How I Liberated Myself from Barberism
Yes, I spelled that correctly
How many activities do we perform in life mainly because at a young age we were told to? We are socialized into a variety of routine behaviors and learn what is expected of us. So we habitually conform to social conventions.
How often do we examine these routines and habits? How often do we ask whether these activities are what we want to do?
Mild Traumas
One constant in my childhood was a disagreement with my mother over the length of my hair. I wanted my hair to extend below the bottom of my ears and she thought boys’ hair should be shorter than the top of their ears. By the time I was around 12 years old, we had reached a tense detente of my hair being about mid-ear length.
My mother was, and still is, a person of habit and routine. Like pretty much everything else in my childhood, there had to be regular appointments with the local barber. I remember the barber as a gruff older man completely unsympathetic to the desires of a boy having longer hair. “You want the ears fully uncovered,” he said, believing he had a right every few months to tell me what I wanted. I suppose that is what my mother was paying him for. Still, the barber took umbrage at my preference for a mid-ear length of cut. He was not open to examining…
