#like I ran into a meds delivery issue so that's part of why the past week has been so Bad™ & it's finally fixed now but jfc brain calm down

[musical-chick-13]

Anyone else out here feeling disconnected from their own humanity.

[ellenlucasonlinedatingblog]

Making My Hair Mine

Katie Klabusich

My adoptive mom’s hangups convinced me I was an ugly duckling with noticeable imperfections. Turns out, it was about her, not me, and certainly not about my hair, which isn't the enemy she -- or I -- thought it was, either.

I have a bit of an obsession with the Instagram feeds of my friends who parent. All those pics and videos of their kids being… well, kids! At 39, my inner child’s heart bursts with appreciation for all that praise of their uniqueness, the silly moments alongside them, and even encouragement for them to experiment with whatever clothing and hairstyles feel right to their personalities, genders, and whims.

A few years ago, my good friend and fellow writer Avital Norman Nathman wrote about why she “lets” her son — who inherited her whimsically curly, often multicolored locks — grow his hair past his shoulders. She’d fielded comments from self-professed, well-meaning bystanders who worried he’d be confused with a girl. As both a fierce feminist and loving mom, she rejected the false gender binary — which taught her son that he’s unique and valuable just as he is, however he is.

My own experience growing up was different.

Parents (and guardians of all titles) are people. They have their own emotional baggage, insecurities, habits, and idiosyncrasies that are part of their personalities. Because they have authority over us, it is naturally hard to see them that way when we’re growing up. Their words and actions have power long before we’re able to see themselves outside their role as the chief influencers in our lives.

Meanwhile, they incorporate those insecurities and habits into their relationships with us. In my house, my adoptive mom’s primary obsession was my hair — all of it: the length, the color, the style, and the amount of curl. And most importantly: how much it made us alike or different.

When a parent has and expresses a particular and constant attentiveness to your appearance — be it praise or criticism -- that constant feedback takes root. When I had light blond hair and soft baby ringlets through age four or five, she LOVED my hair. She played with it like I was a doll. I remember wanting to run around, but having to sit still while she brushed or braided it.

As I got older and let my hair grow, it got thicker, browner and straighter. I hit a couple of growth spurts and lost my chubby baby cheeks, too. Overall, I started looking less and less like her — triggering her insecurities about having had to adopt a child rather than being able to carry and give birth to one. At a glance, anyone who cared to take notice and didn’t know I was adopted would've simply assumed I was going through a phase where I just looked more like my darker, Hungarian father.

But people stopped commenting about how remarkably alike we looked. For her, every new trait pushed us further apart and made me less hers. I’m positive this would've been true even without a birthmark on my scalp for her to focus intently on.

Since reuniting with my birth mother last year I learned that my delivery was long. Like, so long she wasn’t particularly sure which date she’d given birth on. I was born after almost forty hours of labor, and that makes the birthmark — a dime-sized bald spot with a small bump in the middle — likely a result of the doctor using forceps to help me along. It’s always been there, just left of center midway down my skull in the back. My hair has always been thick, so it’s always been covered. But the fear that it could be seen — what if I did a cartwheel? or the wind blew at recess? — pushed my mom to cater hairstyles around it, narrating her thought-process as she did.

At some point she noticed that the hair around the bald spot was curlier than the rest of my hair. It was also darker (probably because it was covered and never got bleached by the sun like the top layer). With a furrowed brow, she sat me down in front of a movie and cut the curlier hair down to half an inch, creating — of course — a larger bald spot. Three times the size of the original, in fact. I couldn’t leave it alone because it was new and felt weird. And thus, an almost thirty-year-long tick was born. Beating it would take therapy, meds, and an intense desire to cast off all the insecurities I have that are tied to her.

In the ten or so years between the first time my mom excised the “extra” curly hair and when I won the battle to control what was done to my head just before my senior year of high school, she went through various phases — which meant I had to go through them with her. At one point she was so grossed out by this thing that made me weird and different and ugly (or at least that’s how it made me feel) that she leaned down and, in a giggle-whisper voice like we were both ten years old, said: “It’s almost like ya got pubic hair back here!”

What kid wouldn’t get a complex? I think that now, but I would never have asked a peer for validation or their opinion. I was terrified of just the idea that someone would see it.

