Life lately has been a season of weddings in my inner circle… people coming together in love and offering each other deeper commitments.. it comes after a challenging season of the dissolution of a very important marriage in my inner circle… if that had to be the story, I’m grateful that the outcome has been a season of these unions forming, almost as a revenge, to what tried to destroy us. Not revenge as in getting even... revenge as in choosing love and refusing to let heartbreak overcome it.
I bring this topic up because my role as a hairstylist and salon owner is that obviously I’ve been around a lot of weddings. I’ve worked a lot of weddings. I’ve seen the behind the scenes. I’ve even known single women to start dating a partner and end up marrying him and forming a family with him. A witness to the entire story. One of my favorite things is when I have two clients, male and female who end up getting married. It’s like my own little Netflix romance that I get to watch, but it’s actually real. One of the coolest things about being a hairstylist is the position that you get to witness the lives of others. There’s so much that we can learn and observe from witnessing other people‘s intimate stories. In my observation, the one thing that seems to be a constant in everyone’s life is transformation. And I think society forces labels and identity onto us and that makes the transformation difficult. We present as who we think we should be or who we are conditioned to be, but when we realize that no longer aligns with us, it creates tension in who we’re trying to become. So stepping into being is hard and can actually be painful.
A client I love dearly was about to get married and they were really struggling with that decision up until, essentially, the night before. And I think what they were experiencing is this tension of going through the transformation of identity and being able to trust their choice that the transformation they were choosing was OK. In these cases, maybe it's less about the choice and more about the fear of letting other possible versions of ourselves go. Like a death to those possibilities... a form of grief. What is it that makes us think that we can’t become the author of our own lives? It was really hard to watch this person that I love go through that because it should be seamless and easy to transform. But our brains are so wired to be a specific thing that authorship is nonexistent.
My little sister got married a few months ago, and it was so special being able to witness her becoming a bride and marrying this man that she brought into our lives who is such a gem. You have to understand: I’ve known this woman since she was in the womb. I’ve witnessed every ounce of her life and even if it was silently, I loved her through all the difficult parts. And of course celebrated the great ones. So being able to witness such a sacred covenant was very emotional. The thing about weddings is they’re like a tangible ritual of transformation. And as the hairstylist, I witnessed the becoming. The getting ready, the nerves, the laughter, every brushstroke of makeup, every tease for volume… And then I watched her walk down the aisle in that traditional and sacred way to her groom and make this promise of commitment to her husband. But he wasn’t her husband yet; he was still her fiancé at the moment she walked up. And through that 10 to 15 minute ceremony we witnessed the transition of fiancé and fiancée to husband and wife. It’s such a pivotal transformational moment. Because when they walk away, they’re no longer the same. They are husband and wife and the whole trajectory changes. They become something new together.
I don’t really know the point of this note. These are just thoughts and observations that I’ve had being a hairstylist. I think the thing about weddings is we can witness the transformation whereas most of the time transformation is internal. And as a hairstylist, one thing I’ve noticed is that changing your hair can be a trigger for transformation. And at the same time, changing your hair can actually be maintenance so that you don’t transform. Such an interesting paradox.
@hairbyamber
