CHOPPED! (introducing my post-partum haircut!)

This is sort of rite of passage, right?

I scheduled a haircut for this weekend, and in the morning, as I was getting ready, I looked at my insanely long hair, and suddenly realized… I was sick of it.

It was as simple as that: the ends of my hair have been growing for about a decade, nearly untouched. After a terrible crop my freshman year of college, I’ve pretty much let my hair grow with just bare minimal trims twice a year.

But now that I’d grown my hair out to nearly waist-length, I found myself looking in the mirror and it just suddenly looked… wrong.

I don’t know how to say this except this way: it was like finding a Metrocard in my wallet after we’d moved out of Manhattan. I looked in the mirror and my hair looked like a relic from a different life. These days, my hair is almost never curled, straightened, or blown out. Sure, long locks look great when you have time to style them, but most of the time, I don’t. Throw in a heaping dose of inevitable postpartum hair changes (none of them good) and I was just done with my long hair.

So I went to my hair appointment and told my stylist to chop of a whopping six inches.

And the result is above! It’s still long, but it’s shorter than my hair has been in years (practically since the beginning of this blog) and I love it.

I wrote last week that one of my 2015 beauty resolutions was to take more risks, and this is me, putting my money where my mouth is. And this feels fresher than my hair has felt in years, easier to style, and just right for where my life is, at this exact moment.

And, hey, great minds think alike! My friend Jordan from Ramshackle Glam went all the way to a bob over the weekend! She looks completely amazing, but more importantly, I have to give you a snippet of her post on the transformation below. I love how she describes the experience of having long hair:

All those long curls were such a security blanket for me — if I felt shy or tired or not like my best self I could sort of fluff them around my face and make my hair be what people saw, not me. And now I don’t have anything to hide behind, so whatever’s on my face — happiness, exhaustion, worry, whatever – is right out there in the open. And I like that.

It feels honest.

If that’s not the best reason I’ve heard to chop off your hair, I don’t know what would be.