My mind wanders

I have a little problem. I should probably tell you that.

There isn't really a name for it, but there should be.

I can't stop metamorphosizing. I wonder if chameleons have the same problem when their lives become overwhelming. Do they suddenly swap polka dots for a nice tartan print? In my case, the only thing I can control 99.9% of the time is my appearance. If I had millions of dollars I would probably be one of those sad cases addicted to plastic surgery, but since I've got champagne tastes on a beer budget I often settle the score by torturing my hair. Most of the time this is met with praise (which probably doesn't help, and may be at the root of the problem) but some of the time, I end up back at square one... with little to no hair.

For example I have never been able to grow my hair past my shoulders. Not once in my life have I felt my actual hair (and not some store bought hair piece or weave) graze against my middle back. Why? Reason number one; Relationships.

If someone were to set up a time elapse camera on me during a relationship it would be like watching a street light malfunction. Red! Black! Red! Blonde!Gray?Weave! Short! Bald! It can't be helped and it's the saddest thing ever. Because what guy doesn't prefer his girlfriend to have long hair? What guy doesn't prefer his girlfriend to stay sort of the way he found her in the first place? AND YET, I am only able to keep my cool in the relationship for so long before I molt and change direction. It's as if I believe that if I can pick the right look, the right shade of hair-color, the right style of make up, and just the right outfit... if I can figure out the winning visual combination, things in my relationship will finally click into place. Though it has yet to work, I continue to do this to myself.

Some girls have anorexia. Some girls pull their eyebrows and eyelashes out one at a time.

Parrots pull their feathers out when their owners die. I have stubbornly refused to be myself until being myself became being anything but. So anyways, here I am again, having another one of those "How am I not Myself?" moments. Want to share it with me?

Overwhelmed by life and my relationship, I've hit that impasse again where it's time to start planning a reinvention of self, or I will continue to look in the mirror and see only the flaws that are not getting me anywhere. The aging face= the nose that used to not be quite so beaky when I smiled. The dull complexion. The shrinking eyes. The too fine hair that just hangs there limp on my head unless tortured into a style every single day.

So I permed it and loved it for two weeks, until the curl fell out along with handfuls of hair in the shower. I remembered the terrible stylist who permed it said that it would need to be cut in a few weeks, and rather than go to her again I bobbed a good 2 inches off of it in the hopes it would remedy the breakage and the lack of curl. To no avail. I could not prevent myself from coloring it with a very gentle all natural product known to leave hair in better condition. Unfortunately what should have been close to my natural brown ended up being inky black. My hair is dry. It is uncooperative. The blackness only serves to highlight the fact that my hair is fine and splitty. I want to cut it all off. Right now. Straight away. DO OVER.

A friend, who is also a stylist, saw me last night and said "Black?! Are you crazy?!"

My boyfriend is still sort of into me, but I fear he may leave me if I cut it all off.

Images of the girl he was really into, that impossible to compete with ghost that he sings songs to whenever he holds a guitar, flit into my head. She wasn't gussied up. She was pretty natural.

I consider shaving my head. Letting my natural grow out. I'm in college, I could get away with it. I could take a break from make up and hair all together and just focus on school. Become that girl who just rolls into a pair of jeans and a hoodie and doesn't have to fuss much or get up an hour early to get ready in the morning.

I tell myself if he leaves me, he couldn't handle "the real me". That it doesn't matter if people question my sexuality because all that matters is I know what I'm into. That it doesn't matter what anyone thinks at all, because while they're critiquing how I've "given up on pretty" I will be channeling all that energy I used to put into pulling myself apart, into building who I am on the inside. Building my knowledge, building a future.

I fantasize. I find photographs online of short hair. Hair the color of gingersnaps. I could be Mia Farrow. I could pull off Twiggy. Then I remember they were waifs, and that every time my hair is short I feel like a sexless lesbian. 60% masculine, 40% just slightly too curvy to get away with the street urchin look. I cry every time my hair is that short. The crying is inevitable, it goes with the loneliness of knowing I was right about what other people would think.

So my fantasy morphs. I imagine me with my Rosemary hair, selling off everything that ties me to this old life. I sell all my owls, my bike and my clothes, everything but a few pairs of jeans, a sturdy pair of boots and some warm enough shirts and socks. I use the money to transfer to a college abroad, maybe somewhere with weather moody enough to make for good sad songs. Somewhere like Scotland or Ireland, where imaginary boys with mischevious good looks will be happier to see me. I picture myself alone in a wet, gray, marshy boring old town and it feels like an adventure.