04052013
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| I never knew I could stretch my neck that long! |
Yesterday I got a new haircut. I had a
few reasons for it:
short hair is practical when
traveling
short hair is comfortable during
the summer
my hair hadn't been cut in years
and the condition of the ends was starting to be poor
I wanted to challenge myself with
something I'm not used to.
Now, the first three deal with
practicality and I fully stand by them, and this new cut serves this
purpose well. This challenge, though, really did prove to be a
challenge!
I wanted my hair cut shorter than it's
ever been and also stripped from any particular shape, form or style.
I also wanted to test whether this hair type would turn into
an afro when short enough. Interestingly enough, this hair type does
turn into an afro – but not in the way I imagined it to, and this
is where all my reactions start to pour in, lol.
My first thoughts when seeing myself in
the mirror with the new cut were “it IS an afro!”, “I look like
my father?!”, “I look like a boy”. So the first things I
reacted to were 1) the expectations I had set about the new hair, and
2) the loss of femininity, which I will return to. The hairdresser
told me that my hair type goes into a “shock” when cut and will
“curl up” in a couple of weeks – and so now my hair is somewhat
straight, the cut doesn't really look like anything but a bush and I
have no choice but to wait for the hair to become “as it's supposed
to” - if it ever does. For all I know, my hair could decide to stop
growing right now.
So I became resistant to go out because
I was afraid of the reactions I would receive because of this hair. I
eventually had to, and it was interesting to see how I began
interpreting people's gestures according to my negative expectations.
For example, a man in the bus glanced at me and after that didn't
look at me again – and I interpreted this to mean he had been
“checking me out” and was now “avoiding me” because I wasn't
“feminine enough”. I realized that with my “feminine” hair I
have gotten used to being validated by how men look at me with
approval and women with jealousy, which is a pretty destructive
pattern now that I've spotted it, because it feeds competition among
women and contributes to the expectation that women ought to look a
certain way. To use a term I found in a study of masculinity, I now
stand here as a “gender traitor”, and that is a position I intend
to utilize to stand as an example. With the loss of femininity I also
felt like I had lost all of my “sex appeal”, but then I realized
I would rather look huggable than fuckable – I'd rather come across
as an approachable human being than an image in flesh loaded with
symbols, meanings and assumptions.
I also realized that I have attached a
whole myriad of words into different types of hair – beautiful,
ugly, feminine, masculine, dumb, stupid, embarrassing, pretty, girly,
cool – not realizing it is all just hair, dead cells growing
from a certain area of my body onto which we have attached all kinds
of cultural meanings and symbols that are not actually real. I will
discharge these words from their positive and negative connotations
so that hair would just be hair to me.
Most interesting about this has been,
aside all this social stuff, how this has affected my self-image. As
I have been unable to associate this form of hair, this shape that
I've become, with anything positive, I've noticed my mind getting
confused. All I associate this haircut with are clowns, my father and
silly looking boys, and none of these is what I want to attach to my
self-image! I want to be feminine and sexy and pretty! So my mind is
in the search for a shape that would be “cool”, “pretty” or
even comprehendible, because now every time I look into the mirror I
kinda flinch, lol, because my hair looks so weird to me, more like a
hat than hair. So every now and then I get this visualized image of
myself, a shape or a shadow of a kind, that is an attempt to create a
self-image. It has been interesting to see how much of myself I
define based on how I look, especially around the head area, and how
befuddled I get when this mechanism is interrupted. To avoid feeling
like I've “lost myself” I've got to remind myself with breath
that I am HERE, I am still me, no matter what kind of hair grows out
of my head, I am the same underneath it.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to doubt my decision to cut my hair and to try and get
myself to not walk into the hair salon and to call it off by using
excuses and manipulation strategies such as “long hair isn't that
inconvenient”, “what if it never grows back?”, “you will
never be as pretty as you are now!”, “what if people will dislike
me?”.
I forgive myself that I've
accepted and allowed myself to try to “turn my head” by thinking
“long hair isn't that inconvenient”, trying to get myself to act
against what I've concluded to be the best choice from a practical
viewpoint.
I forgive myself that I've
accepted and allowed myself to think “what if it never grows
back?”, here implying that if it doesn't grow back my life is
forever ruined because I have assigned hair a position where it
defines my value and consequently affects the quality of my life,
not realizing that hair is just hair and affects my life in no way
whatsoever aside from practical issues – and also trying to
manipulate myself into withdrawing from my decision with a scaring
tactique.
I forgive myself that I've
accepted and allowed myself to think “you will never be as pretty
as you are now!”, trying to scare and threaten myself into
changing my decision with the belief that “feminine” hair is
what makes me pretty and that “prettiness” overall has any
value.
