On Being Alive
A few days ago I declared to the world that I wanted to cut all my hair off… which was a response to ✨ some kind of ✨ emotional turmoil. Change. Challenge. It also was born from the relationship I have with my hair. I’ve always been the person you’ve seen on your screen before. I have attached my — ascribed — femininity almost entirely to my hair. The deep resounding discomfort I feel when I think about having drastically shorter hair, points me in the direction of being ~*too attached to the length of my hair.
Who are we beyond the various hats we wear through this world? Who are we beyond how we’re perceived?
I didn’t cut my hair. My hair has been growing since I got pregnant with my daughter, over 2 years ago. I felt myself slipping into the new role of “mother” and felt necessary to don a certain amount of things that amplified this new role.
To be a woman and to be a mother. I wore my long hair like a medal of honour, observing the various ways in which other women and humans moved through the world as parents. As I so often have, I looked to a variety of examples of how and who I should be within the confines of this new role.
To be a mother is to sacrifice everything for her child.
When I stepped back and tried to figure out where this narrative came from, it started to unravel a timeline of “should be’s” and “shouldn’t be’s” that hit me square in the chest. In order to be a woman you had to be THIS way. In order to be a mother you had to be THIS way. In order to be a wife, you had to be THIS way.
At what point was I going to allow myself the courtesy to say, “In order to be Megs, what way do you WANT to be? What way do you NEED to be?”
In the same way I feared stepping out of the comfort of who I’m supposed to be, I feared answering this question. I feared how uncomfortable everything made me, beyond the familiar.
I fear how I don’t trust myself. How hard I find it to honour myself. How I put myself third, fourth, fifth in the line up of things that require a piece of myself. At what point will I give the biggest piece, back to myself?
At what point will I show my daughter the inherent freedom and peace that comes from running head first into the single greatest investment I will make in this life; myself.
At what point will I face the discomfort that is born from not knowing, and bravely stepping into it. To see what I find. To see what I learn. To trust myself just enough to know that only I, know what’s best for myself.
Every single thing that could have gone wrong with this specific shoot, did. It was enormously hard. I didn’t know how to stand, where to sit. How to get the fuckin’ footprints of my white backdrop. I didn’t know how to sit with myself in a different way that my normal.
Somehow wearing more clothes felt harder. Now I couldn’t rely on my ✨objective hotness ✨ to be able to hide all the ways in which I feel like I’ve failed myself. I couldn’t hide behind my body, and instead had to sift through the pile of discomfort that came up.
Who am I when I’m not trying to appease someone else?
Who am I when the only person I’m trying to appease, is myself?
Despite the overwhelming “failure” of this shoot, and the assumption that the product of this shoot would be a pile of photos that would end up in the recycling bin of my computer, these photos are w i l d.
Why? Because I felt free. To be the person I needed to be for MYSELF, in that moment. At that time.
And instead of attaching myself to one version of me, the version that is most palatable for others, the version that was given to me with a seal of approval …
“We like this version of you. This version will do.”
I just felt, moved, dressed, behaved in a way that felt the most right for me. I breathed into my body and understood that all that I’ve looked for, all I’ve felt was missing for so fucking long, I have within me.
Somewhere along the way, it felt like the world told me, “we know best”. Somewhere along the way, I learned how to be a palatable woman. Not too overwhelming, but just enough to not be too passive. I watched myself move through the world donning the hats given to me, instead of the ones I wanted to give myself.
The first time I realized this, waves of grief crashed over me. I felt adrift in a sea where the farthest point away from me, was myself. But getting back to a point where you know yourself and honour yourself when you aren’t even sure is that’s a real point to begin with, feels impossible.
So …
From now on, I’m going to give myself the same courtesy I’ve given everyone else for so long.
I’m going to face the fire.
Because when you do, and you feel the heat start to burn your skin, when you start to sweat, it’s an indication you’re alive.
And if I have to burn everyday to remember that I have but one life, to remember that trusting my intuition is the single best gift I can give to myself, so be it.
And I hope that you, dear reader, give yourself this gift too. Being human is hard. Feelings are hard. Don’t waste a second feeling any less than completely, fervently alive.
