Change Your Life, Change Your Hair

On severing 11 inches and the half-decade of life that went with it.

On June 27, 2020, in possibly one of the darkest mornings of the Covid years, my longtime friend and hair person Wes came to my home, masked, and cut my hair. It wasn’t just any haircut, least of all because this worldwide pandemic had made such interludes nearly radioactive and rife with fear. It was a haircut tying off the previous five years of my life…five major years spent not just growing and changing, but really living through so many things I never imagined or thought I ever could.

As I was waiting for Wes to come over, I was sitting in my bathroom thinking about everything contained in the braid hanging down my back. On the oldest inches, two or three miscarriages, two surgeries, boxes (and boxes) of blood thinners, hormones, prednisone, and my body and daily routine expanding and contracting with every new medical intervention and rebound. Also held in that braid, moving into a dreamlike two-story office, settling into being married and finding a real home after nearly a decade of wondering if we ever would. There was losing and mourning parents, my doctor (who initially showed up in my life like a comet), and a few friends, too—which gave those older inches a kind of toughness I didn’t know I might need to tackle what came later with the newer, younger inches. Like, finally becoming pregnant with my daughter and bringing her safely into the world, albeit seven weeks early due to preeclampsia, which took another three months to fully recover from. The following year it was selling the company and the beautiful brand I spent 15 years building, and then, the year after that, leaving it for good, an altogether different kind of loss and heartache I could have never predicted I would live through, let alone hold in the strands of my hair. There were other things, too, smaller but no less significant. And, even if my brain or heart wanted to forget them, I knew my hair never would. Once it was cut, they would all be held in that braid forever, like a time capsule of the person I was and the things I lived from 2015-2020.