This Is Not What I Meant To Say About My Hair

Also, never-before seen photos of my floor

A Note For You If You’re Having A Bad Day

Dear Friend,

I keep a running list of things I might someday like to write to you about, and mostly I don’t write to you about these things, because they aren’t good ideas. (Do you have something like this? What are some of your bad ideas? Is it a good idea for us to round up all our bad ideas?) On the top of a recent list of topics is “Haircut (you have to go through a part you hate to get to a part you like).” I was going to delete that altogether, because “haircut” didn’t go the way I thought it was going to go, and while I did go through a part I hated, and I did get to a part I liked, I didn’t walk the path I’d intended, so I can’t write the letter I imagined.

Here’s the letter I wanted to write:

Dear Friend,

I had bangs, and I grew them out, and I hated growing them out, but because I waited, I was able to get a chic, bang-less haircut. Now I look terribly chic and cool, and I have no bangs. This is extraordinary, because I am able to flaunt my forehead wrinkles, a thing I want to do as a political statement. On top of that, I look like a mean legacy art dealer who says things like, “If you don’t understand it, that’s entirely your problem, and get out of my gallery.” 

The moral is, you have to wait. And if you wait, you, too, can scold little men who come into your art gallery that anything Hockney has breathed near is way out of their price range.

Love,

Sophie

I had a vision of myself with a certain haircut, which would have required my hair to suddenly turn ice-white of its own volition. The thing about the forehead wrinkles was true, but growing out my bangs was horrible at every turn. I pinned them back with all kinds of barrettes and the barrettes were horrible. I French braided the bangs into the rest of my hair and little wisps flew out making me look like I’d been recently electrocuted. Bobby pins were painful and floppy, twists never lasted very long, and there wasn’t a hairspray or pomade that didn’t have sticky consequences. Maybe worse than my desperation to solve the styling problem was how convinced my friends were that they could advise me about it: “Oh, just pin it to the side! No big deal!” Smoke came out of my ears like I was a Looney Toon. YOU THINK I HAVEN’T TRIED EVERYTHING UNDER GOD’S BLUE HEAVEN? The smoke would say. (I have a cowlick, which infinitely didn’t help.)

I was probably deep in the trenches of this particular hell when I wrote the sentence “Haircut (you have to go through a part you hate to get to a part you like)” on my notepad as a topic for a future newsletter. I could see myself as a different self in the future, and that self was the self that was going to write to you. That self would have some knowledge that this angry, bobby pin failure didn’t have.

In other words: I fell into the “future self” trap. I believe future me is going to have her shit together so much better than current me. Businesses know how to exploit this phenomenon of human psychology to sell you things and let you pay for them later. Buy the dress now, because by January, you’ll have lost the baby weight, and you’ll be happy to have the dress. It isn’t a horrible idea to just have 100 pounds of raw beeswax because in the future, you’ll have more time to start your lip balm business. You’ve already read an article on how to make your own lip balm; now all you need is the time. In the future, you’ll find it. 

Of course, we’re terrible about thinking about our actual selves in the actual future. It’s hard to set aside money for those selves, or wear sunscreen, exercise, eat piles of steamed broccoli, etc. That’s called “present bias,” and it’s well documented, and frankly, I don’t care about it. I don’t think it matters much at all. 

Here’s one reason why: when people reach the ends of their lives and are asked about their regrets, the percentage that talk about saving more for their 401Ks and wearing more sunscreen is (drumroll please…) 0. They talk about taking better care in their relationships and finding deeper satisfaction with their life work. These are things that require no planning. They require, instead, the letting go of the idea that somewhere in the future is a better life, where you will finally be able to settle in and spend time with the people and activities and causes you care about.

Another way of putting this is: you don’t always have to wait for your bangs to grow out to get to a part you like. 

Deep in the throes of a months-long bad mood, I made an appointment to get my hair cut. I knew my hair wouldn’t be long enough by then to achieve my fantasy (I still hadn’t gotten the coveted bangs-tuck), but I also knew I needed a change, and that my life felt heavy. (Or was it just my hair?)

