Sometimes letting go gives us more than we expected.
I have lived in one of the coldest cities in Canada for all of my life.
And except when I was very young, I never wore a hat.
It didn't matter how cold it was.
I wasn't putting a hat on my head.
Not because I didn't like hats.
I didn't want to mess up my hair.
I had curly hair. It was never particularly long, but once I got those curls sitting where I wanted them, I didn't want anything—or anyone—touching them.
And I mean anyone.
When I was in my early twenties, I had friends who rode motorcycles.
Helmets are the law here, so if I wanted to ride, I had to wear one.
I remember getting a ride one day to the beach where I worked with a bunch of young guys.
As soon as we got there, I threw my stuff down and went straight to the sink to wet my hair.
I had to get those curls looking right again before any of the guys saw me.
Another time, I went for a motorcycle ride on a date.
You'd think I would remember the ride and the date.
What I remember is wondering what my hair looked like when I took off the helmet.
Apparently even childbirth wasn't enough to make me stop thinking about it.
When I was in labour, my husband at the time tried to soothe me by touching my head.
I swatted his hand away.
He was messing up my hair.
Yes.
I was in labour.
And I was worried about my hair.
I have to laugh when I think about it now.
But how my hair looked really did matter that much to me.
When I was in my early twenties, I had it cut fairly short.
I was terribly insecure about it.
I thought I looked too masculine.
The funny thing is, when I look at pictures of myself from that time now, I think I looked beautiful.
I just couldn't see it then.
Years later, I found myself looking in the mirror and feeling old and grey.
I was tired of my hair.
So I decided to cut it short again.
My friend Barb was the one who cut it for me.
I meant short.
I didn't mean quite as short as Barb apparently thought I did.
When she was finished, she looked at me and said,
"Thank God you have a nicely shaped head."
We laughed.
And then I looked at myself.
I loved it.
I felt incredibly sexy.
There was something about having my hair that short that felt bold.
At the time, you didn't see many women wearing their hair shaved that short. It felt like I was making a statement.
And instead of making me feel self-conscious, it gave me confidence.
The irony wasn't lost on me.
In my early twenties, I'd had much more hair and felt terribly insecure.
I was young, but I couldn't see how beautiful I was.
Now I was much older. My hair was grey. And Barb had just cut it far shorter than I'd intended.
And somehow, I felt prettier.
Sexier.
More confident.
More like myself.
Maybe that's one of the gifts of getting older.
I wasn't looking at myself through the same eyes anymore.
The difference wasn't really my hair.
It was me.
But there was something else I hadn't expected about wearing my hair that short.
It was incredibly freeing.
I stopped thinking about my hair.
I mean really stopped thinking about it.
I didn't worry about the wind.
Or the rain.
Or someone touching it.
There were no curls to put back into place.
No bad hair days.
No checking to see what it looked like.
Something that had occupied a ridiculous amount of my attention for most of my life suddenly took up almost none.
And then, a few years ago, I bought a hat.
That might not sound like much of a story.
But for me, it was.
I was in France visiting my daughter, and we went to Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy.
The temperature was above freezing.
For someone accustomed to Canadian winters, that shouldn't have been particularly impressive.
But it was windy.
And wet.
And I don't think I have ever felt so cold in my life.
So I bought a hat.
After spending decades refusing to wear one through some of the coldest Canadian winters because I didn't want to mess up my hair, I simply put a hat on my head.
And I was warm.
I still have that hat.
And I wear it proudly through our Canadian winters now.
Sometimes I think about how ridiculous it is that something as ordinary as a hat can represent so much to me.
But it does.
Because I don't think this story is really about my hair.
It makes me wonder about the other things we give so much importance to that we don't even notice how much they're affecting the way we live.
How we think we're supposed to look.
What other people might think of us.
Things we own.
Roles we've played for years.
Ideas about who we're supposed to be.
Rules we've created for ourselves without even realizing we've created them.
I can't do that.
I can't wear that.
What will people think?
For me, for a very long time, it was my hair.
I didn't realize how much time I spent thinking about it.
How many little decisions I made because of it.
How many things I wouldn't do because I might mess it up.
Until I stopped.
I'm definitely not suggesting everyone should shave their hair short.
But I do wonder:
What are we holding onto so tightly that we don't notice how much it's holding us back?
Maybe letting go of something we've decided is terribly important doesn't always mean losing something.
Sometimes, we might discover something on the other side that we weren't expecting.
For me, it was confidence.
Freedom.
And, apparently, the ability to finally wear a warm hat.
A thought to take with you
Is there something you've given more importance in your life than you realized?
What might feel different if you stopped letting it make the decisions?
Something come to mind?
If you'd like to share it, I'd love to hear what this story made you think about.