Redefined Juliet

This week I have been on vacation with my family. I haven't been updating this blog much, and it makes me sad, but I just haven't been in the right mental state to write here for quite some time.

I go through these phases with my hair.

I shave it. I'm excited about it and it feels freeing. A few days later I look in the mirror and feel ugly.

I notice little things about myself that I never noticed with lots of hair. Everything about my complexion. Every little blemish. Since having my daughter, I've had acne just like in high school and I can't seem to rid myself of it. I'm working on it, but then again, I also don't really have a lot of motivation for some reason in that department - I think, well, it's not that bad.

I notice how hideous my posture really is.

It's something I've honestly been working on since college but I can't seem to kick the slouch. I look at myself in the mirror, and I think - wow, she's kinda pretty, then I see myself in the window of the train, or a storefront, or in a photograph or home movie, and think - hunchback of Notre Dame. It's worse without my hair to hide behind.

The thing about it is, I can't imagine growing it back.

I look at pictures of myself with hair, and while I think photographs from my wedding, for instance, are really pretty, including the hair, it just looks like a weird extra around my face in almost every other photograph. It seems forced. It doesn't seem like ME. So I'm stuck in this strange conundrum.

I hate being stared at.

At least on our vacation in we went to Philly and NYC and no one stared there - except this one chick in the NYC McDonalds. People aren't even subtle about it. We also went to Niagara Falls and at Eat N Park on the way to Canada a woman watched me from the bathroom all the way back to my table with my family, which included her having to turn COMPLETELY around in her seat to see me all the way back.

It wasn't like she was checking me out or something. She was STARING. This hair cut, like pregnancy, seems to give people social license that they wouldn't otherwise take.

I've written about this before. They're trying to put me back in my place since I'm breaking a lot of unspoken rules that many people feel it is their sole duty to enforce.

Walking in the city, everyone minded their own business. A guy with a mohawk actually talked to me for a long time on my way to the train about my kids and music and stuff like that.

I noticed a sign n the city.

It was a billboard with three pictures. All of them were of the back of a woman's shaved head. Under each picture (all were the exact same image), there were different captions:

Fashion Statement
Soldier
Survivor

And after the pictures an ad for a company saying that basically they were interested in the way their clients look at the world - what they see in these same images. There was also a section on the billboard with three pictures of a wallet sitting in the middle of the street with similar words/phrases asking what the client saw - an opportunity to do something nice? an opportunity to pick up a little extra cash?

I mostly concentrated on the shaved head section.

I've noted through magazine covers at the grocery store that shaving your head is becoming relatively trendy in Hollywood. I find this interesting, and I totally get it.

People get tired of being symbols. Or they want to say something that no one expects - that beauty is more than all that junk on the outside. It's also a feminine thing, I think. Taking back something. Not sure what it is. But it feels like a power thing.

In one of my acting guidebooks a common objective for a character is "to get my power back". A multitude of things could have happened to the character, but his or her objective in life is to take back the power that someone took from them at some point in his or her life. It's a powerful objective, actually, and a meaningful, understandable one, even if the audience never finds out how the character lost his or her power to begin with.

I find it can be a great motivator for especially a villain character, but it also works for those girl power movies starring J Lo.

I think it is my own motivation a lot of the time.

I've talked about my own loss of power in this blog before.

It's something with which I have a hard time reconciling because I feel like all of those people should be forgiven now, but it still burns somewhere in my chest when I think about the people who hurt me.

I keep feeling like shaving my head will clean some of that up, but it doesn't really. It does, however, make swimming, bathing, changing clothes, getting dirty, and being spontaneous much more doable. I guess it's worth it for that. Though I still need to reconcile with the girl in the mirror.