People from work ask me, all of us being away from home
Where do you get your hair cut?

I cut my own hair
Have done for a while

It started for the same reasons they ask
When you don't speak the local language well
You often come out with the wrong thing,
too short, long
whatever

It was after an experience like this
Getting back to the hotel, thinking to myself
Its still longer than I wanted

I picked up my beard trimmer, set it low
and shaved

It was very liberating
I felt I had broken a barrier

Independence was mine

Back at home
My wife cut it for me
Same idea, just shaved, same length
all over

I'd sit in a chair
in the kitchen
Music playing and waiting

Her fussing over the bits and pieces
cleaning the clippers
Then cutting

ZZZZzzz
ZZZZzzzzzz

It was only after we split up
I returned to the barbers

But now, here I was
I did it on my own and it looked
Right.

And it felt
Good.

It was easy, I could cope.

Now I cut my hair all the time
In the bathroom, hoovering up afterwords
Can't check the back but its usually OK

These days, though, the feeling
of liberation
is gone.

It's just something I do on my own
Another chore
Like washing the dishes
Cleaning the house
Going to Bed

my hair, too long sometimes, covering my face. i like to hide there within the tresses, imagining nobody can see me. imagining...

sometimes, though, an urge strikes me. an urge to release, to become visible, to breath freely. to something.

and i run to the bathroom with scissors in hand and chop it off. chop chop. all gone.

as if a huge weight has been lifted. a lightness has been found. as if i can walk again, or see again.

i cut my own hair, sometimes. sometimes just when a change is needed. sometimes just when it's all the same.

My mom had the strangest wishes for me when I was growing up. The strangest one, in my opinion, was the fact that she wanted my hair to be long until I was 18. She cut my hair herself, making sure that it remained past my shoulders. I often asked her about this and she said that she wanted me to be able to say to people that I had my hair long until I was 18. Never mind the fact that this is a really weird thing to say to people. She wanted my hair to be long and it stayed so... until I was 15.

One evening I was sitting in my bedroom, staring in disgust at my hair in the mirror. Having seemingly recovered from Trichotillomania a year prior, my hair was now growing back, but was uneven in many places. In some areas my hair was halfway down my back, while in other areas my hair was barely reaching my shoulders. Now, I was quite glad to no longer have enormous bald spots all over my head, but I felt like somehow, this looked even worse.

You have to understand... this was simply agonizing. I couldn't do anything with my hair to make it look cute or stylish. I was embarrassed to go to school looking like this. So that evening, while staring at my hair, I grabbed the craft scissors and decided to even the mess out. Not exactly the smartest of choices, I know, but I was tired of looking like an old Raggedy Ann doll that had been chewed up by the dog. So, I snipped (okay, I SAWED) away my hair and voilĂ ! I was now the owner of a stylishly messy bob haircut.

Of course, now I had to hide the evidence from my mother. I flushed the discarded hair down the toilet, and put my remaining hair up with a claw clip. Somehow, the next day, my mom didn't notice that I was now missing a good deal of hair length.

She must have been incredibly busy or something to not notice this. In fact, she didn't notice for a week or so, and I suspect she wouldn't have noticed for even longer than that if it hadn't been brought to her attention by a friend of hers. This friend of my mother's had seen me walking around school with my hair down and had gushed over how cute it looked. I should have realized that she was going to tell my mom how cute I looked as well, but let's face it, when you're young, you don't really think these kinds of things through.

So one Saturday morning I'm awakened to my mom screaming at me to get up and to let my hair down. I took it out of the clip and showed it to her, and she grounded me for two weeks. To be honest, I thought that she wanted to kill me, so I felt that I got off lucky.

Ever since then, from time to time, I've gotten this insatiable urge to chop off my hair. I did this in 11th grade, and again in my first month or so in college. Craft scissors and all.

The thing I've noticed about this is that every time I do this, my hair comes out looking great. There is no unevenness or anything, even though each time I do this, I am furiously attacking my hair with dull scissors. Am I just lucky? I'd like to think so.

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