoy the little (amazing) things in life amidst the chaos that surrounds us. Thank you all for being here! I know I said this would be monthly, but this post has been ready to go and I know someone who may benefit from reading it this week ❤️."Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don't get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit." - Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart
We were all set. A folding chair with a trash bag flattened underneath was set up next to the big window in the living room, and I sat in it wearing a brightly rainbow-colored cape. My husband stood behind me with the clippers. One week earlier the kids had taken scissors to my long hair, snipping pieces of it to save, the next day holding my hand and telling me I looked great while my hairdresser gave me a pixie cut. Today we would shave that pixie cut right off.
For a few months I had been nursing the sense that something in my life was about to change, but I wasn’t sure how or in what way. And now that I was putting many things on pause to go through chemotherapy, I knew for sure that I was going to change. So far all of these musings on transformation and what was happening in my mind and in my body had been internal and quiet, shared only with those I chose. Now the fact that something was different would be immediately available to everyone I saw - the minute I stepped outside with my new buzzcut was the minute that literally anyone I bumped into would know that something had changed.
In her memoir “The Year of the Horses,” Courtney Maum writes about a period of her life during which she struggles with depression and doesn’t eat as a result of it. Later, when she becomes well, she has to buy new clothes to fit her now healthy body. I’ve heard her speak about this new wardrobe as an “external marker of change”. Sometimes we go through transitions that are entirely internal, never to be revealed to those around us, or maybe announced at a time of our choosing (“We’re moving across the country!”), but other times a change we are going through is announced externally simply by our bodies moving through the world in our day-to-day lives.
Going from having long hair to having no hair and now slowly growing it back has been a raw experience of an external marker of change. When I first learned I would be going through chemotherapy I considered cold capping but somewhere deep down I knew I didn’t want do it (I actually said the words “I don’t want to do it” to my best friends over dinner in Santa Fe a few days after my diagnosis). In the end I was relieved to hear that it wasn’t recommended by my doctor and I fully accepted that there was going to be no hiding from the world what was going on. I impulsively bought a (very) expensive wig that I thought could camouflage what I was going through but I was uncomfortable in it from day one - no amount of color change, cut, or style was going to make me feel like that hair was mine. I received beautiful scarves as gifts (like this one from Ozma sent from an dear friend in California), played around with fake ponytails, tried my hand as a blonde, and wore a pink wig on 4th of July. I had fun with it, and at the same time I learned what it was like to be truly vulnerable and lose the privilege of secrecy I had held onto through many other changes in my life before this point.
This is Eat The Strawberry so I have to take a moment to lay out just a few of the incredible moments of pure joy gifted to me during this time - things I never would have experienced had I cold capped or never had cancer in the first place. One spring morning I woke up to the birds chirping and my then 3-year-old’s dark curls laying softly on my bald head, her little hand on my cheek. One early summer day I ran into the freezing New Jersey ocean head first, catching my breath and then bending over with laughter with my big kids. Later in the summer there was a concert with my oldest friends, summer rain bouncing off our heads while we danced and sang. None of these sensations would have been the same with a full head of hair. Even now, as my hair grows back, I have the pleasure of greeting a 4-year-old in a tracksuit every morning at daycare drop-off who asks me with clear-eyed curiosity why I have a “daddy haircut.”
These experiences are ones I am grateful to have had, even though they came along with an utter lack of privacy. There are other metamorphoses like these - things that the world can see whether we want them to or not - pregnancy, aging, adolescence. There are others that I haven’t experienced that I imagine may be much, much harder. No matter how private we want these things to be, everyone we encounter can see that we are changing.
I would love to hear from you in the comments about external markers of change that you’ve experienced or witnessed, and how that altered your experience of whatever change you were going through. And if you know someone who has experienced this please share this with them as I would love to hear from them too.
A few cool related things:
This amazing Philly artist Melanie Bilenker makes art out of hair and has now started to make dandelions out of gray hair. Look at how beautiful her work is!
Dacy Gillespie’s amazingly relatable piece on body grief in her Substack “unflattering” touches on how it feels to give up the body we once had.
Until next time…eat the strawberry.
“There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly. ”
Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World
This had me thinking about how our society might be different if more profound changes or difficulties that people were experiencing were somehow visible externally - would it make it easier for us to be empathetic to someone’s challenges and lived experiences?
Also the image of your children snipping pieces of your long hair to save… oh my heart♥️