Weight Loss & Finding True Self: It's All Connected

It’s all connected…all of it; the weight loss affects everything, and everything is affected by the weight loss.  Everything! 

 This is going to sound weird at first, but bear with me.  The longer I am healthy the more mental and emotional issues are coming to the surface.  In essence, I guess being healthy is allowing me to finally deal with some things that I really didn’t even know were matters of concern.  And it’s only now, being at a stable place with my eating and weight, that I have the strength to stare down those problems and finally deal with them. 

Take hair, for example.  Hair, in and of itself, shouldn’t be a big deal, right?Unless your sense of self-worth and your supposed true self are tangled up in the belief that you NEED long hair.  Not want…NEED.  That without long hair, you are not enough.  That without long hair, you are not YOU.  Well, I am 55 years old and I am now on a journey to find?  --return to?  --present my authenticate self and, for me, the hair issue must be dealt with. 

I’ve lost 50 pounds over the past year and a half.  I’m fit now and healthy, looking good.  Yet unbeknownst to me, I was still clinging to a misconceived notion of what I need to look like.  I have thinning hair, an issue I’ve been dealing with since 2009.  Finally, in May of this year, I got a pixie cut because I was tired of the stress and anxiety of trying to make sure all my thin spots were covered, all day, every day.  Having a short cut helped immensely…I haven’t felt that happy and carefree concerning my hair in years.  Then a couple of months after the cut, I decided I wanted long hair again.  BECAUSE IN MY HEAD, THAT’S WHO I AM:  I am a Longhair.  Only I’m not, you see.  I can’t BE that person anymore because my hair won’t let me.  Even though I was ecstatic with the pixie cut, I was trying to turn back the clock and shove myself into a box where I *thought* I would be happy.  Why?  Why would I do that to myself?? 

So I had to have a talk with myself.  Remember when you were bald while taking chemo treatments?  Did you stop being Trisha?  Does hair, or absence thereof, honestly change who you are on the inside? 

There’s a song by India Arie that says it all.  And I’m parking the video here as a reminder to myself.  I am not my hair…I am not this skin.  “Was it the hair that got me this far?”

I have a hair appointment tomorrow morning to reclaim the pixie cut. 

And I will rock it.  J