In the past month, I cut my hair short. Like really, really short. Like, I had them when I was 6-7. I remember going to Chandigarh at that age with the same hair and I found myself repeating that at 31, with the same hair. Both those episodes are incidental, and in no way planned. Yet, to a larger idea, it seems like it was always going to happen that way. 

When I found a few pictures with my short hair and had a chance to reflect, it seemed like a grown-up decision. That I had lived with my long hair all my life and I knew it was time to move out of the comfort of knowing how my hair feel against my skin when I wash them or how long do they really seem when I'm in bed alone. I was ready to embark on the journey, even though I felt my whole life upending moments after taking the plunge. It helped that people encouraged me and even the fiercest critic of that decision (my mum) came around and said I've never looked better. 

In the last few weeks, I've had to discuss some tough life decisions. I found myself offering things to a man I never wanted nor thought I was capable of and yet in that moment I felt so sure and strongly positive about those things I wouldn't change a thing even today. While those offerings are still up in the air given the status between us is unclear, I feel so strangely motivated and grown up about parenting, motherhood, marriage, and even partnership that I have started absorbing those motifs into my life without explaining or answering myself to anyone. I previously held extremely strong beliefs that I found eroded in no time as I mouthed the words, "I'll do it because you are at the center of it". 

At some level, the hurt flows because, like I said, it wasn't enough or good to get a total outcome but I know I have done my best and given whatever I could have. I do not know where life will take us and I am a sucker for definite things. Maybe one day I'll look up and realise uncertainty is just as beautiful as changing your mind and living life knowing results don't matter and that it's fine to live with short hair, regardless of how your self-hood is tied with long, straight and beautiful hair. It's okay, it'll be okay, it'll pass. It'll settle. I'll be okay.