She’d also been frosting my hair at home for what felt like forever. For those who don’t know, frosting was a do-it-yourself highlighting kit from the olden days (the 70’s). It was something my friend’s moms usually did for themselves while we kids played with less permanent homemade concoctions for our hair made from different Kool-Aid flavors.

Frosting first required brushing your hair to within an inch of your poor scalp’s life, and then squeezing a plastic cover, like a swimming cap, over your head, eyebrows, and ears. Then, a tool that should only be used for crocheting is poked through the cap 75-200 times, to pul a few hairs through at a time. Once you look like a potato that’s been allowed to sprout, all those pulled-through hairs are brushed again (OUCH!) and a packet of chemicals is mixed using a mask. Why a mask, you say? Because the fumes are f’ing toxic. My hair usually took half an hour to get tugged, completely stripped of color, super dry, and extra frizzy.

It is perhaps unsurprising that I did not undergo this process willingly.

By the time I got to middle school, I’d completely adopted my mom’s paranoia about the hair around the spot and the spot itself. The popular hairstyle in my peer group was “The Rachel” (from “Friends” — flat, straight, with just one or two playful layers in the front to fall in the face). My hair was never going to be flat, but it hadn’t totally transitioned to curly, so I was still trying to wrangle it smooth. That two-or-so-inch ring of trimmed down hair was making most of the hair near the crown of my head poof out noticeably. I was willing to do something more time and money intensive.

Lye had already gone out of fashion as a chemical in hair straighteners because it burns like hell. It feels like your scalp is being literally fried. I — voluntarily, this time — let my mom take me to a stylist who applied the old-school formula and brushed it in, dragging a comb over the skin of my bald spot. The back of my head hurt for days afterward. We repeated this every three or four months.

Eventually, I told her I was tired of messing with it. I’d never picked up her love of a two-hour morning make-up and hair routine. I was going to be taking a “zero-hour” class at 6:50am before the regular school day started the following Fall. I was smartly looking to cut out things I didn’t need (or want) to spend time on. I must have sounded sensible enough (I often cited my academic goals when I needed something), because I got to drop all the extras, and so I also got to see what my actual hair looked like. Luckily, the 90’s had loosened up a bit (or I had) and my curly hair was either a non-issue (better than being bullied!) or people liked it because it was different.

Even though it felt like a HUGE victory to have wrested control over my hair back from my mom at 17 (and without a fight!), it would be another two decades before I was truly comfortable with it. Appearance is about our features, and my often waist-length curly hair was my most distinguishing one. I’d let Mom talk me into cutting it the month before I went to college and it’s the only decision I regret. So I let it grow. And grow. And the more I heard how cute it was short, the more I grew it out of spite.

More than seven years after disowning me the first time (just before Christmas in 2011), when I looked in the mirror I still saw the result of choices that have been about defiance.

Why was anything this toxic person had ever said about my hair to me or anyone else still defining what I did with it?

I think about my hair every day, even if it’s just to pull it back out of my face. So every day a tiny piece of that trauma plays out in the back of my head — right underneath that damn spot causing all the trouble, LOLsob — even if I don’t consciously notice.

Then I thought: what if I just cut it?

I realized I didn’t care if it was perfectly even (a big step for someone with even my mild form of obsessive-compulsive disorder). I didn’t care if my current partners would like it. I popped by a drug store and grabbed decent scissors. I flipped my head upside down over a towel and started chopping!

I didn’t expect to feel so lightweight and fancy free.

I brushed it. I washed it. I ran my fingers through it. I posted a selfie three full days after washing it, sleeping on it, putting it up and taking it down for work, and otherwise playing with it because it was new. As people popped up to say how great it looks, I didn’t feel my typical trepidation and immediately launch into rejecting or mitigating the compliments. I thought, “Yeah. It does!” By the next day, it’d been elevated to my favorite haircut EVER.

I had a date with my primary partner/boyfriend who I’d been with for almost two years. This is someone who has seen my body at various weights and shapes as my health fluctuated, different versions of my hair, with and without makeup. I've never been perfectly comfortable naked in front of a partner; like most of us, I have an insecurity or two. But I believe him when he says he loves my body — including my hair, which I always wear up when we have sex.

