Trial run

I did something new this weekend. I went to a craft fair in Massachusetts with my friend, the gallery-owner. That’s not the new part. I’ve gone to several such events with her, and many more on my own. It was a perfect day for it, one of those glorious spring days you wish could last throughout the year. She picked out things for her store and I window-shopped.

The new part is that I went wigless.

I’ve been thinking about my hair a lot, now that it looks like I may keep it with this new treatment. It’s grown back to about the length it was last Thanksgiving, which is to say, it’s just barely long enough to cover my head. I’ve been hoping for it to grow in curly, but it’s still too early to tell if it will. As before, it’s completely white, and not quite a hairdo. It needs another month or so before it will look “intentional.”

I have taken off my wig in the company of friends before. It’s easy with people I trust and so much more comfortable. I figured that going wigless among strangers would be a good next test for me. And I didn’t feel uncomfortable or self-conscious about it at all, even when we ran into people we knew. In fact, the only comments were compliments.

As with all things new and fearsome, the anticipation was much worse than the actuality. Self-consciousness is certainly self-defeating! Why should the prospect of appearing in public in a different guise upset me as it does? I can’t answer that except to say that if this were easy for me, I’d have to be a different person.

The final frontier will be going to my client, where I’ve been working onsite about once a week for the past couple of years. I’ll have to mull it over a while longer before I show up there in the buff, so to speak.