The extra exaggerated the palette, the louder the sign. It was by no means simply in regards to the look; it was about reconciling who I felt like internally with what I noticed externally. I used to be making an attempt to match the insanity. Make it legible. Lovely, even.
However like all cycles, what goes up should come down. After every episode, at all times got here the minimize: a buzz, a bob, or an enormous chop. The urge to start out over, strip all of it again, and reclaim management. My hair grew to become each the proof and the aftermath of the whole lot I used to be making an attempt to navigate mentally. And thru all of it, the salon chair was the place I processed in actual time.
My hairstylist’s chairs grew to become a form of makeshift confessional, not not like the workplaces of the licensed therapists I’ve labored with since being clinically identified in 2013. Throughout my hardest season, Milena Rose Salon wasn’t only a house for styling; it was a sanctuary, a holy house for talk-and-chop remedy. The factor about hairstylists like mine is that they don’t simply care about the way you look while you depart; they care about how you’re feeling. And I don’t suppose they’ll ever absolutely know what number of instances they talked me off the sting with a colour, minimize, and a reality bomb.
Beneath all of the dye jobs and dramatic chops was by no means simply self-importance: it was vocabulary. My hair grew to become a translator when phrases failed me. It shouted after I wanted to be seen. It grieved. It rebelled. It dreamed.
If the physique retains rating, what do my strands keep in mind?
Perhaps they keep in mind the primary time I minimize all of them off in 2013, when the fog of mania collided with a heartbreak I’d been outrunning for 5 years: dropping my mother to breast most cancers. It was the form of grief I hadn’t named but, however my physique had been carrying it the entire time. My scalp felt what my mouth couldn’t say. That first large chop wasn’t about model; it was survival. A visceral, unconscious try to shed what felt too heavy to carry.
Courtesy of Sophie Meharenna