Every time my hair got in the way during a sexual situation and a partner groaned (not in the good way, but usually not intentionally) I had a jolt of mood-killing insecurity. Which lead to me automatically pulling it back. I didn’t realize it until very recently, but those unintentional disapproving sounds definitely triggered memories of my Mom’s judgemental noises as she snipped the tight curls around my birthmark.

Even though my current boyfriend has said it isn’t/wouldn’t be in the way, and I believe him about that too, I never wanted my hair down. I just didn’t want to have to manage it — or be distracted by it, or think about it at all — during an enjoyable, but admittedly often messy, activity. Even though wearing it up was a long-standing habit, it hadn’t ever occurred to me that it was affecting my overall body image.

Well. Two weeks ago I found myself unconsciously taking my hair tie OUT OF MY HAIR as things were heating up with Current BF! When I realized it — I realized it felt GOOD. That I felt good! I didn’t feel any kind of insecurity. An hour later when I was all blissed-out I didn’t even try and picture what I looked like — what my hair might look like. I didn’t care. It was just part of the rest of me.

Of course it was. It is! IT’S MY HAIR. It always has been, but now it feels like it is.

body image

self image

self esteem

family

growing up

identity

comfort

hair

appearance

parents

adoption

sex

relationships

working it out

empowerment

Bodies

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[type2diabetestreatments-blog]

Dance Pharmaceuticals Gives Inhaled Insulin a "Do-Over" (Exubera 3.0?)

New Post has been published on http://type2diabetestreatment.net/diabetes-mellitus/dance-pharmaceuticals-gives-inhaled-insulin-a-do-over-exubera-3-0/

Dance Pharmaceuticals Gives Inhaled Insulin a "Do-Over" (Exubera 3.0?)

I can't help it. This reminds me of the movie City Slickers, in which one of the characters has messed up his life, and his friends tell him he's getting a "do-over." The young company Dance Pharmaceuticals, based in downtown San Francisco, is basically on a mission to salvage the good parts of Pfizer's failed inhaled insulin Exubera (not the awkward delivery device!) and launch a second coming of the base product that is "simpler, smaller, easier to use, and lower cost." Godspeed, I thought, upon hearing this!

Last week, I spoke with Dance's President and CEO John Patton, who was part of the Exubera development team, and Chief Business Officer Samantha Miller.

As an intro, John had emailed me this statement:

"Dance is founded by people from Inhale/Nektar and is 100% focused on making good on the inhaled insulin promise. We're convinced that we can create products that build on the strengths of Exubera and resolve the weaknesses (issues around both device and cost). Before the launch of Exubera, we were already well along in developing a much smaller, more patient-friendly 2nd generation product when Pfizer pulled the plug on the entire program. This was devastating to all of us working on it.

We know how to leverage all this previous work and investment to the fast development of a 3rd generation product. Our product will not be perfect, as we're still dealing with technical constraints and cost constraints, but we believe we are taking a giant step in the right direction and look forward to showing you our technology and potential form factors soon."

Then on the phone, we talked specifics:

DM) I know you're working on a much-improved inhaler device, but how does the drug itself differ from Exubera?

Samantha Miller) A good way to think about what Dance is doing is reformatting the Exubera technology. We're taking the Exubera formulation and just removing some of the additional chemicals they had included — some of the additives.

On the device side ... our formulation is a liquid pulmonary device instead of dry powder pulmonary device.

Your website mentions aerosol technology. Sounds like this is going to be the 'hairspray' version of insulin?

SM) Aerosol is often used as another word for "inhalation" or "pulmonary." So it's a general tech word that could be misinterpreted. So we probably should use a different word...

John Patton) Actually, aerosol came about when a scientist's little girl who had asthma — who was taking all these horrible oral steroids and things — said, 'Daddy, why can't you put my medicine in a spray like mommy's hairspray?' It originated back in the '50s. But we don't like to be thought of that way at all. Ours is more of a gentle mist.

So you have a prototype that you're testing now?

JP) We have a prototype, but we're improving on it. It is similar to an asthma inhaler — a hand-held mini-nebulizer.

