haircuts

No, I still haven't got one yet.

Someone recently mentioned to me the theory that people tend to get dramatic new haircuts when they want to take control of their life and I've been thinking about this as I continue to vacillate on whether to cut my hair or not. The last time I got my hair cut was over 2 years ago. It wasn't even a noticeable hair cut - I only got the split ends trimmed (although if I did that now, it would make a pretty dramatic difference) - but it was definitely part of feeling in control of my life. That was the summer when I was going to the gym every day, cooking proper meals and being productive in the lab I was rotating in. It felt good to be looking after myself. Of course, then everything fell apart and I seem to have been doing my best to be self-destructive ever since.

I've thought about cutting my hair short for a long time, and I keep thinking I will do it, but not just yet. In the mean time, I could just get it trimmed, so that it's not all raggedy and split, but I don't do that, because I'm still deluding myself that I'm going to be ready to make a big change any time now. I think I'm doing the same thing with the rest of my life, too. Obviously, I need to make some big changes, but that seems too intimidating so I just keep being lazy and self-destructive. Somehow it's not enough to try to make a small improvement; I have to completely fix everything at once.

The other issue I have with cutting my hair is the same one I have with my appearance in general. I put minimal effort into my hair/clothes etc, as you can guess from the Lucy halloween costume. I'd like to say that's a purposeful effort to resist patriarchal beauty standards, but really it's just motivated by profound discomfort with myself (inside and out). My aim is pretty much to be invisible, since both positive and negative attention is scary.
It's also meant to be clear that I'm not trying to live up to any kind of beauty standard, since if I don't try, I can't fail. There are a lot of things I think look nice, but I couldn't possibly wear, because I feel like people would think "who are you to think you can look nice, or more importantly, attract attention?"

That summer when I was going to the gym regularly, I did end up feeling more comfortable with my body and how I looked and I liked feeling more able to choose clothes based on how much I liked them, rather than how unnoticeable they'd make me. I guess I felt more like, if anyone noticed the cute clothes, I could still stay invisible, instead of the clothes drawing attention to the fact that "omg, she totally shouldn't be wearing that".

Now I'm back to being completely unfit and not very happy with my appearance (although I think I'm slightly better at accepting it, as long as I don't have to go clothes shopping), so getting a cute haircut seems like it would conflict too much with the rest of me. I feel as if taking control of my hair would only make the lack of control over the rest of my life even more glaringly obvious.

The other option, which I almost felt self-destructive enough to do a couple of weeks ago, is to just cut my hair off, without it being a cute haircut. That would solve the problem of not wanting to appear to care about about how I look, but then it might look bad enough to attract negative attention. Actually, any haircut would seem to imply that I care, since the default is just to ignore my hair, as I've been doing.

I wonder if getting my hair cut would make me feel like I'd taken control of at least one aspect of my life, and then motivate me to make other changes, or if I have to feel ready to make the other changes before I'll finally be motivated to cut my hair.