“Suppose that we said yes to a single moment, then we have not only said yes to ourselves, but to the whole of existence… and in this single moment when we said yes, all of eternity was embraced, redeemed, justified and affirmed.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power: Selections from the Notebooks of the 1880s
Braids.
Braids, braids, braids. Braids climbing the Wasatch. Hiking the Tetons. Swimming. Teaching. Sleeping. Making love. All atop a gradually thinning frame. Nothing like a camera roll scroll to reveal how little of you you’ve let yourself be, your rehearsals to see how much you can fade before a full vanishing act.
My hair’s untamable. Wild. Curly, thick, resisting any product or styling. It does its own thing. It was my trademark, a spectacle that made me visible from afar despite my chronic spotlight-skirting. My unruly mane was almost sentient in its demand for expression, a veiled disclosure of a suppressed vibrancy.
I mastered the art of shrinking, though. An old obligation to be “less”—and a partner’s lingering ruling that my hair was “too wild,” “in the way,” and “too much”—led to a habitual routine of braiding. My signature mane transformed into tamed tails—practical for mountain trekking and swimming, sure, but also a covert strategy to reduce myself. Cutting it off was a liberation, a shedding of the old, and a chance for the new. Yet the deep-seated duty to minimize endured, making the chop as much a severing from myself as a reclaiming.
Now, I could ignore the symbolism hair is laden with—self-expression, identity, rebellion, power—and excuse the restraint as purely practical if it didn’t coincide with my diminishing body. With a drop in vigilance and rusty coping reserves came a drop in weight, a reversal of my earned progress. The camera doesn’t lie. Evidence that old habits die hard.
Shrinking my body: an early learned hack to disappear. A compromise to exist without fully being, numbing my own doubts about staying. I learned my expansion was an intrusion, but I figured restriction made me less of a load to hold. Become a ghost, become less, and there’s less to reject, right? If I take up less space, others will invite me into theirs, right? If I say yes, douse desire, contort, fade, appease, I’ll be let in, right? if I can’t be desirable—God willing—maybe I can at least be digestible.
But, turns out, people don’t like dancing with ghosts much.
Less is less to hold onto. There’s no traction in a pleaser—and how boring! Being seen in my hiding is nothing. It’s in unreserved, unfiltered presence—letting nature unfold as it will in each moment, without concern for side-eying passersby, playing under the directive of the earth— that I’m me — seen — wild in my curiosity, ardor, love, candor, verve, wit, desire, sensuality.
I’ve been close to losing myself in hiding, becoming an imperceptible vagrant I see no identity worth sticking around for. Entrusting navigating this life to myself is entrusting my life to a stranger. And shrinking—refusing to look myself in the eye—makes me a poor advocate for myself in my regular death contemplations. I’m suffocating in myself, in the charade of “being less.” Restriction doesn’t eliminate the wild; it only brings a nagging clawing that begs for life and witnessing. Even in a smaller vessel, the ghost that haunts remains vast. I’m terrified of what it means to be me, but I’m disappearing in not being it.
I’m growing my hair out. I’m unbraiding more. Companioning my body, letting it expand and soften. Resting. Not making being palatable my life’s work. Choosing clothes that don’t hide the history on my arms. (Working on) not apologizing for aching. Unrestricting my boundless loving. Undertaking existing without permission. I’m living. I’ve learned acceptance meant silencing; I’m shifting into knowing love means celebrating my song. It feels like a moonshot, but I’ll be an ally to myself, my own higher ground. Maybe if I can hold myself, I don’t have to be so afraid all the time.
I shrunk to be digestible, but I’m not meant to be consumed.
“I exist.’ In thousands of agonies—I exist. I’m tormented on the rack—but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar—I exist! I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there. And there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Kimberli Raya Koen
This is stunning. Honest. Heartbreaking yet exudes hope. Be your wild seld. Disrupt the universe with your wild, unique life and passions. We need you!