My haircut, a few musings

"Plan for failure;"  that's my motto.

I have become a huge fan of the (very optimistic, actually) strategy of assuming that whatever project you're going to barrel your way into, you're going to make mistakes that you can learn from.  The example I remember reading about that sold me on this idea was surgeons learning a new, minimally invasive technique: the teams that left deliberate time for debriefing after each surgery (what went wrong? what went right? what could we do differently/better?) ended up eventually being incredibly adept at the technique, whereas the teams that just assumed they'd be awesome at the procedure ended up eventually abandoning it for the old, more invasive technique.  

And so it is that when I cut my hair earlier this month -- and here, "cut" means "drastic change in hairstyle" -- I carefully thought about exit strategy.  

• I did the cutting a tad longer than I'd really wanted to give me wiggle room for further changes; 
• I warned the nearest and dearest in my life so that I could get emotional support for such a big change; 
• I also timed the haircut so that I was heading out of town for a week right afterwards, and 
• during that out-of-town week, I'd be with my sisters, one of whom is awesome with scissors.  

Indeed, said sister wound up snipping a few hairs at the back of my neck to even out the line there.  Minor touch-up.  I now know that I'll be paying attention to that area in the funky medicine cabinet trio of mirrors in the future. 

Even beforehand, I spent a lot of time staring at other people's heads (almost all the women in an Amtrak station had long hair tied up in some kind of pony tails or braids; the short hair I saw among most of my friends in academia looks more professionally manicured than I'm likely to maintain myself).  I kind of fell in love with the heads of the main characters on Peaky Blinders, and decided to try a less stark version of what they did.

The actual clipping of the hair (like the actual painting of a room) was short and sweet.  I used the largest guard on my clippers to do all the sides of my head, leaving the top long.  Then I bent over like I was touching my toes, and used one or two swipes of my sewing scissors straight across the mop on top.  The whole shebang took maybe 45 seconds.  

I have to say, I like my hair now so much.  I had been growing increasingly self conscious during online meetings (I describe it as, my hair was not "Zoom happy").  The new gray hairs go kind of wild when they get long, and I needed a way to tame them down.  

Other people claim to like my hair, too.  That's not why I did the chopping off thing, but it is nice to have affirmation from people around me, so that's fun.  (I love reenacting how I did it:  "and then I bent over like this, and . . .  snip!")  And my sisters, who aren't likely to hold back if they think I'm veering into trouble, were just the right first-feedback machine (including the helpful "back-of-the-neck" pointers).  

It's kind of nice to plan for failure and then to land in the comfy corner of success.  Whoop!