Why Long Hair

Since I began my first steps in the long hair journey, I’ve never really sat down and thought about why growing my hair long is important to me.  I gave it a lot of thought today.

While my goal length is ultimately tailbone at this point, I don’t know if I can realistically achieve that with healthy looking hair.  And my goal really is to have hair as long as it can be, while looking healthy, even it that means having a shorter final goal length.

So what is it that has me driven to grow it long?  I thought of a lot of possibilities.  I never did have long hair much as a child, and never in my teens or 20s, so it’s not about recapturing my youth.

It’s not about vanity, or else I would have my hair cut and styled in the most face and age-flattering cut. I’m sure there’s always an element of vanity in wanting any part of your body to be a certain way, but that’s really not the crux of it.

I did always admire long hair, but usually the long hair I admired was not anything like my own; it was usually thick, wavy and flowing.  My hair is and never will be any of those things, so I’m not trying to achieve that.

I finally realized that a lot of my desire to grow long healthy hair is about making a long term goal and doing what I can to reach it.  Hair that is waist length, hip length, tailbone length, or however long I can keep growing, represents not days, not weeks, but years of care and commitment.  This is not something that one can do overnight.  It takes patience and a certain amount of discipline.

Long healthy hair is a visible result of that commitment, patience, care and discipline.  I really like that.

I truly sabotaged my initial efforts when I dyed my hair brown and then blonde again, but that’s in the past now.  Now I’m just about free of the damage of those experiences, and I’m back on the road of this long hair journey.

Do I think that having very long hair will change my life?  No, not in itself.  But I do think that having a long term goal and achieving it, even if it’s something as seemingly insignificant as hair, will be a very good experience for me.  It already has been so far.