A Piece in My Mind

Why Did I Donate My Hair

As some of you know yesterday I cut off 9" of my hair to donate to Beautiful Lengths. Some of you might be wondering how I came to the decision to do this? There are many answers actually. The first is I'm cheap. I normally cut my hair to between my chin and my shoulders then let it grow to 2-3" below my shoulders and repeat. This is truly because I am too cheap to pay for more regular haircuts. But being cheap is not enough to get 9" extra inches of hair. No, there's also the fact that around May when I should have gotten a haircut I was working an insane number of hours. So when I finished work later than normal at night I never really had the time to sit and wait to get a haircut. That ties into the next reason, I don't like people or to be more specific, I don't like being around people I don't know. Not that people could tell that based on how much I'm on twitter or plurk or how I podcast and spend hours in after shows. So my natural tendency to avoid crowds and strangers kept me from getting my haircut. Next we have vanity. Not that I consider myself to be terribly vain more to the contrary actually. However in the middle of July I was getting ready to go to the Girls Night In Podcast (now the new show is Girls Night In Radio) Meet up. For the first time I would be meeting listeners of the show. I knew how I liked to do my hair with it longer and I wasn't sure about how I would do it short. So I decided I'd wait until after the meet up. Around the time I returned home I started thinking about donating my hair. I had heard of Locks of Love and checked out the requirements. At the time I had about 7" to cut. Locks of Love requires 10" to donate. I honestly had no idea how long it takes hair to grow and at that point I decided to let it grow so I could donate it.

So the months went by and my hair continued to grow. This is where we run into the problem. I have a very large head, as in I don't actually know anyone who has a larger one. It's so big I can't wear hats and I have problems getting hooded sweatshirts over it. I also have very thick hair so combine the two, and I have a ton of hair which gets really heavy for my easily aggravated neck (I get tension headaches so bad they become migraines without proper medication). Several weeks back I started getting pain in my neck from the weight of my hair. Around that same time I was watching Ellen and she had Hilary Swank on sporting a new short do. She talked about how she had given her beautiful hair to Beautiful Lengths. They make wigs for women with cancer. It turns out 58% of women who are diagnosed with cancer list losing their hair as their number one fear and that's over fear of dying. In fact 8% will decide not to have chemo or other treatments for fear of losing their hair. That's right, they will forgo a possible life saving treatment because they don't want to lose their hair. The donated hair is made into wigs for these women to help they decide to do chemo which will hopefully save their lives. The other thing that got me thinking about them is they only require 8" of hair minimum.

I wrestled with if I should continue going for 10" for Locks of Love or do Beautiful Lengths. Both are great causes but in the end the pain in my neck was getting quite bad. I was having tension headaches every single day from the weight of my hair. I had Marty measure my hair and he said I had 8.5"-10", 11" if you counted just the very longest and depending how short I got my hair. I wanted to make sure I had at least an extra inch over the requirement so I decided on Beautiful Lengths. I knew I couldn't wait longer for it to grow a couple extra inches.

After following all the prep instructions I went into the local Great Clips right before close. The stylist had never heard of Beautiful Lengths but said if I were donating to Locks of Love the haircut would be free. I had intended to pay for it so not a big deal but as I told her about the organization she decided not to charge me, she said she wouldn't feel right about it. I thanked her and gave her a huge tip. She also said that most people can get two ponytails out of their hair but she got four from mine! It take 6-8 ponytails to make one wig so my hair will make about 1/2 of a wig!

I guess in the end the answer to the why I donated my hair was because I could.

posted by Ziese52 @ 7:18 PM 1 comments