A couple of weeks ago I cut off all my hair. I had it buzzed by Rachel Cisco at Bouffant Hair Salon. Rachel is a very talented tress artist who's been sculpting my long, black locks for a couple of years now. She knows every cowlick on my head and does a great job making each hair behave.

Here we are in the act of eliminating the need for months of future appointments:

Hair today, gone tomorrow

Why did I cut off my signature locks?

The truth is, I've never had an attachment to my hair. I've been dying it since I was 13 years old, and I just turned 40, so forever it's been kind of a pain. That first time my mother brought home some dye for me because she noticed all the gray one day. It's to be expected, this pre-mature gray, since the heads of both my mother and my father had turned very early in their lives as well. I hadn't noticed one silver strand until mom brought that box of a nice medium brown; I was still too unaware of my appearance or why I should care about it then.

For a quite a while I've had very dark, very long hair. (Here I am in a publicity photo that was shot for my storytelling experiment The Miracle in July with said very dark, very long hair.) But before it was black and long it was short and beige blond. (Not a good look on me, by the way.) And before that it was red/orange, mid-length and layered. (I managed to pull that off, I think.)

Over the years I've really learned to hate dying my hair. The time wasted, the mess, the smell. And, over the years, I've been cooling promising myself that I'd someday let my hair be the color it really is. I love the streaks of light through the hair of others, so why not?

Now my hair is really gray…and in some places a beautiful silver-white…a silver-white that is all-too noticeable against the ink black dye. So I made an appointment with Rachel, and after I convinced her that I was of sound mind and body she cut my hair off in chunks with large scissors and then used an electric razor to finally free me from every artificially-colored hair on my head.

And. I. Love. It.

And not just because it turned out great (don't you think?) or because I no longer have to waste my time trapped in the bathroom filled with the scent of permanent hair color. I also love it because I finally did something I've said that I was going to do, for a long time.

Cutting my hair off feels as good as it did publishing new chapters of MIJ. Each time I revealed a new part to my fictionalized past into the world—which is a scary and exhausting feat—it was like reaching milestones in a journey, which told me I was on the right path. Meeting each publishing deadline infused me with the sense of having control of something in my life through the act of choosing: I could keep writing and publishing MIJ until I was done, as promised. Or I could use any number of really good excuses as to why I couldn't possibly find a second of time or trace of desire to write another gut-wrenching 8,000 word chapter about loving hard, losing it all, and following your bliss.

Almost 100,000 words later, I finished that first interactive draft. And lots of people liked it. But then I stopped working on it, for a lot of very good reasons that don't matter beyond the fact that the work stopped because of them.

But then I cut off all my hair, because I said I was going to. I again feel empowered by choice and the satisfaction of passing an important milestone.

Type-ity type type.