I went to see Abby, whom I’d met at a samurai movie night a month before and had immediately liked. Probably the main thing that gets in the way of me going to get my hair cut is that I hate going to get my hair cut. I mean, I’m terrified of being a sub-par conversationalist with a person whose job it is to be a master artist and multitasker day in and day out, and so I turn myself into a ball of stress over trying to be the exact right level of amusing and inquisitive when I go to the salon. Because I am trying so hard, I inevitably epically fail, and I imagine that stylists see my name on a schedule and grow rigid with dread. I hate that I am the hypothetical cause of this, and I don’t know how to shake my fear about it. Which is why meeting a funny, interesting person with really cute hair who worked at a salon in Chicago felt like the universe sending me a sign.¹

I walked into the salon and told Abby that, as much as I wanted to make a political statement about forehead wrinkles, I really didn’t feel like myself without bangs. Do you know how sometimes you say a sentence and once you say it you realize how very true it is? The bangs thing is a deep truth, and I didn’t fully understand it until that moment. Then I asked for an undercut, because summer, and Abby said, “I had a feeling this was the haircut we were going to be doing today.” Then we talked about quirky weddings, and Abby did a spine-tingling scalp massage, and when I left the salon, well, to say a weight had been lifted would be too cliche, right? But.

In an essay for Orion Magazine, the radical environmental activist Derrick Jensen writes passionately on his decision to give up on hope. This kind of idea used to freak me out way too much; it was too bleak, and I worried that if I engaged with it, I’d never stop feeling despair, so instead of reading articles about the “we’re fucked”-ness of climate change, I’d push them aside, deciding instead to hope someone out there was figuring it out, and meanwhile, I’d ride my bike and be a vegan. If this resonates, I encourage you to read this essay, since it wouldn’t be right for me to just excerpt the whole thing here. But I’ll say that I credit Jensen with easing my climate anxiety more than anyone else, by encouraging me to continue to work to save the natural world I love. Which, he notes, has nothing to do with hope. He writes:

When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free — truly free — to honestly start working to resolve it. I would say that when hope dies, action begins.

As Jensen points out, this is a Buddhist idea, and Pema Chodron writes compellingly about it in When Things Fall Apart, noting that hope and fear are two sides of the same coin: "Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can’t simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment.” 

Sometimes you do have to wait for the smoke to clear, for the water to recede, for your cold to go away, for the wound to heal, for your bangs to grow out (since we aren’t all bangs people, I guess). It can be difficult to know when time is the thing that’s required, and when action is. Nevertheless, the you that exists right now is definitely already worthy of The Good Life. The you that is reading this letter already deserves to enjoy life.

Something I think about all the time is that whatever picture gets taken of me today is a picture I’ll look at later and think, “Wow. I was so young then.”

Here’s to Present You.

Love,

Sophie

This Week In Sophie

Sammi and I had a cartoon in The New Yorker last week that maybe doubles as a parenting paragraph?

Also, I’ll tell you before anyone else that I have put up six new print packs in my shop — it’s taken me forever to do this, and you have to scroll to the bottom to see them, for some reason. Here is what my floor looks like, and it feels impossible to organize everything and number and ship it, but I have made all these prints, and I want to get rid of them, so please help me do that!

I also have a metric ton of new stickers, and I have a deal where you can pick two and I’ll pick two, and you can pay me $7 and I’ll mail them to you, and you don’t have to pay for shipping! (This is a deal and I DO NOT BREAK EVEN, but I love to send you mail.)

On that note, let’s vote for a new print, shall we?

Vote on one to become a print forever and ever!

A plea that yes, in the summer, educators really struggle to make ends meet — and they did, indeed raise our mortgage $1,000 a month. If you’ve been on the fence about becoming a paid subscriber, a $5 a month subscription makes an enormous difference in my actual life! So if this newsletter means something to you, please consider subscribing. (And if you can’t pay right now, but you also haven’t signed up for free, that makes a bigger difference than you know. Consider become a FREE subscriber! What do you have to lose?)

1. Time to note that the samurai movie night is a monthly affair hosted by my friend Brendan. It’s a really cool idea, and he said I could tell you about it. On the last Sunday of every month, he has over whoever wants to come to watch a samurai movie in his apartment. They order popcorn from the local independent movie theater and noodles from a place where there are noodles, and it’s a really nice, causal way he’s built community this year among our friends. I also want to say that Abby cuts Brendan’s hair, and my girlfriend’s Kat’s hair, so I knew that Abby was good at cutting hair, and did very attractive haircuts.