A Lesson in Self-Love
This photo was taken the night my hubby and I went to dinner to celebrate 20 years of marriage. I felt beautiful that night. I felt like myself with my outsides marching my insides. This is called coherence. Being in agreement with yourself regardless of the environment.
To the people closest to me, my dreads are not appealing. And I can understand that with the kind of conditioning we subscribe to every day. Anything different activates judgement within us. Sometimes it’s based on a sort of jealousy. Subconsciously, they hate in others that which they don’t feel they can do themselves. And sometimes it’s a belief. Such as dreads (or any other stimulus) is unsanitary or only certain people get to experience them. Rarely is it ever about the stimulus itself. Nor is it about the person showing the stimulus.
I wore dreads after a time where I came face to face with my mortality. I was experiencing some persistent symptoms that could lead to my death. Namely, colon cancer. I never went to a physician, I didn’t feel I needed to. You see, it wasn’t about feeling bad at all. Most that are close to me felt I was blowing it out of proportion. But it was never about feeling ill or being in so much pain. It was about living my life guarded and not in sync with myself.
The thought of my own death was very difficult for me to come to terms with. Never seeing my kids again. Fading from being physical to a memory. It forced me to think about all the wishes I had that I never acted on. No one else could possibly know how deeply it affected me. They all went about their life like it was all normal and I held inside of me all the regret and fear.
I started to think of all the things I’d leave undone and not lived. I cleaned up my body using the wisdom I was guided to for a decade. I lost 40 pounds. I put in dreads. I changed my clothes. I became more present. I hosted my own birthday party. All the things I wanted and had never done for myself, always waiting for permission or for someone else to do it for me, I just started doing them.
And you know what I found? Coherence. That’s what it did for me. It gave me permission to be authentically myself. Not many in my circle liked that. I was constantly told how they liked the old me better, they preferred my real hair over dreads, they wanted me to go back to who they knew before. But I couldn’t.
In that time of discovery of myself, a time of deep isolation and remembering, I couldn’t see how the experience had changed me. A complete timeline shift. But the lack of unconditional love and support from my loved ones made me question everything.
Two years after the symptoms showed up, I got really tired of feeling less than from those I cared about. So I took my dreads out. I got my hair cut and colored. Trying so hard to be accepted by those people if I complied with their view of who they believed me to be. I hated every single minute of it. It felt like putting a mask back on just to fit in. It felt wrong, but I didn’t understand why.
I started researching this topic and what I found was astounding. I saw that to me, my dreads are an outward expression of my spirituality. Many cultures believe in hair being very spiritual, like an antenna or an extension of their energy. And I read a passage that explained that when hair is an expression of spirit, it’s no different than getting a piercing or a tattoo.
I thought about that long and hard. I have never, ever told anyone that their tattoo was a bad choice or that I preferred how they looked before they got that piercing that felt sacred to them. And yet here I was getting that from all the people I loved… and I was expected to still love them the same. The grace I had always extended to them was not extended to me. It hurt.
I spent 6 months trying to be myself when I felt nothing like myself. Not once did anyone outside my circle comment on my hair. Not that I needed them to, but it was so unremarkable, so ordinary, so boring, that I did not feel coherent to anyone.
It took me that 6 months to realize that I didn’t go through all of that so I could just hide and fade away while I was alive. I had work to do still and I was allowing others to control my life by diminishing myself to feel like I fit in.
So, the dreads went back in. I refined my wardrobe again to only pieces that made me feel good about me. Not how others would see me, only about how I saw myself.
We traveled to Florida last week and we had fun at Universal Studios and we spent time at the clothing optional beach and we saw Disney Springs. And you know what? I had people stopping me to tell me how much they loved my hair. Some said they loved my whole vibe. One woman in a store caught up to me and said she was afraid she wouldn’t get to tell me how much she loved my dreads. At Universal, I had at least ten people every day comment.
It wasn’t about the dreads at all. It was about coherence. Everything about me spoke in unison. I was shining my light. Maybe I shifted some perspectives. But I was free to just be completely myself and people that don’t know me were very attracted to that.
I’d read something a long time ago that if you dress in a certain way to be noticed and you check your appearance at every reflective surface to be sure you still looked the part, that is ego wanting validation from others. Not authenticity. I was then painfully aware of how I did that. I’d dress up to go out and make myself look sexy for my hubby but it was all for him. I wanted to hear from him that I was sexy because I didn’t feel it. I was so far from myself, I required him to tell me.
This last week, I didn’t dress to be noticed, I didn’t do my hair to impress, I didn’t do my makeup… well, I didn’t do my makeup at all most days. I just was. And all the people aware enough to notice, let me know it. What’s funny is, my nervous system is used to the criticism so the compliments were foreign to me. I expect to get blasted for being different. But really, I don’t think of how I look to anyone. I even forget I wear dreads because they are so “me”. They are simply part of me.
By not expecting to be noticed, by simply being myself because I love who I am, I became magnetic. I just didn’t require it from anyone else. I found it inside of me. I wish the same for you. ❤️
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A Lesson in Self-Love
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