One option is that users would have a vial of special insulin that's separate, and then drop the right number of drops into the inhaler and breathe on it. We're looking at this and a few other possible dosing formats.

This is prandial-only (mealtime) insulin, correct? So users would still need an injection for their long-acting basal dosing?

JP) Yes. And the precision of dosing has been very good (in studies). As a matter of fact, it's identical to shots.

Which diabetics do you expect to use this product?

JP) We're not ruling out type 1s... but type 2 is our primary market. Those patients tend to put off taking insulin for so many years, and because of that their disease progresses, and healthcare costs go way up.

And when people go off of a series of oral medications — which we think is backwards because they should be going on insulin sooner — the cost of their meds goes down. Overall, cost is critical. It's one of the reasons the initial (Exubera) program failed, because it was too expensive.

But it wasn't just cost that killed Exubera. The inhaler was not a lifestyle-friendly device by any measure!

We admit the thing was a big, clunky, sort of ridiculous-looking device. It was the first go; give us a break!

But why didn't the developers listen to feedback, pre-launch, from patients and doctors saying it was too big and awkward to use?

JP) We couldn't really change that. That was our first product. It was anchored in stone. We had a second generation that was like 2.5 inches high. It was a tiny, delightful little device; it would have assuaged you.

But that was the one we did our trials with and changing it would have thrown us back another 3 to 4 years in development.

The reason why that thing was big was to make sure that it was accurate and that patients got the dose they were supposed to get. And then as time went by, we learned how to miniaturize it. You know, like the first personal computer filled a room!

If that's all true, then why did Pfizer dump it? Why didn't they hang onto it and try to do it better in a newer version?

SM) Because they didn't think it was commercially viable from their perspective. They weren't making a lot of money on the product, because there was a cost of goods problem that needed to be resolved.

Is inhalable insulin more expensive to produce than shots then?

JP) Insulin is one of most inexpensive drugs on the planet. And they charged a very small premium. It wasn't exorbitant at all. Instead of a dollar, it was like $1.20 per dose.

But even at that, we'd only shown equivalency to shots. If the therapy is just the same as injections, then you have no justification for charging more. And because of that, it was not covered by payers in Europe anywhere, and that was one of our big markets.

Is insulin really so cheap? That's not what we're seeing and hearing as patients.

JP) As far as recombinant proteins go, yes. Insulin was the first product that Genentech invented, by DNA engineering, and they licensed it to Lilly. But it had always been sold as a porcine or bovine product, from cows or pigs, and the price was 'grandfathered.'

Most recombinant proteins cost anywhere from $200 to $2,000 a dose; insulin's a dollar.

How does Dance plan to change the economics on producing a fancy inhalable insulin device?

JP) We're not going to be satisfied with some high-end device that only people in America and Europe can afford. So that's really played into our passion — to somehow make this thing affordable for people in China and India. Over there, there's no way you can charge what we charge here. So our selection of technology is heavily influenced by cost.

This 'Laptop for every child' campaign — I know that sounds a little bit hokey — but it's really working in Africa. And we want an inhaler for every diabetic in the world.

Dear readers: I'm thinking, "good luck with that!" And for once, I'm not being snarky.

Of course there were some people who liked Exubera, but on the whole, I think it's clear that Pfizer's judgment was off in expecting people to come flocking to the product in its current form...

JP) You're right. Absolutely. The CEO was from McDonald's. He was used to seeing hamburger numbers go up every month.

If you look historically at the adoption of all the insulins, the adoption glucose monitoring, or of pumps and pens, none of them take off like rocketships. The (adoption) curves all look like a hockey stick.

The whole early adopter / bell curve thing is typical. But Pfizer went in so big, invested so much money... and then just 'dumped the product and ran away.' It didn't leave a good taste in the mouth of most patients.

JP) No, and it didn't leave a good taste in the mouth of the people at Pfizer who developed it. They were bitter and ashamed.

We had a fabulous team there, we worked so hard. The second generation was coming and it was looking really good. And then they made this commercial decision. That was devastating for us.

I guess that's the whole point here, is getting past the negative connotations with a product like this...

JP) It's tough. We know it's not going to be easy, but we still think it's a good idea. We want this thing to look so cool that it'll be a draw just on its own.

