It has been nearly a week since I donated my hair to Locks of Love. And I still miss it. Not the hair on my head, mind you. Rather, the hair that had been shaved and then bundled and then tucked away until we raised the first $5k of my $25k project (and HUGE thanks to all of you who made that happen!).
A bag of disembodied hair. I couldn't let go of a bag of disembodied hair...which I had cut off for this very purpose.
I hadn't expected this. I mean...I SHAVED IT OFF. What did I think was going to happen? As it turns out, for me, the shaving it off (and keeping it off for nearly 3 months, and counting) wasn't the trial...it was mailing away a bunch of hair in a Ziplock bag that sat in a drawer of my ancient writing desk for months.
Talk about strange attachments.
Come to think of it, that particular drawer has held several strangely precious things that I didn't know what to do with at the time. Most recently it held the box of my father's ashes (which still await their final resting place) until I decided to have them in plain sight--an attempt to help the process along. Despite their relocation, I still don't know where to put them...and the longer I keep them, the more I find myself wanting to keep them.
Is this the same process as giving up my hair? Is it a slow, ossification of habit? Or, in my holding the long strands hostage...did I somehow invoke whatever the opposite of Stockholm Syndrome is?
Maybe. But it's probably more akin to my ill-timed attempts to hang onto what has already been lost.
How many times have you tried to capture a moment in a photo, only to realize that as the shutter closes, the experience you were trying to seal up and savor was gone before you even thought to pull out your camera?
This happened to me on an excruciatingly regular basis, until I realized that if I had the urge to capture something on camera, I had best surrender to the moment. Be IN the moment. And I've gotten good at that. With the sublime, the adorable, the funny.
No so much, it turns out, with the smoldering sting after the sucker-punch of loss. Sure, back in the day I overstayed my welcome in unhealthy relationships...relationships that were O-V-E-R but I just couldn't seem to jettison myself away. Thankfully, that phase is over. But I continue to grapple with loss through death...expected/unexpected. I still remake conversations or say gorgeously choreographed goodbyes that were never uttered...but only to redo them later that week or that month.
I think my bag-o-hair represented much more loss to me than I had anticipated. As proficient as I am with navel-gazing, I'm still not sure of the totality of what it came to represent--suffice it to say, I miss it not because it covered my head (but I am missing head-cover people!!).
Henry Ellis: "All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on."
(Please email your hours/donation amounts to: DrBevyn (at) Gmail (dot) com
