We all know I talk too much about my thoughts, feelings and general weirdnesses here. When I first started writing a blog, that was what it was for – to get the shit out of my head and onto ‘paper’, onto a screen, onto the internet where millions (ok, more like thousands) of people could read it and think “Holy fuck, that chick is totally self-obsessed”. Then I started thinking above my station, pondering the possibility of writing a blog that would mean something – social commentary, reviews of new and exciting things, technology-related stuff. And I do that, sometimes. Occasionally I say something that isn’t about my own life and my own slowly melting brain. But this isn’t one of those times. Sorry.

The picture up there shows my new hair. Ok, second-to-new hair. It’s now slightly shorter and not as white-white (the hair is about the only thing in the photograph that is it’s actual colour). But the point I’m trying to make (and not doing it very well, I know) is that I change my hair A LOT. Not often, necessarily, but dramatically and usually in short bursts of cut-and-dye (rather than the emo version, cut-and-die) activity. This generally coincides with change of season, dark in the winter, blonde in the summer. But recently I noticed another pattern to my behaviour. Get ready to say “Holy fuck, that chick is totally self-obsessed”.

In times of stress/anxiety/general-head-melting-ness I do terrible evils to my hair. I bleach it to death, I cut it all off, and more often than not I don’t particularly like the result. I then spend the following months obsessing over growing my hair back only to chop it all off again. Growing hair back feels like healing, like the only way I can guarantee that I most definitely WILL become better looking over time. Something self-destructive is done, time passes, it heals, it feels good.

This is a pattern of self-injury mindset and behaviour, or at least of my self-injury mindset and behaviour. No, I don’t cut myself any more and while I’m cool with talking about it in a relevant context I don’t like getting all descriptive about it randomly because I’m 26 years old, it’s not something I’m proud of ever having done and I don’t like attracting emo teenagers to my blog by ranking high in Google searches for ’self-injury’.

Since mentioning this whole ‘hair cutting as self-injury substitute’ phenomenon on another website, on person has said that she too fits this description. Is this a common thing? Are there loads of ex-cutters (please someone, shoot me right now for employing that turn of phrase) out there who now compulsively fuck with their hair when they can’t cope with life? I’m intrigued. Must…do…research (in the voice of Liono from Thundercats attempting to reach a sword while hanging from a ledge). To the Google machine we go!

Post Script: The photograph at the top was over-exposed, shot in RAW under bright sunlight, with the black levels raised in RAW processing. Just in case anyone wonders how I did it or (god forbid!) assumes I’m one of those people who spends hours editing the fuck out of things in Photoshop only to try and pass them off as genuine photography rather than digital art.