It's interesting what the body does to warn you. There are all these warning signs trying to tell you to stop doing what you’re doing. The hangover, depression, suicidal ideation, nervous tics, and in my case, the hair pulling. A long time ago when I went through my six month meth binge to deal with being sexually assaulted, I developed a tic. Whenever a stressful situation or thought entered my mind, I’d twirl my hair and pull it out. The urge is especially bad when I use any sort of uppers. Cocaine, meth, even caffeine makes the urge harder to suppress. Even sober I still feel the urge to twirl my hair at times when I’m feeling stressed out or anxious. I’ve brought it up to my therapist and she pointed out that it could be something I do that soothes me and keeps me grounded. She said as long as I’m not hurting myself or others, or putting myself in any danger, it’s totally okay to want to twirl my hair. Okay. That made me feel a little better about my nervous tic. My therapist also said it’s common to develop different habits when dealing with a traumatic event. Some like to pick at the pimples on their face and others like to twirl their hair. I think a lot of us have something we do that helps us feel safe. Some of us like to use drugs, I’m totally raising my hand. Others like to eat, read, sing, write or play sports. I have a lot of things that make me feel good and keep the negative thoughts from spiraling out of control. However, there was a point in my life where I just couldn’t take it anymore. “It” being life. My body was slowly deteriorating from all the drugs and alcohol I was abusing. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to escape the bottomless pit I had dug for myself. Something profound happened. My body did it for me. My body nudged me in the right direction. Better yet, it threw me in the right direction. So here it is. This is the day that changed my life forever.
I should've known the second I woke up with half my head of hair missing.
Tufts of locks blowing around the room like little tumbleweeds that you see in old western movies before the shootout scene commences. I should’ve known this fuck up was warning me of the hard years ahead. “Run away”, the wind whispers, “Run away as fast as you can and never look back.” The reality of what happened sinks in. I look in the mirror and I swear I look like Gollum from "Lord of the Rings”. As I looked in the mirror, at this stranger, I couldn’t remember a goddamn thing. My mind starts racing. “What the fuck happened? Why did I do this to myself?” I would later learn that, in a blackout rage, I had what some would call a mental breakdown.
My heart sank. My cheeks were flushed, my face felt so hot I could hardly stand it. I could feel my heart pumping in my chest and I could hear it thumping in my ears. I couldn’t believe what I had done to myself. “What the fuck?!?” I screamed. The person who was there with me that night told me that we were having sex and I wouldn't stop pulling out my hair. I had been on a pretty bad two year bender. I drank from morning till night, using drugs in between the blackout stages to bring me back to life. This night was different. This night changed everything for me.
I definitely hit a bottom. I remember the next day taking a broom and sweeping up all of my mistakes just wanting to hide my hideous breakdown. I wanted it all to be a dream. I cried so hard that day that my cheeks burned from all the salt. “This is the worst day of my life”, I thought to myself. I chose to deal with this alone. I chose to take every last strand of curl and throw it into the garbage and watch the garbage man come and pick it up and hurl it into the back of the truck along with other people's regrets and mistakes. I’m going to go back now to the person I was with that night. This person made sure to tell me how horrible it was for him. He made sure to tell me how crazy I was for doing what I did. He made sure that my anxiety and hate for myself grew and grew and grew until I had nowhere left to hide.
You see, it wasn't just the melt down, the tufts of hair everywhere or the mess my life was, no. This is about my life being turned so far upside down that I learned never to use the word no. What had happened that night was, I had a mental breakdown. I had been ignoring the signs. I had been living in such an unhealthy way for so long that my body did something to make me see what I was doing to my insides. It’s kind of a perfect storm. It’s like what a predator does to its prey. It watches the heard and finds the weakest of the bunch and attacks when the time is just right. This was the night he knew he had control. This was the night my abuser realized he had found his next victim.