Let's talk competition for a moment. How does your product stack up against MannKind's Afrezza?

JP) We're definitely rooting very heavily for those guys to succeed!

Ours is going to be different, in the sense that ours is the same profile that Lilly, Novo, and Pfizer developed, and we think it very well matches the natural secretion of the pancreas in response to a meal.

MannKind's got an ultra-fast insulin that would be absorbed and cleared faster than ours. And they feel that's an advantage to the patient. That's not our strategy.

Wait, how is slower insulin better?

JP) We want to match what the body does physiologically, naturally. If you look in the literature, there's a lot of published studies on the body's response to a normal meal — with protein, fat and carbohydrate. Our profile matches that well, so that's our goal, is to maintain that.

As patients, we're always being told the problem is that current insulins aren't fast enough...?

JP) I know. You know, when people say that, they need to show you the data. I've written a review covering all the published studies on the pharmacokinetics. An awful lot of what diabetics are told is not true.

But we patients can see for ourselves that no matter how carefully we dose, we get blood sugar spikes after meals.

JP) This is very controversial among insulin suppliers too — whether or not faster and faster insulins are really what you want. The data supporting that is really thin. And I would challenge anybody to immerse yourself in the literature, and not to pay so much attention to some of the sound bites people tell you about insulin.

What is your launch strategy for this new inhalable insulin?

SM) We're in the middle of an angel (investment) round right now. We have a pretty aggressive business development effort. Right now we're looking for a couple of regional partnerships, and also talking to insulin suppliers.

We're not quite decided on how to launch the product yet — as a small company, or in partnership with a major Pharma company. That strategy is to be determined at this point. We just want to be sure that we develop the best possible product that we can for patient's use.

Clearly this product is a few years out from hitting the market. Are you feeling confident about moving quickly through FDA by then?

JP) We're going to be leveraging $6.5 Billion of other people's work, which is in the public domain — safety studies, special population groups, efficacy and so on.

We'll have to do some specific studies relating to our system, but we won't have to reinvent the wheel in terms of long-term safety and a lot of the efficacy work that's already been done.

Why Dance? Does the name have a special meaning?

JP) Well, we like to dance. And in order to really get in synch with the patients and business partners, you need to 'dance' with them. And also the molecules — insulin is undergoing motion, so it does a dance as it hooks up with its receptor. So there are lots of reasons for the name...

Most of all, we think that diabetics will dance for joy when they get this product.

****

Well, that's a TBD if I ever heard one. Still, it's exciting to see this technology move forward, no?

Thank you for this dance, John and Samantha.

Disclaimer: Content created by the Diabetes Mine team. For more details click here.

Disclaimer

This content is created for Diabetes Mine, a consumer health blog focused on the diabetes community. The content is not medically reviewed and doesn't adhere to Healthline's editorial guidelines. For more information about Healthline's partnership with Diabetes Mine, please click here.

Type 2 Diabetes Treatment Type 2 Diabetes Diet Diabetes Destroyer Reviews Original Article

[ellenlucasonlinedatingblog]

Making My Hair Mine

Katie Klabusich

My adoptive mom’s hangups convinced me I was an ugly duckling with noticeable imperfections. Turns out, it was about her, not me, and certainly not about my hair, which isn't the enemy she -- or I -- thought it was, either.

I have a bit of an obsession with the Instagram feeds of my friends who parent. All those pics and videos of their kids being… well, kids! At 39, my inner child’s heart bursts with appreciation for all that praise of their uniqueness, the silly moments alongside them, and even encouragement for them to experiment with whatever clothing and hairstyles feel right to their personalities, genders, and whims.

A few years ago, my good friend and fellow writer Avital Norman Nathman wrote about why she “lets” her son — who inherited her whimsically curly, often multicolored locks — grow his hair past his shoulders. She’d fielded comments from self-professed, well-meaning bystanders who worried he’d be confused with a girl. As both a fierce feminist and loving mom, she rejected the false gender binary — which taught her son that he’s unique and valuable just as he is, however he is.

My own experience growing up was different.

