Empathy

For the past year or so, I’ve been growing my hair out. I’ve never had long hair before, and it’s fun to try something new. As I’ve been growing my hair, I’ve learned some things. These are things that I’ve heard before, but never really understood.

  • Washing long hair takes a long time. Like, an order of magnitude longer than short hair.
  • You make the mistake of going to bed with wet hair. When you try to comb it out in the morning, you end up crying and wondering why you don’t have blood flowing down your head from ripping your hair out of your scalp.
  • Nothing compares to the feeling of wind rushing through long hair. You gain a whole new appreciation for roller coasters and open car windows.
  • There is a whole new frustration when dealing with hair that is longer than you’re used to but not “long”. Bending over means that you stand up with hair in your face.
  • When you walk in to a dark room, you start freaking out because you think you see shadows moving around in the room, only to realize that it’s just your hair in front of your eyes.
  • Your hair pokes you in your eyes. This is a pain unlike anything you’ve experienced before.
  • You realize how drastically different the rates of growth are for different parts of your head. You need a weed whacker to keep the hair at the back of your head in check. Meanwhile, you spend months agonizing over how slowly your bangs are growing because they’re just not quite long enough to tuck behind your ears.
  • However, the realization that your hair is now long enough to tuck behind your ears is life-changing.
  • You appreciate your ears more. They are built-in hair holders. As an added bonus, they can help you hear things.
  • You have a constant, minor headache where your neck meets your head from shaking your head from side to side in order to get strands of hair out of your face.
  • Every time you get out of the shower, you wonder why you are not bald from all the hair that’s come out.
  • As an added step of showering, you now have to clean the equivalent of a small waterlogged rat out of the drain.
  • You have a persistent voice in your head telling you to just chop it all off.
  • You consider your hair to be a convenient neck-warming layer. Scarves may now be optional when it’s cold outside.
  • Suddenly your mom thinks you’re a liberal and begins to worry about your immortal soul.
  • Your answer to that is “Jesus had long hair; I’m trying to be like Jesus.”
  • You develop a reflex to reach up and tuck your hair behind your ears. In so doing, you begin to regret teasing girls in grade school for doing the same thing so often.
  • When you find a long hair in your food, it’s no longer feasible to blame it on your kids. They have plausible deniability.
  • Suddenly you don’t buy shampoo anymore; you buy “product”.
  • You consider investing in hair product manufacturers.

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