Chop Chop Chop
Good morning my loves and happy Sunday! Apologies for the late blog post, forgot my computer at home last night.
We’re at day 16 of our dry January journaling series!!
But anyways - to our prompt:
“What do you feel like you can’t do? Or what feels like you aren’t allowed to do? This can be a big thing like a job or something small like wear red lipstick, it’s just about letting whatever wants to come up - come up.”
Can I tell y’all something embarrassing? I spent a good 20 years of my life thinking I wouldn’t feel confident if my hair didn’t look like that of a Disney princess. I’m from Texas after all - it’s like the culture here.
But my hair started to feel like a separate part of me. I didn’t want to do it, taking care of it was becoming so much work, and genuinely - I didn’t love the way it looked and how it felt.
I know this sounds incredibly vain and maybe it is but isn’t this what humans do? We make meaning out of everything. I’m a writer after all, I tell stories. And this one is about hair.
Cutting my hair felt like the thing I couldn’t do. For 10 million reasons over the last 20 years, short hair felt like something I wasn’t allowed to have.
How silly, the boxes we put ourselves in.
When we’re trying to heal it can be tempting to try and guess the final version of yourself and just achieve it as quickly as possible.
But that’s the lie of hustle culture, not healing. Hustling tells you to go go go and conquer everything and that eventually you’ll have it all and love everything.
Healing tells us to accept ourselves as we are - not as who we believe others want us to be.
My short hair felt like it was calling to me from the inside out.
When we become who we think we aren’t allowed to be - sober, healing, peaceful - we open up parts of ourselves to new things and new experiences that felt out of our grasp before.
Jumping off the cliff into “I’m not allowed to be” land is so terrifying. But only because we don’t know what’s next - not because what’s next is scary.
Discovering who you are and what you really want is the path to living a life you enjoy. Let go of the idea that you can’t be who you want to be and love the things you want to love - it is your birthright to walk through this life exactly as you feel.
I feel so much freer by this hair chopping decision. One that would have paralyzed me years ago. I feel like I lost more than 18 inches today, I feel so free.