Parents (and guardians of all titles) are people. They have their own emotional baggage, insecurities, habits, and idiosyncrasies that are part of their personalities. Because they have authority over us, it is naturally hard to see them that way when we’re growing up. Their words and actions have power long before we’re able to see themselves outside their role as the chief influencers in our lives.

Meanwhile, they incorporate those insecurities and habits into their relationships with us. In my house, my adoptive mom’s primary obsession was my hair — all of it: the length, the color, the style, and the amount of curl. And most importantly: how much it made us alike or different.

When a parent has and expresses a particular and constant attentiveness to your appearance — be it praise or criticism -- that constant feedback takes root. When I had light blond hair and soft baby ringlets through age four or five, she LOVED my hair. She played with it like I was a doll. I remember wanting to run around, but having to sit still while she brushed or braided it.

As I got older and let my hair grow, it got thicker, browner and straighter. I hit a couple of growth spurts and lost my chubby baby cheeks, too. Overall, I started looking less and less like her — triggering her insecurities about having had to adopt a child rather than being able to carry and give birth to one. At a glance, anyone who cared to take notice and didn’t know I was adopted would've simply assumed I was going through a phase where I just looked more like my darker, Hungarian father.

But people stopped commenting about how remarkably alike we looked. For her, every new trait pushed us further apart and made me less hers. I’m positive this would've been true even without a birthmark on my scalp for her to focus intently on.

Since reuniting with my birth mother last year I learned that my delivery was long. Like, so long she wasn’t particularly sure which date she’d given birth on. I was born after almost forty hours of labor, and that makes the birthmark — a dime-sized bald spot with a small bump in the middle — likely a result of the doctor using forceps to help me along. It’s always been there, just left of center midway down my skull in the back. My hair has always been thick, so it’s always been covered. But the fear that it could be seen — what if I did a cartwheel? or the wind blew at recess? — pushed my mom to cater hairstyles around it, narrating her thought-process as she did.

At some point she noticed that the hair around the bald spot was curlier than the rest of my hair. It was also darker (probably because it was covered and never got bleached by the sun like the top layer). With a furrowed brow, she sat me down in front of a movie and cut the curlier hair down to half an inch, creating — of course — a larger bald spot. Three times the size of the original, in fact. I couldn’t leave it alone because it was new and felt weird. And thus, an almost thirty-year-long tick was born. Beating it would take therapy, meds, and an intense desire to cast off all the insecurities I have that are tied to her.

In the ten or so years between the first time my mom excised the “extra” curly hair and when I won the battle to control what was done to my head just before my senior year of high school, she went through various phases — which meant I had to go through them with her. At one point she was so grossed out by this thing that made me weird and different and ugly (or at least that’s how it made me feel) that she leaned down and, in a giggle-whisper voice like we were both ten years old, said: “It’s almost like ya got pubic hair back here!”

What kid wouldn’t get a complex? I think that now, but I would never have asked a peer for validation or their opinion. I was terrified of just the idea that someone would see it.

She’d also been frosting my hair at home for what felt like forever. For those who don’t know, frosting was a do-it-yourself highlighting kit from the olden days (the 70’s). It was something my friend’s moms usually did for themselves while we kids played with less permanent homemade concoctions for our hair made from different Kool-Aid flavors.

Frosting first required brushing your hair to within an inch of your poor scalp’s life, and then squeezing a plastic cover, like a swimming cap, over your head, eyebrows, and ears. Then, a tool that should only be used for crocheting is poked through the cap 75-200 times, to pul a few hairs through at a time. Once you look like a potato that’s been allowed to sprout, all those pulled-through hairs are brushed again (OUCH!) and a packet of chemicals is mixed using a mask. Why a mask, you say? Because the fumes are f’ing toxic. My hair usually took half an hour to get tugged, completely stripped of color, super dry, and extra frizzy.

It is perhaps unsurprising that I did not undergo this process willingly.

By the time I got to middle school, I’d completely adopted my mom’s paranoia about the hair around the spot and the spot itself. The popular hairstyle in my peer group was “The Rachel” (from “Friends” — flat, straight, with just one or two playful layers in the front to fall in the face). My hair was never going to be flat, but it hadn’t totally transitioned to curly, so I was still trying to wrangle it smooth. That two-or-so-inch ring of trimmed down hair was making most of the hair near the crown of my head poof out noticeably. I was willing to do something more time and money intensive.

