ABSTRACT
QUESTION: Why did I cut off (or, in Rastafarian parlance, “trim”) a set of perfectly beautiful nine-year-old dreads only to commence locking again just one year later? The trimming actually began before that, in October 1988, almost immediately after I had made a cross-country relocation and assumed a new job. I radically pruned my locks, but did not completely divest myself of them until 1989, shortly after my December 6th birthday. I suspect that the move and the midlife birthday both contributed to a deeply felt sense of shedding the old and beginning anew. I was also extricating myself from a love relationship that was heavily associated with my hair: off with the hair, out with the lover! In general, this seems to have been a time to discard old, “locked-in” energy in order to make fresh starts. Just as clearly, though, I was loathe to give up-in one fell swoop-so many years of cultivated beauty and my elder lockswoman status. Yet, despite its fineness, this head of hair had reached-for me-a static state that was very different from the ever-changing dynamism that had helped attract me to dreadlocks in the first place. I have an even better understanding now of why people play around with various hairstyles “simply” for the sake of change.
