Back in the fall, I wrote about the indecision I had over getting a short hair cut after years of long hair. 2017 had been a bad year for me: lots of loss, lots of sorrow. By the end of October, however, I could sense an awakening in me. A desire to put all that behind me and pick up the pieces of my life.

Making a decision to drastically cut my hair seemed part and parcel of this need to change. But as you know if you read the post, I had my doubts. Those doubts must have conveyed themselves to my stylist, because though I went in armed with photos of what I wanted, she’d never been through one of my cutting cycles and she was concerned I’d hate it once I cut it all off. I was too, to be honest.

So I let her talk me into cutting it in stages. It had been down to nearly mid-back level. I had her take it to shoulder length before I went on vacation, with the plan to go shorter on my return.

When I went in, I was ready for something dramatic. Something reflective of the changes I was making in my life. I wanted a clean slate.

What I got unfortunately was the exact thing I told my stylist I didn’t want. “Please”, I said. “Whatever you do, don’t give me a chin-length bob.”

But that’s what I got. When I came home, my husband greeted me with a single question: Did I mean to look like Velma from Scooby-doo? VELMA. Okay, I don’t care how much he said he liked the cut later, there is no coming back from VELMA, baby.

Then there was the problem of the cut itself, beyond how I looked. I asked not to get this cut because I know what my hair does. Freed of the weight of length, every time it got the slightest bit damp outside (which is 90% of he time here, what with the general humidity), it began to lift up on all sides until I resembled a dandelion in the puff-ball state. It was too short to put up and long enough that I couldn’t get it out of my face for work. I hated it.

When a friend of mine (a former hairdresser herself) begged me to let her cut my hair, I gave in. It couldn’t be any worse, right? Well, I’m so glad I took her advice. She gave me the pixie cut I wanted and I love it! Not only is it everything I wanted but people keep telling me how much younger I look, and that’s never a bad thing. And it is so much easier to take care of. I’m telling you, I’m never growing out my hair again.

I saw a video on Facebook today of a lovely woman who shaved her hair off because it was something she’d always wanted to do. She’s a seriously pretty woman who never liked her hair, and while I’d never go that extreme, I definitely could understand her love-hate relationship with her hair. When she took that first swipe across her head with the clippers, I gasped along with her at what she had done. You could tell she wasn’t 100% sure about it, and yet she’d just cut a wide swath across the top of her skull! She was committed now.

What I found most interesting was her reaction at the end. Not just that she loved her new look (and she totally rocked it in a way I never could!) but that she was so proud of herself for making a bold move and stepping out of her comfort zone. Kudos to her.

The decision to cut my own hair short led to another: the decision to declutter the house. This has been something I’ve been meaning to do for years but keep putting off for one reason or another. I mean, why do housework when you could be writing, right? The truth of the matter is the house is a bit of a disaster, and it’s hard to get motivated about cleaning it up. But something about cutting my hair short made me look around at the house and think this needs fixing.

And the decision to declutter made me realize something had to be done about the house itself. We’ve been in a holding pattern for years on the place. It needs major repairs, the kind worth more than the house itself. We don’t want to sell–we love the farm. But the house never should have passed inspection and the problems have been gradually making themselves apparent over the years. Seriously, the guy who sold it to us could have been Mr Haney from Green Acres. Somehow we let ourselves get stuck: do we sink major money into the repairs or sell and move? And the end result was we did neither.

But we’ve finally decided to bite the bullet, take out a home equity loan, and tackle the worst of the problems. It will make our lives a living hell for several months during the renovations (and I suspect play havoc with my ability to meet certain writing deadlines) but when it’s done we’ll have a house we can either love OR sell if we so choose. And hey, decluttering is exactly what we need to do before the reno!

I guess the lesson here is that making one big decision makes others seem less scary. Once you make one scary decision, it gets easier to make others. Like the woman who shaved her head, I’m stepping out of my comfort zone. For a long time now, my comfort zone has been one of hunkering down and waiting out the never-ending storm.

Now I’m stepping out in the rain and dancing in the puddles.