Meaningful Pleasures

Sometimes I feel out of control and in those moments I look toward what consumes me.

I had a dream last night. I was at a party, held inside my childhood home. This was the first pillar of fantasy since we haven’t hosted a party there in a decade. I walked around anxiously, looking for people I knew. There was none. I looked for people my family knew. There was none, except my fathers hairdresser. This was extremely strange to me. I had only ever had a handful of interactions with her as a child. I watched her set up her tools in my laundry room and administer the same classic tapered-side, full-top look to my dad on Sunday mornings. The most I’d ever considered her was thinking she was cool for being a woman who cuts men's hair. In the dream, she was circling the party like a hawk and I was the only vulnerable, small mammal in the room. Our conversations, all initiated by her, were as odd as they were direct. She asked me about my hair, which was in braids at the time. I answered in typical fashion: I like it because it's low maintenance, out of the way, protects my hair etc. But upon hearing this, a clear sense of doubt emerged from her body language, doubt that discomforted me enough to lose her near the punch bowl. Though she inevitably found me again, this time, probing me with questions of what I’d like to do with it next <my hair>. She said this with a razor in hand and next thing I knew I was draped in a barber's cape listening to the buzz beside my ear. Despite the flash forward in time I knew exactly what to expect of the appointment, like I had agreed in an unconscious state. A full buzz, removing every strand. I felt intense fear, the kind you feel on airplanes when the turbulence feels daunting in a novel way. At the end of it, I was walking around my house a new person. My look threw people but it was my own internal crisis that drove the nightmarish turn.

I think of this dream as a call to reckon with these physical attachments, to hair and, by proxy, all other things I consider accessories to my sense of self. Two opposing thought processes scuffle constantly in my mind. One says that, as a taste maker, I should indulge in the things I find value in, however material they are. The other says that I should delegate all the value I place on the things I own to the people I care about most. While it would be entirely fair to say that these options don’t reflect the complex realities of thought that allow us to inhabit both extremes at once, I find that easier said than acted on. What feels more truthful to me is recognizing the complexities of identity itself. This is what anchors a deeply personal attachment to hair, which in effect reflects a relationship to gender, societal norms and performance.

It's these, often, minuscule, subtle things that provide access to new combinations which have the potential to unlock creative transformation. To me, it is no different than a movie introducing you to dimensions of feeling you never knew existed and modes of being that echo through others, through the creations that resonate, within yourself. Acquiring and acknowledging these morsels of influence can only deepen our material experience, which we are all captive to in some fashion. This cognizance is the difference between meaningless, hedonistic excess and mindful engagement. As a species bound to material experience, a habit of conscious and deliberate curation is not just “pretentious fussiness” but a pursuit of what we know of ourselves and what shapes us.