I’m Breaking The Habit Of Cutting My Hair Every Time I Experience Heartbreak

Cutting my hair was a way for me to signal that there would be changes in my life.

I guess it’s what I call a “prelude” for the new changes that I expect to happen to me. In some twisted way, I also view it as a way of getting rid of something like a bad memory that keeps on replaying in my mind. The physical act of cutting something away from me symbolized the act of truly letting go. Lastly, it’s also my way of telling everyone I know that something happened that shocked me to my core. That’s how I was before. Now, I believe in keeping my hair length just the way it is.

I got my heart broken earlier this year. It was and still is an awful feeling. I finally understood what the poets and writers are talking about when they talked about heartbreak. It was heart-wrenching and traumatic that the thought of “will I ever survive this?” plagued my mind every day for the first few weeks after having my heart broken. It was a time where I didn’t know what to do; sleep seems to be always the good option but I found that when I woke up, the heaviness you feel in your chest doesn’t fade.

Now, almost three months after that traumatic experience called heartbreak, I’m starting to contemplate whether I wanted to cut my hair again. I feel like I needed to change what I look like in order to erase any trace of what I was in order to be reborn into something new. In some sort of cheesy way, I compared cutting my hair into being a phoenix. I am being formed into something new because of what happened to me. However, the past week made me really ponder on the real reason why I am cutting my hair. I started to really question whether I like to cut it in the first place. My thoughts on something menial such as whether I should cut my hair led me to the conclusion that I love how long (almost shoulder length) my hair is. That I was only cutting it before in order to prove to people that I am over a bad experience when the truth of the matter is that I am not over the experience yet.

Don’t get me wrong. I admire and respect those girls who cut their hair in order to signal change in their life. However, for me, I guess that way of thinking does not apply to me anymore. If there’s one thing I learned from the whole heartbreak I have experienced is that I lacked self-love which led to the demise of the relationship. And right now, I believe that cutting my hair in order to put up a front or in order to gain the attention of the people around me would go against the lesson I’ve gained from the experience.

I am slowly trying to learn to love myself and trying not to think too much about other people’s opinion of me and the relationships I enter in. So today, I plan to keep my hair length just the way it is. The only day I will decide to cut it is when I really want to because I believe that a change of hair length or hairstyle will make me look fucking beautiful.