free as my hair

which is to say, attached to my head

After the late unpleasantness of 2022, my hair fell out and grew back curly. Over the last few months, it has ceased to be curly and now it’s mostly the way it used to be—kind of wavy, but not curly.

curly hair, last summer

kinda wavy sometimes hair, this month

My hair and my eyes are the two facial features (…is hair a facial feature? well, it is now) I’ve always been very vain about. My eyes remain obscured most of the time behind my massive and thick-lensed glasses, but the hair is another story. I don’t do anything with my hair, partly because I’m extremely lazy, but also because I prefer to let it do what it wants. Sometimes it looks a mess but I assume that it has its reasons, and so on. I wash it when it starts to feel greasy, which averages out to about twice a week. I would never dye it another color. The thought feels sacrilegious to me. I would not even dye it its own color, because in my heart of hearts I believe even its grey hairs are superior in shade to any commercial dye.

But even though I knew I was vain about my hair I don’t think I ever realized how much it was central to my sense of myself until it started falling out. It is physically distressing (and even kind of embarrassing) to have big clumps of hair coming out all the time, but it really felt like, who am I, if I don’t have my beautiful hair?

Forget reading and writing and my inability to focus long on either; forget sleeping twenty hours a day; forget giving up cheese and wine for the rest of my life; this was hair, which was abruptly revealed to me as the most important thing in the entire world.¹ When it came back, I felt as if I’d been forgiven for something. And I liked the curls, once I got used to them. They were like a battle scar, but chic. Also, I was born with curly hair, which was cut off at one point and grew back straight. So it felt like a way of saying I was reborn in the sense of I didn’t die.

All told my hair was probably fully grown back and curly for about two years. Now that the curls are gone, I’m not really experiencing the same loss because all the hair is there. It’s a sign of things becoming normal. Except for one thing: now I dream about having curly hair all the time.

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Lately, I’ve decided to start trying to take my dreams slightly more seriously, though—don’t hit that “unsubscribe” button!—I promise I’m not going to be dream journaling on here. (Even if you wanted to read it, that would involve a level of vulnerability that’s several steps too far for me.) In part, I have, as I’ve mentioned before, really terrible nightmares, and I’ve begun to wonder if thinking about them will be better for me than not thinking about them. Would I benefit from viewing my dreams as my emotions writing letters back to me, after I write letters to them?

In any case, what is actually weird about this shift is that once I decided to do it, the dreams themselves started becoming different. I don’t mean more sensible—or even nicer!—but they had a feeling of working in symbolic language that they had not had before. For instance, the hair. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a true recurring dream motif like this before—unless “I never graduated from college” counts—but now I do. I try to cut my own hair and I end up with a curly pixie cut. I wake up to discover I have long but uneven ringlets but if I try to take a picture they look stringy, flat, and bad. I discover the secret method by which my hair curls again.…

This all feels a little like the process of training a dog, except I’m the dog and the trainer—like my dreaming self and my conscious self are collaborating now to find a language they can mutually speak. So dreaming me is like “hair!” and conscious me’s ears perk up. Encouraged, dreaming me says “hair!” again. Ears up! And so on.

Some say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks; some say you can; but can you teach an unconscious dog new tricks? Well, we’ll see.

1. Obligatory.