What Happens When You Shave Your Head

I came this close to shaving my head over New Years. But instead I told myself that I didn’t do it because I cared too much about what other people would think of me.

I just wanted to feel what it would feel like to be bald. I wanted to be one of the few, the proud, the brave, to have seen my scalp as an adult (the exception being middle-aged balding men). I wanted to check out the scar on the lower left side of my dome. I wanted to feel like I was contacting aliens every time I walked down a hallway with a draft (kidding — that was just a fun side perk.)

I thought that once I stopped caring what other people thought, I’d finally be able to shave my head.

But I’ve watched enough Netflix documentaries by now to know that serial killers are the only people who don’t care what others think about them. And I wasn’t really aiming to join their club. So then the question became: “At what point will I be wiling to put what I want above what other people think?” Because it won’t be when the outside voices quiet down. They’re not going anywhere. It’ll have to come from somewhere else.

So I decided to hear them, but do whatever the fuck I wanted to anyway. Four months past New Years, ironically on April Fools Day eve, I shaved off all my hair with a leg hair razor, guided by the reliable wisdom of a wikiHow article.

Shaving my head represented a massive internal change for me. But it’s not like everything turned to roses and I was made whole again. I actually became more aware of how far I had to go in other aspects of my life, specifically with my creativity, my career, and how I treat myself.

Simply put, I’m a terrible friend to myself. I never give myself compliments, I barely acknowledge when I’ve accomplished long-held goals, and I constantly tell myself that I can’t do things even as I set out to achieve them. So this month while I was down and out, my friend Chiara gave me some great advice:

Have gratitude. Look at where you came from. Appreciate where you are. Look to where you want to go. Soak it all in.

It was after this that I realized that everyone deserves to give themselves a little mini celebration while we’re in quarantine. Because nothing is certain in these times. Nothing except for how we choose to perceive this moment. For me, that has been the most beautiful thing about quarantine. When we create a space without judgement for ourselves to experiment, we ironically create the exact conditions that are required to grow more than we ever thought possible.

It’s my (recently formed) belief that we get the challenges in life that we can handle. So while this quarantine is awful and terrible in the most unexpected ways, if we’re going through it, that means we can handle the hardships that are coming our way. We get thrown the things that we’re capable of transforming through. And these just might be the situations that can change us for the better.

2020 taught me that everything is always changing all the time. The only way to find solace in that relentless pace is to learn to rest in the midst continual motion and change. And on this spinning rock we call Earth, hurtling around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour, it’s what we call “normal” anyway.

This edited piece is from writing originally published in my May 2020 newsletter. If you would like to read more like this, you can subscribe here.