Lye had already gone out of fashion as a chemical in hair straighteners because it burns like hell. It feels like your scalp is being literally fried. I — voluntarily, this time — let my mom take me to a stylist who applied the old-school formula and brushed it in, dragging a comb over the skin of my bald spot. The back of my head hurt for days afterward. We repeated this every three or four months.

Eventually, I told her I was tired of messing with it. I’d never picked up her love of a two-hour morning make-up and hair routine. I was going to be taking a “zero-hour” class at 6:50am before the regular school day started the following Fall. I was smartly looking to cut out things I didn’t need (or want) to spend time on. I must have sounded sensible enough (I often cited my academic goals when I needed something), because I got to drop all the extras, and so I also got to see what my actual hair looked like. Luckily, the 90’s had loosened up a bit (or I had) and my curly hair was either a non-issue (better than being bullied!) or people liked it because it was different.

Even though it felt like a HUGE victory to have wrested control over my hair back from my mom at 17 (and without a fight!), it would be another two decades before I was truly comfortable with it. Appearance is about our features, and my often waist-length curly hair was my most distinguishing one. I’d let Mom talk me into cutting it the month before I went to college and it’s the only decision I regret. So I let it grow. And grow. And the more I heard how cute it was short, the more I grew it out of spite.

More than seven years after disowning me the first time (just before Christmas in 2011), when I looked in the mirror I still saw the result of choices that have been about defiance.

Why was anything this toxic person had ever said about my hair to me or anyone else still defining what I did with it?

I think about my hair every day, even if it’s just to pull it back out of my face. So every day a tiny piece of that trauma plays out in the back of my head — right underneath that damn spot causing all the trouble, LOLsob — even if I don’t consciously notice.

Then I thought: what if I just cut it?

I realized I didn’t care if it was perfectly even (a big step for someone with even my mild form of obsessive-compulsive disorder). I didn’t care if my current partners would like it. I popped by a drug store and grabbed decent scissors. I flipped my head upside down over a towel and started chopping!

I didn’t expect to feel so lightweight and fancy free.

I brushed it. I washed it. I ran my fingers through it. I posted a selfie three full days after washing it, sleeping on it, putting it up and taking it down for work, and otherwise playing with it because it was new. As people popped up to say how great it looks, I didn’t feel my typical trepidation and immediately launch into rejecting or mitigating the compliments. I thought, “Yeah. It does!” By the next day, it’d been elevated to my favorite haircut EVER.

I had a date with my primary partner/boyfriend who I’d been with for almost two years. This is someone who has seen my body at various weights and shapes as my health fluctuated, different versions of my hair, with and without makeup. I've never been perfectly comfortable naked in front of a partner; like most of us, I have an insecurity or two. But I believe him when he says he loves my body — including my hair, which I always wear up when we have sex.

Every time my hair got in the way during a sexual situation and a partner groaned (not in the good way, but usually not intentionally) I had a jolt of mood-killing insecurity. Which lead to me automatically pulling it back. I didn’t realize it until very recently, but those unintentional disapproving sounds definitely triggered memories of my Mom’s judgemental noises as she snipped the tight curls around my birthmark.

Even though my current boyfriend has said it isn’t/wouldn’t be in the way, and I believe him about that too, I never wanted my hair down. I just didn’t want to have to manage it — or be distracted by it, or think about it at all — during an enjoyable, but admittedly often messy, activity. Even though wearing it up was a long-standing habit, it hadn’t ever occurred to me that it was affecting my overall body image.

Well. Two weeks ago I found myself unconsciously taking my hair tie OUT OF MY HAIR as things were heating up with Current BF! When I realized it — I realized it felt GOOD. That I felt good! I didn’t feel any kind of insecurity. An hour later when I was all blissed-out I didn’t even try and picture what I looked like — what my hair might look like. I didn’t care. It was just part of the rest of me.

Of course it was. It is! IT’S MY HAIR. It always has been, but now it feels like it is.

body image

self image

self esteem

family

growing up

identity

comfort

hair

appearance

parents

adoption

sex

relationships

working it out

empowerment

Bodies

Pregnancy & Parenting

Etc

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