I worked with an intern last year who used to say, “Change your hair, change your life.” And it just rings so true. We used to mutter it to each other until one of us came back with blonde hair (me) or hair dyed a shade darker for a role they were playing (him).

Shortly after going blonde, I abruptly quit my job. I got engaged. I spent months of unemployment swimming laps and climbing the Stairmaster at the gym, going to matinees, trying the café that allegedly has “the best chicken Caesar wraps in Chicago,” reading the cache of New Yorker articles I’d been bookmarking. It was mildly stressful wondering if I’d get a job again. But also, it was bliss. Waking up and realizing the day was mine, that I could decide exactly how I wanted to spend my precious time, for the first time in my adult life. It sort of sucks that being unemployed is so stigmatized when in reality, I don’t think any of us were put here to work. And yes, it sucks that under capitalism we need money to survive, oh and isn’t it bad that our healthcare is yoked to our employment? But I digress.

Being unemployed for eight months radicalized me. I got to put into practice all the things I’d wondered about in reading Jenny Odell’s “How to Do Nothing” and it made me wish that all of us could do more nothing, just be “breathers” as Marcel Duchamp called it. Just be here, breathing, playing chess, or sleeping, or going on long walks with the dog.

Change your hair, change your life; indeed.

I started a new, exciting, incredibly stressful job in late April and have felt completely unmoored, exhausted, and crazed since then. The work is fulfilling and will likely turn out great, but I’ve felt disconnected from the non-working “breather” version of myself since I started. Work, this all-consuming thing, has even permeated my dreams. Sometimes I wake up and walk through how many meetings I'll have that day and start thinking through my to-do list before I’ve even opened my eyes. What I wouldn’t do for a matinee, ten minutes in the sauna, and the weight room with its TVs playing daytime television.

I joked with my hair stylist yesterday that the job is high-risk, high reward, and also, please pray for me?

Before we heard of the bombings in Iran, Todd and I went in for routine haircuts. A cut and color for me, a trim for him. We walked out with a shaved head (him) and dyed pink roots (me) because change your hair, change your life. And in our brief deliberations about if we could or should make what felt like drastic changes to our appearance, we landed on the idea of control—or rather, that shaving your head, getting a piercing, hitting the gym—they’re all ways of reclaiming control over our bodies in a time when we are feeling wildly, dangerously, powerless.

As I sat in my stylist’s chair waiting for the color to take, I looked in the mirror, mildly panicked that my job might not approve of the new hair. And then I thought… what will they do? Fire me? And then I thought, let them.

Things are feeling grim and intense and tough and hard. But at least we took control of one small thing. And maybe that small thing will empower and embolden us to do another small thing to reclaim control. I’m not sure what that looks like in action or practice, but I do know that changing your hair really can change your life. 

And in all likelihood, the hair will grow back. But perhaps the slight shift in appearance will leave us with a fresh perspective or a new way of knowing ourselves.