Hair trigger

An hour to nap, or an hour to write? I'll be a good girl, and write, though there is so much going on it's going to be hard to focus on what to write about first. My nerves. My back. My drugs. The steroids. Humans being assholes. Household money problems. For someone who is unemployed and is no longer formally a student, I have an awful lot going on to potentially set me off.

I've had to remind myself for the last couple of weeks of various things.

1. Shit doesn't happen to me, it just happens. The moment I cry "whyyyy?" is the moment I become a victim.
2. I am not in control of other people's emotions or reactions.
3. Being around people who have similar diagnoses to my own is potentially toxic, especially if those people aren't on meds.
4. I am in control of my own reactions, despite my feelings. I can choose to act on feelings or not to.
5. Once I have apologised for something and made every effort to make right a wrong, it is up to the other person to forgive or not, and I cannot control when or if they choose to do that.
6. Re: previous point; shame and regret are useless, destructive feelings.
7. When threatened with losing everything, ask yourself what "everything" entails and whether you are really losing it.
8. Change can often be predicted, but rarely prevented, and that is no one's fault.
9. In the world of the Internet, I have more friends than I realise, but they aren't necessarily the people I thought they were.
10. It's okay to let go of things that are holding you back. Even people. Especially people you've only met in person a few times.
11. Your hair looks cute, and it will, in fact, grow back.

Now, all of these things are going to be talking points in therapy tonight, and during my session, this is where I'll pause. I don't have the time nor the energy to write about all the causes of those reminders in one entry. Instead, I'm going to write about the very last point, because it's an inner child thing, and when I'm stressed, I regress.

My mother did not allow me to get my hair cut when I was a child, owing to some traumatic experience in her own childhood in which she was forced to get a haircut against her will, apparently. Anyway, by the time I was in my early teens, I was pretty tired of being made fun of for my long, unkempt, scraggly, dry hair. Seriously, she even had a thing against conditioner. "It costs too much and will just make your hair greasy," she'd say. Anyway. I was 14 or 15, and I had a piano recital, and I was tired of my hair. I didn't cut a lot off, just about three inches off the bottom, and a few little wisps of bangs.

My mother's reaction was to run through the house, screaming. I wish that was an exaggeration, dear readers, but it is not. She kept saying, "No, no, no, no!!!" as if I'd hacked off one of my limbs. My father tried to calm her a bit, I think, but it probably just turned into an argument between them. I don't remember. Anyway, it was absolutely forbidden for me to do anything with my hair while I lived in her house beyond the use of barrettes or pony tail holders. So, naturally, as soon as I was away from my mother, I started doing all sorts of things with my hair. I dyed it, I cut it short, I even had it butched at one point. It's been every colour of the rainbow. And yet, every time I do something new with my hair, I feel an almost immediate sense of dread and remorse. I have had nightmares about my hair getting cut off, and it's terrible when I'm dreaming it, but when I wake up, I wonder what the big deal was.

Fast-forward to Saturday. With all the stress and pain making me feel horrible, I really wanted something to make me feel pretty. So Matt gave me $20 and dropped me off to get my hair cut. When I got into the chair, I said, "Yeah, so, I want like, an asymmetrical bob with it really really short on one side and really long bangs. Can you do that?"

And I got most of my hair chopped off. And it felt lovely, and I thought I looked cute. And I was happy. And then... the remorse hit. Fuck. I thought I was over this! (I've been saying that a lot lately.) Maybe it was because I had been growing my hair long for several years, and it was longer than it had been in quite some time, I don't know. But I hid in my room, as if my mother was going to burst in at any moment and scream at me for cutting off all of my beautiful hair, and how I was so much prettier with it, and how it would never grow back the same. I pushed it out of my mind by playing video games.

The next day, Matt and I went to a large social function which included many of our hockey friends. I was really nervous about going out in public with the new hairdo, but I got so many compliments on how cute it was, it was hard not to feel good about it. And today, Tuesday, after washing it a couple of times and adjusting the part, I absolutely love it. It feels sexy and cute, and I don't know what my whole deal was. Except that I do. It was PTSD. From a damn haircut. It's frustrating. It's over now, I mean, like I said, I'm really happy with the way I look, but to think that at 35 years old I am still having this kind of reaction is frightening to me.

(And Loki laughed, because Sif. But of course, he made it up to Sif by tricking the dwarfs into making hair spun from gold that grew naturally and was even prettier than her real hair. I think maybe he just wanted to snip some off here and there to pay for cigarettes.)