Some Ramblings

I started a bad habit a year or so ago. At my desk at work, I happened to lean over a sheet of white paper. Because my hair sheds a lot, a strand of my hair wafted down and fell on the paper. I dye my hair blonde, so the strand wasn't entirely yellow. At the top of the fallen hair was about a half-inch of brown, my natural color. It was oddly beautiful.

And so started the bad habit: When I'm nervous or bored, I pull out my own hair. It's completely disgusting and disturbing. There's a name for it, because it's apparently a "condition": trichotillomania. I don't think it's a condition. I think it's a bad habit, like nail biting, that can be controlled with willpower and maybe a few behavioral diversions. I don't do it enough to cause major damage (yet), but on the top of my head, around the part of my hair, baby hairs are sprouting continuously. I hate that I do this. I want to stop. But it's become a part of my life.

It's strange, the mundane things I fixate on in the midst of a rather large life crisis. I think about the differences in my life if I made a crucial decision I'm thinking about making now. If my answer is yes, I think I'll end up pulling my hair more. If the answer is no, I'll probably pull at the same rate.

Decisions are not really about the actual decisions, are they? The superficially correct, left-brain, most pain-free answer is usually pretty cut and dried. But it's the fallout from decisions that's a bitch. At the fork, you have to choose the road that's less likely to have thieves and bramble and disappointment a mile down -- the road you're less likely to twist your ankle on a year from now, two years from now. That judgment call is hard to make.