I forgive myself that I've
accepted and allowed myself to think “what if people will dislike
me?”, trying to scare myself to change my decision with worst-case
scenarios of social consequences – not realizing that if someone
actually chooses to dislike me because of my hair, they aren't
really looking at who I am but the image of who they
thought/believed/perceived me to be.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to create and build up expectations and images in my
mind about what my hair will look like when it's cut to a certain
length, not realizing that as I have never had my hair this short I
cannot possibly know what it will look like and how the curls will
adjust to the change, also not realizing that with these expectations
I hinder myself from accepting whatever the end result will be.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to react to the end result by thinking “it's not how
I imagined it to be”, not taking into consideration the practical
fact that in my imagination my hair was cut even shorter and that in
this length what I imagined is not possible.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to make it harder for myself to accept my new haircut
as I have held onto ideal images of how it “should” be.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to react to the association I had to my father and how
my hair kind of looks similar to his, resisting looking like my
father because that means “loss of femininity” and “loss of
youth” to me.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to react to the association I had to some memories of
teenage boys with afro's / bushy curly hair, resisting looking
similar to these boys because to me that means “loss of femininity”
and “loss of sex appeal”.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to fear that my hair won't curl up as it's “supposed
to” and that it will remain somewhat straight, here reacting to the
loss of my curls which I have defined an essential part of my
self-image.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to define myself according to my curls, believing and
perceiving that if I lost my curls I would no longer be “me” -
not realizing that this “me” is only the self-image of me but not
who I am in fact.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to want my hair to curl up because that would mean
there is a chance that my hair won't remain “ugly” and might turn
“pretty”.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to attach certain kinds of hair to negative
associations within and as the following words: “ugly”,
“embarrassing”, “dumb”, “short”, “boy hair”, “man
hair”, “masculine”, “stupid”, “ruined”, “trashy”
(also in finnish: “nolo”, “tyhmä”, “pölö”, “ruma”,
“miehekäs”, “kynitty”, “homssuinen”, “poikatukka”,
“miesten kampaus”, “dorka”).
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to attach certain kinds of hair to positive
associations within and as the following words: “pretty”, “nice”,
“beautiful”, “attractive”, “feminine”, “girly”,
“cool”, “curly”, “flowing”, “thick”, “cute” (in
finnish: “nätti”, “kaunis”, “söpö”, “kiva”,
“tyttömäinen”, “naisellinen”, “kihara”, “paksu”,
“enkelinkihara”, “pukeva”, “ihana”).
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to assign certain forms and shapes of hair specific
values which I have used to define myself and others.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to define myself according to what kind of hair I've
got through the words and values I associate with it, creating all of
my personalities and characters based on the self-image I have built
upon my hair.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to define others according to the hair they've got
through the words and values I associate with it, creating
assumptions and expectations of others based on who they instantly
appear to be instead of taking the time to get to know a person to
see who they actually are.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to require to build myself a self-image based on what
I look like especially around the head area (face, head shape, hair,
shoulders) and to get confused when what I looked like did not fit
into any category of what I wanted to look like.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to want to look like certain ideals and to fear
looking like certain worst-case scenarios – not realizing that what
I look like bears no value to myself in fact, and that I will be here
all the same no matter what the visual aspect of my hair is.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to give value to the visual aspect of my hair and thus
validate the cultural construct of evaluating people according to
their hair.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to not realize that what matters to me in fact is how
my hair feels and not how it looks like (unless I'm playing the game
of “getting approval within society to reach a goal” which I am
not at the moment).
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to overlook the fact that this short hair feels really
nice and comfortable because I have given more value to others'
experience of me than my experience of myself.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to fear that others will react negatively to me
because of my hair with judgement, rejection, ignoring, mocking,
belittling and name-calling.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to fear that others will only see who they perceive,
believe and assume me to be – not realizing that even if this was
to happen, it would simply mean that these people I would no longer
interact with and that it would not change who I actually am.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to fear the judgement of others because I have been
insecure of myself and used the perceived judgement of others as a
way to judge myself.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to expect that others will judge me because I already
judge myself, and to interpret the behavior of others according to my
negative expectations, not realizing that I do not know what the
experience of another actually is.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to want and expect validation of my worth in terms of
“sex appeal” / “attractiveness” from men as “signs” of
appreciation and from women as “signs” of jealousy.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to want to win in the competition among women to be
“most attractive” to gain the alpha-position of the dominant
female where I would stand as a “winner” and all other women as
“losers” in terms of alluring men, finding a partner and
continuing one's lineage.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to base my sense of self-worth on this validation I
have searched from how men and women react to me and interact with
me.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to define my self-worth according to my “level of
attractiveness” I have gathered by reading “signs” from the
behavior of others.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to believe and perceive that in order to “make it”
in the competition for a suitable partner I need to look a certain
way to get as much positive attention as possible, here believing
that the quantity of positive attention assures my “victory”, not
realizing that I ought to rather be looking at the quality if what
I'm looking for is “suitability”.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to feel like my femininity is “lessened” because
of how my hair looks.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to feel like I had lost my “sex appeal” with my
hair, believing and perceiving that attractiveness is determined by
how I look instead of who I am, and also giving value to the quality
“sex appeal” because I fear not attracting a partner and being
left alone.
I forgive myself that I've accepted and
allowed myself to not see my hair as what it is – dead cells of
physical matter the purpose of which is to keep my head warm and
comfortable – and to instead perceive my hair to be “more” than
just hair by attaching cultural and social symbols, meanings and
values to it, not realizing the extent to which these imagined values
affect my behavior, application and overall life experience.
I commit myself to embrace my hair as
it is within and as the realization that it is just physical matter
and NOT who I am, and that it can be re-grown and re-shaped for as
long as it still grows, and that when/if it stops growing it is OK
because that is how the physical body functions.
I commit myself to consider
practicality along with self-expression when and as I make decisions
to re-shape my hair, but to also be clear on “self-expression” to
not include hidden desires, expectations and self-definitions.
I commit myself to accept my hair as a
part of my physical body no matter what it looks like by focusing on
how my hair feels like as a touch sensation.
I commit myself to walk myself out of
the dependency for external factors to determine myself for me with
writing, self-forgiveness and practical application.
I commit myself to take note of the
moments where I judge/evaluate/assess another based on how his/her
hair looks and to open up these moments either in spoken or written
self-forgiveness.
I commit myself to allow myself to
enjoy my hair (as well as the rest of my physical body) by focusing
on how I experience myself instead of focusing on how others appear
to experience me.
