Chasing the Clunkers

I like to think that when the transformative moments hit me, I recognize them in the moment and appreciate the gift of clarity and the chance for a reset. But, nah, it never goes like that.  The clarity comes later and the recognition of how life will change comes much later.  Transformative moments, inflection points, often arrive as pain points.  Pain and suffering is what jolts us out of the autopilot.

One of the gifts of my years behind the chair as a hairstylist is my collection of hard won stories detailing how I have screwed up people’s hair.  Or another way of putting it is I have stories about how I ruined other people’s lives.  Blessed with just enough self awareness to keep me humble, I was usually able to be mindful of my part in where things went wrong.  Practically every landmine that manifested as a “Whoopsie! We have a very serious problem”, was generally planted within the first ten minutes of the consultation. If I was in a rush, not fully listening or failing to see how the client’s description of golden blonde actually matched my understanding of ash blonde, a landmine was planted as I marched blissfully unaware toward an inevitably very bad day at work.  

In the late summer of 2019, I had a client erupt on me over routine blonde hair color.  Apparently a landmine had been planted, and it detonated as I began to dry her freshly colored hair.  As her panic escalated, I stopped the blow dryer and physically pivoted 180 degrees away from the chair.  Looking at the ground to recenter myself, as her verbal shrapnel of rage swirled around me, I calmly and suddenly knew I was done.  The last ounce of passion I had for the career I had spent my entire adult life curating spilled out beneath me and I was just empty. As the lie I was telling myself to keep myself hustling evaporated, the truth of my reality came screeching into focus. I could feel the shift, a calm and clear inner knowing that was final. The moment was an inflection point, and only just the start of how my life as I knew it would be unraveled.

As far as upset clients go, she was not the worst of them.  She was just the last.  The needle that broke the camels back.  The emergency flare that finally caught my attention and made me stop.  The way I was working was unsustainable.  I knew it, but I couldn’t face how out of alignment my life had become and my way out of my mess was utterly unclear.  What was invisible to me at the time were the patterns that propelled me to overwork - a fierce case of imposter syndrome, people pleasing to exhaustion, and a vaccuous need for external validation for my own worth.  I recieved more positive feedback and pats on the back in a day than most people get in a month.  This was shamefully lost on me.  What stuck with me instead were the clunkers.  People that would never be satisfied because what they saw in the mirror would never match their expectation of perfection.  I have compassion for these beautiful souls who suffer from deep seated issues that have nothing to do with their hair, those whom relinquishing control in such a vulnerable way brings out the worst in them.  But sometimes it wasn’t even that complex, we just ultimately didn’t see eye to eye or share the same aesthetic values when it came to meeting expectations. Those impossible to satisfy clients were the ones I pursued to determine my value.   

What I couldn't see at the time was crucial to getting myself back on track. I pursued the clunkers because I thought they revealed the truth. When I discovered that I had no real sense of self and embarassingly  low self worth, I started to understand that I was looking to others to give me a sense of my own worth.  And because my own narration in my head was full of self criticism and self loathing, the ones who had the worst things to say became the truth tellers because it confirmed all the fears in my head.  On the outside I appeared like a normal human being, but I functioned internally like a sieve, allowing any praise to seep out like water, filtering out the criticisms and rejections to inform me of my worth. Deeply unpleasant! 

I was aware that I was working in an unsustainable way, but I wasn’t aware how deeply entrenched this issue of low self worth was seeping into my overall way of being.  All I could access was how broken and empty I felt with nothing more to give.  The kind of empty that no amount of beach days, hours in bed, or even an SSRI could fix.  I was googling signs and symptoms of burnout, or adrenal fatigue.  I felt like I was in a fog some days, while other days I was scared that I might fly into a rage and physically hurt someone midway through complaining about their bangs.  I was losing what I loved most about my job, seeing the humanity in people and connecting with them in such an intimate way.  

That day in the salon, the inflection point, was the beginning of the end of my career.  Four months later I took my last client and later sold my salon.  On one hand, this makes me sad and nostalgic for what might have been.  However, the gift of doing the inner work is that as painful as it was letting all of that go, now that I’m on the other side of that last decisive landmine, I appreciate how it forced me out of pretending everything was okay. Everything was not okay and the wake up call I needed was the wake up call I received to spark the much needed start of telling myself the truth.  We don’t get to choose our lessons. But we can choose how the lesson imapcts us.

The journey to getting back on my feet was nebulous and required a patience with myself that was unfamiliar.  I had to continually surrender my expectations of a linear timeline of healing.  But in that surrender is where I learned to appreciate the present moment, which, by the way, is all we ever have.  I don’t know if I’ll ever fully recover from the level of burnout I got myself into.  I live an intentionally slower, calmer life and measure my level of success on how regulated I can keep my nervous system.  It was in the surrender where I got honest with myself about my relationship with alcohol.  In the surrender is where I began to access an unshakable sense of self.  My relationship with myself is separate from and impervious to what the outside world has to say about me.  In the surrender is where I started to embody this essenstial new way of being.

When I left my first career, I didn’t know if I would ever be able to work with people again.  But working through my issues that delivered me to burnout’s front door gifted me my second act in life.  The irony of life is that the more we chase happiness and attempt to avoid pain, the more elusive happiness is to grasp and the avoidance of pain mysteriously generates more pain.  However, learning to face our pain instead of running from it, we open the door to transformation. Magic is on the other side of pain.  A life with meaning and purpose is a product of living life with radical honesty and the courage and willingness to navigate life’s turning points. We are all students in this shared journey called life.  There is magic if you are willing to see it.