An Incandescent Awakening Through Haircut
In October of 2022, I was in the trenches in regard to my mental health. A few months prior I’d moved to what I had once called home, Melbourne, but was now practically a new city to me as I was in a whole new area and a different stage of my life. I thought it was going to be the beginning of a newly found version of what was going to be one of the best parts of my twenties. I had started working two new retail jobs which ended up being a lifesaver in the sense of me never having time to stop and think about how shitty I was feeling mentally because I was too exhausted physically getting from A to B and trying to remain an upstanding employee at jobs that I truly only enjoyed because of my coworkers who became my everyday confidants. I’d moved to Melbourne in hopes of acting opportunities being more abundant and readily available, as well as the chance to potentially create companionships with like-minded people within that circle. Unfortunately, the auditions were so few and far between and to add insult to injury they were all taped from within the four walls of my tiny shoebox apartment bedroom.
The realisation of my discomforting inhibitions hit hard when I sat with myself on the train heading home from my closing shift at 10 pm on a muggy October night. Whilst all these people my age were coming from pre’s and heading off to boogie the night away, I was hardly functioning at keeping up any ounce of personal life alongside my ambitions of an acting career that was as stagnant and stubborn as the strain in my upper back from standing all day, every day.
In short, this was the beginning of what most people do when they want to begin a new chapter in their life. Change their hair.
“It’s not only a way of physically manifesting a new version of yourself, it signifies a fresh start.”
A change of routine, a feeling of the new ‘you’. Now some people simply cut a few inches off or dye their hair slightly darker or lighter. But I did what most are too afraid to conjure in their thoughts…
I cut off all my hair.
It began with a breakfast date with my beautiful, best friend, Molly. She is one of those friends that you can talk to about anything. We divulge every inch of our emotional state and accompany each other’s ailments with words of advice and ‘What would you do’s’. But something struck a chord in me and I just began to tear up. I mentioned how miserable I felt my life had become and without realising it, I’d started to pinpoint the blame of feeling completely out of touch with myself. Which ironically is something that I had complete control over. I had lost every aspect of what it was that had brought me joy. I was so inundated with working these two retail jobs to stay afloat financially in a city that I had moved to, purely to support a career that wasn’t even allowing me opportunities to interject myself into it becoming a reality. And in doing so it gave me no confidence to change any aspect of my sad little cycle of ‘poor me’.
Oh and by the way, I didn’t just tear up, it turned into a full-blown embarrassing meltdown, tears flowing into my coffee cup. Miserably failing to cover the stream of tears practically spitting out of my eyes with my sunglasses, it began overtaking my words and holding strain in my throat as I struggled to get any reasonable answer out to Molly’s heartfelt solutions. She has been through so much with me in my life, as have I in hers. We both lived in LA together prior to covid and both mourned the loss of a truly extraordinary life we could’ve been leading if it wasn’t for such unfortunate circumstances (that’s not to say nothing could have come from it as well, and also in saying that, there were far more devastating things happening in comparison, but it’s all relevant to whom it’s affected by). But as I went on to say ‘I don’t think I want to live in Melbourne anymore’ I practically felt myself cringe. It’s as though I felt I needed to physically move AGAIN (ironic because I’ve just moved to London LOL I’ll explain in another blog post) for anything to change in my life. When in reality I had completely lost all confidence and self-assurance in my own competency as a functioning human being.
I contemplated for days as to how I would help myself feel more ‘in charge’ of my life. It began with a tear-filled afternoon on the phone with my mum hopelessly listening to her words of reassurance, which whilst initially soothed my helplessness, in turn, fuelled this overwhelming feeling of sadness - as I was once again burdening her with her child’s inability to figure out her life for the fifteenth thousandth time.
Thus a haircut...
It started days prior with a booking for a trim to my overgrown, bleached blonde, lifeless bob. But the morning of the appointment I awoke to an email from my American agent labelled ‘parting ways’. And just when I could’ve let the world open up and swallow me whole, I felt an odd sense of peace. I accepted it as a way of the universe telling me it was time for a fresh start. And as the hours drew closer to my abundant affair with the ‘new me’ I began to contemplate more than a trim. Instead of a ‘small change’ how about a bigger one? A ‘bixie’(mixed between a bob and a pixie cut) had been flooding my Tik Tok and Pinterest feeds and I was set on that fitting the new version of who I wanted to be more like.
But as 4 pm approached and I attempted to gain any kind of composure over my nerves, I had an adrenaline-filled phone call with my mum where we settled on Audrey Hepburn’s pixie cut as my inspiration.
Thank god for the confidence and reassurance of my hairdresser because if she wavered in any sense of the word with an ‘Are you sure?’ I would’ve immediately backed down and never attempted the cut. In a way, I appreciated her being a kind of ‘fairy godmother’. As if she somehow knew this was what I needed. It might sound ridiculous and a little silly but she truly was the beginning of this transition I had longed for.
Seeing myself for the first time with that short of hair, I weirdly felt the most feminine I’d ever felt. Hair holds such significant meaning for someone who identifies as a girl/woman. It can make you feel more confident when you don’t feel great in your body, it can make or break a day (bad hair day anyone?), it can be infinitely changed with a multitude of styles to emulate any mood. It can be seen as effortlessly sexy when tied up into a bun or blow waved with such sophistication that it bounces with every step. I’d had all of the above. Hair so long it can be plaited down alongside my chest, colours of the rainbow including the golden most platinum blonde highlights, fiery red and muddy brunette, fringes that would stick into my eyeballs with every blink, and now…I didn’t have any, really. I say I felt the most feminine because I didn’t have to rely on something like hair to make me feel feminine. I could see the crooked features of my face so clearly it was somewhat shocking, but eye-opening in a coddling of my younger self kind of way. I couldn’t tuck any ounce of hair behind my ears or somehow cover a blemish with a strategically placed strand, or part my hair slightly more to one side of my head to weigh out the lopsidedness of my jaw…it was just my face.
Although In the coming days and months, I went through the motions of imposter syndrome. Feeling so unlike myself it subsequently made me feel unconfident. It was a weird thing to grasp alongside my mental stability and the feeling of ‘oh god have I just hindered myself more’. I struggled with the lows but was always met with pleasant reassurance from kind strangers at work telling me how much they liked my haircut, mistaking me for being a European model of sorts. It was a real eye-opener for me in regard to the perspective of beauty. I no longer had people move aside for me on footpaths, or random men asking me out in the streets. I was avoided like the plague which was slightly scouring to the ego but at the same time a relief to not be viewed in that way. And maybe it had nothing to do with my hair, maybe it was just this new version of myself that made me unapproachable…whatever it was, for the first time in a long time, I felt a sense of control over myself and the person I’d become.
So whilst this blog was supposed to discuss the way a haircut can change how you feel about yourself, it has truly become a commentary on what I now know as ‘free will’. You can wake up one day and yell out your window that you’re going to have a great day, you can lay in the street and get beeped at and yelled at by strangers, you can quit your job that makes you miserable, you can ask that person out to coffee, you can chase whatever wildest dream has ever reckoned your deepest desires, you can get an entirely new wardrobe, you can dance in the middle of the grocery store to that one song that you only ever hear in a grocery store. You have the ability to change your life, whether it be in the smallest of ways with a haircut or the largest of ways like moving to a new country. You have the potential and ability within yourself to live your life however you want (with obvious discretion and legality considered…)
And as I attempt with every inch of my being to grow out my unruly mane, I will forever think fondly of the first time I had the courage to cut it and see myself in an entirely new light, physically and mentally.
