You know how when you need a bang trim, but your stylist doesn’t offer a free one, or you just don’t have time to schedule one…so you think to yourself: How hard can it be? It’s just a little trim. I’ll do it myself.
Usually we need way more than a bang trim when we look in the mirror and notice that something needs changing, but we can’t help wishing a little trim will do the trick. We seriously think that cleaning up our bangs will make the difference that not even the most extreme makeover in the world would make… because the change we’re hoping for, the one we know we need deep down in that honest place where nobody knows us, has nothing whatsoever to do with what we see in the mirror.
But! If you’re like me, you still try to do it yourself. And if you want your hair to look like Sandra Bullock’s, for example, back when she had that sophisticated, long bob with side-swept bangs, you google her and find a million images of her with a thousand different hairstyles. And after you’ve looked at more pages of Sandra Bullock haircuts than you care to admit, you add ‘bob’ and ‘side-swept bangs’ to your search term, and narrow it down to a few thousand. Then you look at more of those than you care to admit, but you can’t help yourself because she’s so dang cute…and smart…and talented, plus you’re still hoping you’ll run across the perfect picture to take to your stylist…or try to copy yourself.
Next stop? YouTube. To find a bang tutorial (of which there are hundreds), and once you find one that looks simple enough, you still have to figure out, Is her part on the left or on the right? And…Which way do I angle the scissors if I part mine on the other side? Or…Heaven forbid that I should want to be able to part it on either side. How the heck do you do that?
There’s a tutorial for that, too. Just so you know. Seriously, one YouTube ‘stylist’ went so far as to flip her bangs over to avoid the contortions required to achieve the desired angle…and that just confused me more. But! Not so much that I didn’t spend the next 45 minutes trying to follow her every move. This is the stuff we do. You do it. I do it. And the purpose of this blog is to admit it. It’s the whole point of the Truth or Dare game we played a while back. Check it out and play along with us. Send a comment. Share the post. We really do want to hear from you.
Something amazing happens when we dare to tell the truth. It frees us. Suddenly, something breaks open, and we realize that it actually feels good to finally be honest. We begin to be able to laugh at ourselves … and be OK with being laughed at by other people, as long as they’re willing to admit their embarrassing truths, too. And aren’t mean-spirited, of course.
We grow up a little every time we tiptoe toward truth. And slowly, but surely, we begin to admit the unthinkable — those things that are more than embarrassing {as if they weren’t bad enough}. Some things in life really can feel so shameful that we believe we have to hide them for the rest of our lives, because everybody knows {right?} that as long as nobody else knows those things about us, we can almost convince ourselves that they’re not true.
I remember very clearly formulating that kind of rationale when I was young. I absolutely believed it was true, and lived in a state of wishful thinking for a lot longer than I care to admit. But a time came when I realized I could put that childish way of thinking aside. That I had to. And it wasn’t that long ago, so don’t feel bad if a lightbulb is just now coming on as you read this. Our stunted growth is one of the hardest truths to admit to ourselves. One we may hate more than any other, and the energy we put into hiding it makes us hate it (and ourselves) even more. It’s embarrassing. We’re ashamed of it. But the truth is…it’s easy to get stuck in childish ways and wishful thinking. It’s OK. We’ve all been there, but we don’t have to stay there, and the breakthrough comes when we begin to admit what we’d rather not.
So back to my bang debacle. The truth is…I really made a mess of my bangs trying to “do it myself,” and the more I tried to fix it, the worse it got. And the worse it got, the more I had to keep trying to fix it…which only made it worse. And the point of sharing this with you is…? I’m not really sure. But I think it has to do with realizing how hard it can be to…grow up, I guess…and wanting to share what it {kinda} looks like to admit what a mess we can make when we think to ourselves, How hard can it be?
Maybe next week we’ll look another hair issue. Like…you know how when you need a little lift at the crown of your head, so you do that backcombing thing? Otherwise known as teasing. {Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah!} Well! I almost walked out of the house this morning without taking a quick glance at the back of my hair. It could have been disastrous!
