Hair

It's happening.

All day I've been feeling hair falling on my arms, picking it off my clothing, seeing way more than I'd like between my fingers when I run them through.

My hair feels sick, cloying, and hot.  I feel hot all the time.  The hair on my head sticks to my sweaty neck.  I keep putting it up but I don't want to stress it out by combing it or brushing it.  Even though my hair looks terrible, it grieves my heart to the core to look in the mirror.

Hair.  It's the first thing to go when someone wants to rob you of your identity.  Think death camps, think boot camps, think convents.  You want to humiliate someone?  Shave their head.  You want to erase individuality in a group?  Shave everyone's heads.

The biggest crime the Beatles committed, according to my parents' generation, was growing their hair over the tops of their ears.  Over the tops of their ears.  Fast forward to the later '60's and '70's, when men had hair down to their waists, or out to their shoulders, or both.  It became a symbol of ethnic pride when both men and women started proudly sporting afros.  More than anything else about us, our hair is how we proclaim our individuality and the way we go about the world.

Hair is our vitality, our qi. It grows and flows and curls and twirls.  It dances on our crown chakra like little dancing vibrations reaching up and out to the gods.

Mine is going.  I can't help it and I can't stop it.

I really am quite bereft.

It is the next descent down into the underworld.  I have been graced, thank GOD, with a few days' reprieve in terms of feeling pretty good.  Unfortunately, these days have been spent with too much busyness and not enough down time; my soul is staggering around with bags beneath its eyes wondering where all the inundation came from, and knowing full well that it is the same old thing: taking care of business, keeping up with commitments, following responsibilities first.

And while I try madly to catch up in hopes of catching a breather soon...my hair dwindles down my arms, falls on my lap, stays behind in the sink.

I am hoping that once it's off I'll be less weirded out by the whole thing.  That, like every other step of this journey, the anticipation is worse than the event.  That once we shave it I may even like the new me, that the new identity may be surprising in ways I can't imagine at the moment, on this side of it.  Maybe it will be freeing.  Maybe it will be a relief to get it over with.  Maybe, after all, I'll still be me and it won't even matter.

I hope so.  And I hope that this is part of a glorious metamorphosis, when all is said and done. That, on many levels, outside is matching inside transformation, and when I'm through with all of this I will be able to say I've shed more than just my hair, that I will have shed lack of wisdom and misplacement of priorities, that I will have shed bad habits and wrong action.

Once again, this thing is taking me down roads that I never dreamed I would have to travel. Pushing me towards limits of discomfort and despair that I had thought were left behind during the extremities of my  youth.  These are whole new levels... both good and bad.  As a friend said to me tonight: the problem is that it's both so good and so bad, at the same time.  It's too much, it's so much, it's beyond my ability to control or even comprehend it.

Yesterday, a dear friend brought me some scarves from Washington, where she lives.  We sat in my backyard and practiced tying them.  They are beautiful.  They flow and make me into a whole new kind of feminine.

And then today: an unmet friend brought me an amazing care package.  She is a fellow survivor and friend of a friend who has somehow been called to be my personal guardian angel.  She packaged up some baskets of scarves and hats and other head paraphernalia that I may need and dropped them off at my home.  She gave me two wigs... cuter than my hair has ever looked... and even thought of providing baskets for me to put the stuff into.  Packaged with such loving attention to detail.  Given from the heart.  So compassionate I could not even stand to open all the packages yet.  Too much.  Too much love. 

We will see where this new adventure leads.  I can't say bring it on, because I don't want it.  I can't say I'm game, because I'm not.  But I do know I've never said no to a new experience...and the choice isn't really mine anymore anyway.

At the end of the day, it has to happen.  It has to happen because better days have to happen.  It has to happen to get through to the other side of this journey.  As long as I keep my cakes to use to escape the underworld, I'll be fine.  I can see horrors and experience humiliation, but as long as I can keep myself together, I'll endure it.  I'll make it through.  I'll finally grow a new identity that will be built from the tears and tendrils of the old one.