parallax

a small rant on hair & a followed revelation :)

Whenever i try to cut my hair an electric jolt hypnotizes my fingers and either i cut my hair too short, or cut somewhat that make no actual change to my appearance. I try every trick known to mankind, or at least to beauty vloggers on the internet, but all in vain.

This time i had to cut them because split ends had made home onto every lock of mine, and so i did the safest thing i could - booked the most lavish salon i could find in my neighbourhood and hoped for the best because it was a crucial gamble. I sat in the hotseat and gave my half an hour to the bet.

And next, as my subconscious already knew after fifteen minutes into the hotseat, I lost the bet. yes, I took advice from the most inexperienced trader of all time (the hairdresser) and yes I had gotten bangs. Bangs. On curly hair. You can of course imagine what happens next. I cried for like an hour after reaching home because all I could feel was the weight of all the decisions I’ve ever taken in my eighteen years of living.

Cut to yesterday, when I was looking at a photo from like five summers back. I had a bob cut in the pic. Then I looked at my now hair. Back and forth, back and forth comparing both. Who was I even kidding? My hair had grew. Of course they would. I had not. I had remained the once naive girl I was that used to sob heavily when her father cut her hair at five and not changed a bit in thirteen years. Hit me like a truck, I realised this limiting belief had gotten the best of me. And I know why too. I was so scared of looking anyway less than myself all these years that I had befriended permeance. I had made home in it and it had swallowed me whole.

A firm believer of ‘to grow is to change’ had found comfort in remaining the freaking same. And I am not talking about my hair even anymore. Oftentimes than not we find our self getting attached to silhouettes of ourselves that fetch us the most compliments or are conventionally ‘less riskier’. In my case, I had made a part of me my whole identity. My identity isn’t my short hair or long hair or shabby hair or pixie hair. It is me. and I am abundant. I can shatter, I can heal, I can drown five feet deep, and still build myself from the remnants.

I had made the mistake of mind mapping the coordinates of me so sharply in my head that I was now afraid of redrawing them again.

Think of it like this: the neighbourhood tree that you bypass everyday looks different every season. Be it fall, or winter or spring. You see the leaves wither away, you see it all bald at once even, but when the rays come fully, you see it exploding with countless ripening fruits and flowers too. The tree is you. The only difference is that it doesn’t complain. It channels through water and glucose even when it bears no fruit. In a way, the tree has figured out the answer to the complexities of life isn’t fear, its perserverance. Even through storms, even through drizzle.

I would now like to introduce y’all to an analogy that you have already have the taste of, but I’ll bend it to suit my own narrative - Plato’s prisoners. (just to be clear, I am not talking about the different realities in this one, just the sheer perspective that I share.) We all know why they kept thinking of mere shadows to be the reality of the universe - it was because all they could see was it. The shadows. Not the light. Not the figures that produced their shadows. And us, as humans become so occupied with the mundane everyday form of us that we fall in love with the outline of us. (in this case, the shadows.) There is so much more to be, but we still keep grinding our empty souls into believing we are what we are. But trust me, look to the other side. be anything u wish. Just be.

Also while I talk about all this I can’t leave out the orbit of familiarity. I get attached to books, movies, versions of me, and of course, hair. but i will rearrange the room. I will put my clothes in the cupboard and I will make space for my night lamp on my work desk, where I doze off to sleep. I will shake out the doormat and I will reshuffle my favorite makeup pieces. I will do anything to keep myself awake to the idea of change. and I will move the sofa to the side, and make space for me to dance in the light of it.

thankyou for reading, ‘twas a super quick piece :)