I shaved my head this week.
This is by no means the first time I’ve buzzed it all off; there are eras of my life when this was a routine look. But there was an emotional compulsion this time around, and a craving for a kind of physical release. It can be a glorious bit of destruction, sending the version of your self from only moments ago into a shower of little pieces scattered on the bathroom floor.
And something had to give, in a moment when life is overly full and I find myself saying yes to more than I ought to. Yet I really haven’t wanted to reject any number of projects and opportunities, to cut anything out of the calendar. But I could cut my hair. A few minutes less in the shower or getting ready each day, a few degrees cooler in the middle of a heat wave. An option for keeping things simple.
It served as a nice reminder that sometimes moving forward doesn’t look like continuing to fuss with what’s there, but instead like clearing the way for what’s next. One might say that shaving my head every so often serves as a kind of ritual for practicing the metabolization of loss, as well as for lessening attachment to one way of being, or at least of presenting, to the world. Practice for others, too. People obviously notice the change; there’s often a pause the first time they see it, a little moment of mental adjustment before they conclude, ‘oh, it’s still you.’
There’s a lot of change happening each day right now, much of it faster than most of us really have the ability to absorb or handle. And most of us are, unfortunately, not holding the cutting shears. So I’m not offering up my haircut here as an approach to all the difficult losses that are accumulating at this moment in time. But, as a practice of preparation, I still find it useful. It’s a method of training the senses to handle a sudden alteration, to see and feel a dramatic change and experience that life still goes on after it.
So a question for you, readers: what channels or practices do you have right now for metabolizing loss — for releasing, for letting go? And what acts of destruction might you be able to see as acts of clearing and creation, of making space for something other and new?
This kind of processing and re-envisioning is how we prevent ourselves from getting stuck or frozen, of living for years in a holding power of waiting for ‘a return to normal.’ It’s also how we fend off common reactionary tendencies (varieties of which exist on both the left and right ends of the political spectrum), believing that everything was better ‘before.’ That sense of reactionary grievance — and the ability of those hungering for power to manipulate it — has contributed a fair deal to our present situation.
It might be worth saying that the frequent turning to these themes of learning how to skillfully navigate change and loss here at Unsettling isn’t just some emotional navel-gazing on my part. I write about it because our collective ability to alter our affective responses — both to that which is difficult and to that which is simply different — is critical to projects of major social change, and to projects of reconciliation and repair.
These aren’t digressions; they’re part of the work.
Of course, the very first time I ever shaved my head, I was pretty nervous. There was, after all, the risk that I would hate it, that I and others would balk at the naked curve of my skull as it was newly revealed.
Those who knew me in college knew someone with hair often approaching waist-length. I was keeping it at my shoulders in the years after, but taking it all off would still be a moment of drastic transformation. I think if I had attempted it by myself, alone in a bathroom with a pair of clippers, I probably would have let my fear overcome me and not gone through with it. So that’s not what I did. Instead, I made a party out of it.
It was, actually, a going-away party; the shaved head was both initiating change but also marking a change already in progress, as I was leaving one community of friends and colleagues for another in one of the many cross-country relocations that filled my twenties.
We hosted the party in the collective house where I had been working and living. We put a tall stool in the middle of the living room, and many different hands came and helped cut off a lock or two each, until it was time to pull out the clippers and really let one friend get down to business. Though we did pause momentarily to let me enjoy a temporary mohawk before that, too, was taken away.
After all the hair was good and gone, everyone stood around me all at the same time and looked and offered compliments and rubbed what stubble was left. Then we cleaned up the mess, turned up the music, and cleared the floor for dancing. That would be my last night at that house and in that town (at least for a little while), but after the party I would be leaving full of a sense of belonging and ready for what came next.
I share that story to show that sometimes we need practice for our practices. Sometimes we might need a good long warm-up to embrace a given change. Sometimes we might even need a whole community to help us through it, because even if it’s not so big in the larger scope of things, it can still feel big to us.
That community support isn’t just about accountability. It’s about the joy. About being with others who will stick with you even if the change turns out to be ugly. Thankfully, I happened to discover that I like the look of my head when it’s shaved. But many of the changes in our current moment certainly will not look so good. That doesn’t mean we can’t gather joyfully and with love for one another and practice facing them together.
With all the changes coming at us faster every day, now is the time to put your fears in the center of the room and cut them up. Do it. Watch them fall to the floor. See how it’s possible to move more freely after you do.
Then find some friends and dance.
Thanks for reading Unsettling.
Until next time,
Meg