Marking Transitions: The Solstice and My Hair
Or, how oftentimes, we need physical acts to bring something new into existence.
Tomorrow is the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere, a time of pausing, stillness, and transition. Friends and I are planning to celebrate by gathering for the sunset on the river, having a meal together, and feeding reflections on what we want to let go of into a fire and breathing in what we want for the new year with the lighting of a candle.
It feels perhaps a bit too fated that Friday I have a hair appointment where my stylist has agreed to shave my head. It’s an appointment that’s been booked for a year or more, so I can’t lay claim to planning this simultaneous shedding and welcoming act to happen on the day that marks the start of our return to longer days, to the spring and then summer ahead. And yet, perhaps it was the energy of the solstice that is propelling me to this shouldn’t-be-but-yet-still-is transgressive act1, for that’s what it’s felt like: inescapable, required, necessary; a decision that simply has to be made.
I have a lot of excitement, fear, anxiety, desire, and curiosity about this change. In the few days that have past since I made my final decision that this is happening, I’ve noticed myself getting caught up in:
What will I look like? Will I recognize myself? Am I going to cry as the clippers touch my head at the salon, or perhaps later in the solitude of my own home? Will I immediately love it and marvel at my beauty and badassery from a new view?
Will I encounter a different violence in people, particularly men, when I subtly, microscopically uproot their comfort about what is acceptable for a woman? What protection might I be giving up from strangers that I enjoy today by not disrupting their notions of what a “woman should look like”?
Will I give into the part of me that always wants to be seen as attractive by returning to wearing makeup after a four year breakup? Will I give into the part of me that always wants to go unnoticed and not rock the boat by hiding my shorn head under hats or wigs? Will I give into the part of me that always wants to be seen as smart and measured by correcting everyone around me who worries this is about a midlife crisis and that, itself, worries if this might be true?
Will it give me a path out of my internalized biphobia if I somehow look more queer? And what does it mean for me - and the world around me - that we think queer people are and must be so easily identifiable?
Will it - like it has for so many women who have previously done it and talked or wrote about it have said it has been for them - be an act that supports my freedom from performed femininity, from internalized docility, and from shielded luminosity? What might that feel like if so? Who could I become - or remember myself to be - if so? What will rise up to take the place of the energy, the work it takes in my system to put on this current show?
How will I meet any of these scenarios if they turn out to be true? What will I choose to shed? What will I cling to? What will emerge in me newly?
These last two sets of questions are, perhaps, what’s driving me to do this the most. I can’t shake the inner knowing that something is trying to move through me and make it out in the world, and that it’s blocked by the parts of me I mention here - the part that wants to be pretty, the part that wants to be smart, the part that wants to be good and go unnoticed. I’ve been working with these parts for the better part of a year using work informed by Internal Family Systems therapy as well as somatic practices to release the armoring in my body these parts generate. They are some of my fiercest protectors and I have such tenderness in my heart when I meet and work with them. They have kept me safe and relatively successful for nearly forty years; it’s time they had a break so that whatever is trying to be born in me and in my life might make itself known.
I have no idea how I’m going to react on Friday or in the days, weeks, months, or even years to come when I think about this decision. I do know I believe in experiments as a powerful container for growth, that I’m safe to try this out (despite any anxieties that I might not be), and that I’m choosing to trust my inner knowing that this simply needs to happen. I also believe in the power of rituals and physical acts to mark transitions; I think whatever this will be, I will be able to look back in photos, in my writing, and in my memories and recognize that just as this is a liminal time for the sun and for us as we approach the solstice, so too will this be for me as I enter this period of discovery and rebirth.
When I meet my friends on the river tomorrow, I’ll be saying goodbye to this year that has been full of so much violence and death and heartbreak for far too many humans around our globe. I’ll be saying goodbye to a period of rest in my life that was so needed and that has come to its conclusion in its current form. I’ll be saying goodbye to my long, hydrated, luscious curly hair. I’ll be saying goodbye, perhaps, to living contained by others’ expectations and desires.
And I’ll be welcoming and breathing to life the possibility of burning brightly.
May you let go of what is no longer serving you; may you welcome in what you need in this next year of precious life.
XO,
Athena
PS - Looking for more solstice inspiration? This piece by Katherine May is beautiful, as ever, and this piece by Jodie Melissa Rogers includes lots of ideas for how you might take a moment or several to mark the solstice and reflect on what might be asking to be let go of.
Let’s be honest: a woman cutting her hair to her head should not be radical, or even noteworthy. Yet even with its growing popularity as a hairstyle among women, it remains so. May we bring into being a world free of rigid, gendered norms and restrictions. May we bring into being a world where this - and many, many more acts of expression and love and transformation - are so accepted they are considered unnoteworthy.