Reclaiming ME
... well that AND my Irish Curls ;)
Hi, Hello, Friends! đ¤
Last week I did something that felt small from the outside and enormous from the inside.
I went to get my hair cut. Alone. On a whim, kind of. Except it wasnât really a whim at all. It was something I had been thinking about for almost a year, slowly building the capacity.
Building the capacity to do something just for me. Which means sitting with it long enough that it starts to feel safe. Safe enough to take a step.
This time was also different, I didnât minimize the moment. I never told myself it was just a haircut. Because it wasnât just a haircut.
In December of 2024, I really felt like my body was shutting down. I felt so weak, from the inside out.
It was not so much all at once, and not in a dramatic way that everyone from the outside would have necessarily noticed. It was more like a slow, critical leak. Cervical cancer diagnosis. Surgical complications. Sepsis. Stress that had nowhere to go. Grief I didnât have language for yet. Trauma that I was still calling other things.
I saw a photo of how long and while still beautiful my hair was⌠but also how thin and sick even my hair looked.
So I started cutting my hair.
A little bit at a time. A few inches here, a few inches there, over months. Like I was trying to shed something without having to admit that I was shedding.
Looking back, I think it was one of the only things I felt like I had any control over. It was a way of taking back control of my body. Redirecting something that, in harder seasons, would have looked a lot more like self destruction.
Then last fall, something shifted.
I started noticing the new growth coming in differently. Curlier. Tighter at the root, almost like a different texture entirely. Like my hair was remembering something my body had worked really hard to forget.
I have photos of myself as a little girl with wild ginger ringlets. Somewhere between then and now I straightened them out. Years of heat, of product, of making my hair behave the way I thought it was supposed to. By the time I was an adult, most people didnât even know my hair curled.
But the curls were coming back.
And every time I noticed them, I had this quiet thought that kept returning: I want to cut it short. I want to start over. I want to see what it actually does if I nourish my curls.
I want to take a little pause here about hair and women, because I donât think itâs as simple as vanity and I donât think itâs talked about enough.
Long âperfectâ hair carries weight, a burden. Not just physically. There is a whole social contract buried inside it.
Society and for some of us, trauma teaches us that long âperfectâ hair reads as intelligent, young, stable. As femininity performed correctly. As softness, as availability, as I have it together. My long red hair was something strangers felt comfortable commenting on. Touching. People I barely knew told me what they thought of it like they had some kind of stake in it.
Even in my family of origin, my siblings and my mom could dye their hair, change it, play with it. Mine had to stay the way others wanted it to be.
And the men in my life were no different. The ones who loved the idea of me decided that extended to my hair too. Like my body and what I did with it was something they got a vote on.
And I loved it. I want to be honest about that, because this story isnât about hating what I had. I genuinely and deeply loved my long red hair for a very long time.
Until I loved the idea of what was trying to grow underneath it more.
So last week I went. Sat in the chair. Said do it, and meant it this time.
Iâve made myself a promise: 30 days of actually nourishing these curls. Irish and feral and not entirely predictable. Nourishing them every day, no fighting them, no making them behave. Just finding out what they look like when someone decides to love them the way they actually are instead of the way theyâre supposed to be.
Itâs been four days.
I think weâre going to be okay.
Iâve been thinking about why this feels as significant as it does, and I think itâs this:
So much of the last year has been about learning to stop suppressing the things in me that were trying to come back. My parts. My feelings. My actual nervous system responses instead of the performed ones. The version of me that existed before I learned to make myself easier for other people to be around.
And now, apparently, my hair is doing the same thing.
The curls I had as a little girl are coming back.
And this time, Iâm not going to straighten them out. And when I do decide to, itâll be because that is what I want not because that is what someone else needs my hair to be.
Also, it is worth noting. No man has touched any part of my hair. đ
I am not my past.
I am the story.
I choose to keep writing.
đ Thank you for meeting me here, friends!
A la Luna, đ
Lauren đŞťđ
I have been working on a creative little project over at [freckledlore.com]
She is a work-in-progress just like I am. I hope to meet you there. đ¤