Shaving head

Yesterday I cut my hair. I considered going to a salon to have it cut, but I cut it off myself. There wasn't any grand reason for it. For a few months I had wanted to try shaving my head, and I also wondered, if not now, when would I ever get the chance. The word "now" here is an important one. Having once cut my hair down to nearly a shaved state back in my army days, I already had verified, remembered proof that short hair doesn't suit me. Even so, I wanted to try shaving my head. I was curious about how it would feel not just to have short hair but to shave it completely, and I was also curious about how it would look once it had grown back just a little, maybe 1 to 2 millimeters. And when else would I attempt such a thing if not now, while I'm living shut away from the world like this?

So before cutting my hair, I tried to see whether an electric shaver would cut through it, and of course it wouldn't. Since it's the kind of thing used for trimming short stubble, the long hair had to be cut down first with scissors. Before I had fully made up my mind, I picked up the scissors and cut a bit of the hair on the side, and wasn't my hair a mess after just that one cut? After that, only two options remained for me: to stop even now and go to a salon, or to shave it all off completely myself. The option I chose was the latter, and after a fairly long stretch of careful cutting and shaving, I managed to become completely bald.

While cutting my hair, many thoughts came to me. First was the thought, what on earth am I doing? At the same time, the second thought was that the money a hairdresser receives is well worth it. Having cut it at home, I learned that everything—from the cut hair itself, to the shape of the cut, to the fact that hair is, by nature, an extremely, extremely difficult thing to cut on your own. Having tried it myself, I understood it well enough. There is a clear reason for paying the price of a salon. Third was a thought about patients. I understand that people with leukemia sometimes have to shave their heads short. I don't know the exact reason, but among patients there are cases where, whether due to treatment or surgery, they lose their hair or have to shave it, and I wondered whether it feels like this for them. Fourth was checking the state of my scalp. My scalp has always been hot and prone to things like acne, and after shaving completely I saw that more of it was red than I'd thought, with a lot of acne too. There's almost none on my face, so the fact that there's so much on my scalp is surely proof that I've managed it poorly. The fifth feeling I had was a sense of starting over. For me, life these days gives off a feeling similar to that of a farmer. I am like a farmer planting and tending a tree, not knowing whether or not it will bear fruit. What's even funnier is that I'm a farmer with no memory of ever succeeding at farming. To put it as an analogy, I'm a person who used to sell farm machinery, who has now set out to do the farming himself, which is quite a predicament.

After shaving my head completely, my own appearance was both funny and unfamiliar. And yet many thoughts came to me. I shaved my head voluntarily, but some have had to shave it without ever wanting to, and some shave it to steel their resolve as they leave the secular world behind. People shave their heads for different reasons, but I feel as though I've understood their hearts a little. Just having shaved my head, I find I don't want to create any occasion to meet someone right now, and on top of that, I find myself thinking more deeply about the things I do. Also, having shaved my head like this, I won't have any reason to date for a while. Dating, the secular world, relationships with people, even going out somewhere to work in this state—all of it is rather strange. Even to my own eyes, my appearance is very strange and unfamiliar.

I imagine that if someone were to see me, there's a high chance they would think I'm a patient. A person with a completely shaved head is rarer than a foreigner, and if it wasn't shaved for fashion, most would assume the person shaved it because they're a patient. Perhaps, just as they would think, I am a patient. I myself can't say exactly why I came to want to shave my head. But this much seems certain: having done it once, I can now judge very clearly whether this is something I should keep doing or something I shouldn't do going forward. What I learned amounts to about that much.