(Warning: Do not read this if you have an aversion to loose, dead hair. There are graphic images.)
Every morning before I take a shower, I comb out all the loose hair on my head, as I lean over the bathroom sink, to make sure it doesn’t make a mess on the floor. I have somewhat thick and wavy hair – and I have a lot of hair. Currently, it’s just past my shoulders, so a single hair pulled straight is anywhere from six to eight inches long.
After combing out my hair, there are about a dozen hairs strewn every which way in the sink basin. It grosses me out, but it’s better than having the hair scattered all over the floor where it could potentially get in between my toes if I’m walking barefoot. Even the thought of that gives me the heebie-jeebies.*
While I’m taking a shower, I shed hair at least three more times – when I’m initially wetting my hair with water, when I’m conditioning it, and then when I rinse out the conditioner. (It’s four times if I shampoo it, which I try not to do more than every two or three days.)
I run my fingers through my hair, collecting stringy strands, and I plaster them to the shower wall, creating abstract swirls of dark fibers across the white, subway tile. This is my strategy to keep a majority of the hair from going down the drain and creating a potential clog. Even then, I still comb out just as many clumps of hair after I take a shower. This turns the bathroom sink into what looks like the aftermath of the violent murder of a long-haired guinea pig, minus the guts and blood. (I wipe the shower wall with tissue afterward, of course.)
And even with all my efforts to keep hair from going down the bathtub drain, within a week, it’s starting to clog, and I have to fish out slimy clumps of hair. If I thought the labyrinth of hair in the sink was gross, the hair that comes out of the bathtub drain is downright revolting. I use a combination of my bare fingers and a paperclip fashioned into a hook, and I have to do everything I can to not throw up.
If you saw how much hair I shed on a daily basis, you’d have to wonder how I don’t ever go bald. But there must be enough new hair growing in just as quickly to replace the old, dead hair. Our bodies are in a constant state of regrowth, whether it’s new hair, new skin, new fingernails, new brain cells, new blood cells.
I’m not a scientist or a certified philosopher, but only imagine if our minds were also in a constant state of regrowth! All the dead, no longer functional thoughts shed from our brains on a daily basis, whether it’s through REM dreams, through therapy, through writing, through physical exercise, yoga, meditation, and through all the things we do that help clear out our minds.
But just like the hair in the bathtub drain, those no-longer-useful thoughts don’t magically go away. Yes, we manage to catch some and dispose of them properly, but others stubbornly remain, clogging up our ability to continue moving forward with the flow of life. We have to reach in, ready for the feeling that makes you want to vomit, and dredge out those cruddy thoughts.
*Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been squeamish about loose hairs. If I found on my clothes or on my bare feet, or stuck to the floor or furniture near me, I’d yell out, “¡Pila! ¡Pila!” Translated from 2-year-old-child Spanish into regular Spanish, that would “¡Pelo! ¡Pelo!” For all you non-Spanish speakers, that would be “Hair! Hair!”