This marked the ever turning wheel that an abusive relationship consists of. There are many stages and new lows while being torn down piece by piece. The isolation, the financial control, and worst of all, the verbal and emotional abuse. It all becomes a melting pot of staying. All of the tactics an abuser uses become so heavy, I couldn’t remember how to swim. So I stayed. Farther and farther down I went, until I forgot how loved I once was. I felt so undesirable in my body that I thought, “Who would ever want me after what I’ve done?” I forgot about all the lovely things that made me, me. I was only concerned about his well being and anticipating what I had to do to help him stay in a good mood. But sadly for me, at the time, I wasn’t aware that there is no satisfying a man like this. His need for power and control have no bounds. There is no satisfying a hungry wolf. Their appetite is so huge that they must continuously fill their belly with never ending tears.
The cycle never stops. You’re trapped on a wheel spinning and you can’t make it stop. Much like the need to swirl my hair around my fingers and pull it out. It’s this anxiety that creeps in my head and the only way to make me feel safe is to twirl my hair. I see now that the night I broke down, the anxiety and the urge was so great that I had to do what helps me feel safe; twirl and twirl and twirl until there is nothing left. I see now that the pulling of my hair was the start of something big. I see now that what I thought was the worst day of my life, was only the beginning.
In hindsight I can look back and see the beauty in what I thought was the worst day of my life. I can see that I pulled all of those strands of hair out because I was getting rid of the old and making way for the new. New hair follicles to replace the old, to grow better, stronger and healthier than what was there before. I can see that maybe my body did me a service and helped me see out of the dark place that I had been hiding in for so long. In hindsight I can say the same thing about what being in an abusive relationship did for me. I can see now that this relationship paved a way for me to grow bigger, stronger and more powerful. I was forced to find my voice in it all. I was forced to find the very thing that I had been missing for all these years. Love. Love for myself and for my life. Love for all the terrible things that have happened and loving myself through it all.
Plucking away my precious mane, remaining silent and giving up complete control of my life was almost a religious experience. To be stripped free of all my humanity, left bare, naked and crying on the floor. To feel so undesirable in my body and in my spirit, was the single most horrifyingly beautiful moment of my life. I look back and see a new born baby, scrunched in a fetal position, very little hair, purple skin, and eyes sealed shut. Then the moment the light hits my pupils for the first time, I scream. I scream at the person looking at me. I scream at all the eyes looking my way. I only see terror. I only see things that I do not understand. Then out of the darkness, I hear her. That familiar voice I’ve heard before. It’s my mother. That voice I felt echoing in my chamber. That voice feels so familiar and so comforting. Then I see her for the first time. I see where the voice comes from and I am home. I am plucked from the scary unknown and I am placed in the comfort of my mother's arms and given life. I’ve been right where I need to be all along. Every dark, dirty corner I passed, every lonely quiet night; it was all home. Every rape, every time I wanted to die, every single morning I woke up terrified, these moments where all apart of it. I needed every single one of these experiences to climb to where I am today. I needed them and they needed me.
Being born again looks different to everyone. It may look like a ceremony where you are dressed in all white and dunked into holy water. It may be your first mushroom trip at your first music festival or it may be while sitting on the top of one of the highest peaks and looking down at how small the world is; it looks different to all of us. My awakening, my divine, my righteousness, looks a lot like a mental break down and that’s okay. I’m okay with it now. I’ve created the meaning behind it. I figured out what it all meant. I could fall apart and feel guilty and ugly and repulsed. I could spend the rest of my days looking in the mirror at this person who has bald spots on her head and let those memories tear me down day after day, or I could look at these scars and missing locks as a reward. A reward for living a life, a beautiful life, filled with shitty things that happen. Because to me, that is exactly what life is all about. It’s about ripping apart everything I think I know and exposing it for what it is and finding out that I am what I am. I am filled with anxiety, I am filled with rage and I am filled with regret. But I am also filled with forgiveness, I am filled with love and I am filled with life itself.