Vanity!

I do not like my hair right now. It's been short and easy care for years now but I like change. Boredom sets in if I leave it in the same style for too long, so I'm growing it out. Having done so in the past, I remember that it's an annoying process, but I'd forgotten how extreme the annoyance really is. The process of going from short and sassy to long enough to successfully coif behind the head is driving me nuts! I just want to be able to pull it back into a pony tail when running/biking/working out. Is that too much to ask?

The layers are growing out fairly quickly, but the problem is that I have a lot of hair. When getting it cut, it's imperative to have the stylist texturize it to death, or my nice new style cut, all too soon, turns into a bush; an unattractive, over-grown, really needs to be pruned bush. Not exactly the look I'm going for. As the layers grow out, the bush has, sadly, turned into something like a weeping willow. Again, a fairly unappealing look, so I went and got it shaped. It looked great, actually looked like my hair had a smidgen of a sense of style again. But, not knowing any better--what do I know about hair?--I had them texturize it as usual. This wasn't a problem until a few weeks later when it started to grow out. The texturization (I'm sure that's not a real word) caused hundreds of short little hairs to stick straight out amongst the branches of the weeping willow, giving me a porcupine-ish weeping willow kind of look. ARRGH! Some days it looks somewhat okay--not great, mind you--but not horrendous either. And every day is a struggle to get to the point where I'm not abashed to be seen in public. I'm not terribly vain, but embarrassingly bad hair days, stacked one on top of another for weeks in a row are starting to give me a complex! And yet, my hair is still not quite long enough to ponytail it. Something about the shape of my head necessitates longer than average locks to pull off a tail!

Almost at the end of my rope, I mentioned that I was going to give up and get it cut. To which my husband replied, "No, don't cut it!" He almost never gives his opinion about this kind of thing, so the knowledge that Hubders wants me to grow it out, helped me find the wherewithal to stick it out a bit longer.

I know that this too shall pass and that it's not important in the eternal scheme of things, but I will be soooo relieved to put this process behind me! It feels incredibly vain to be terribly bugged by multiple bad hair days, when there is actual real suffering in the world; but the relentlessness of dealing with this is wearing very thin. Once the hair has reached the required length and a professional has trimmed it ever so slightly into a somewhat stylish do; once I am again satisfied that I don't look incredibly dorky, then I'll be grown-up and mature. Right now, I just want to have a meltdown, reminiscent of my teenage years, in front of my mirror each morning. But that would be an incredibly bad example to set before my young-uns. So, instead, I'll whimper inside and suffer in silence whilst I yearn for better hair days.