IF, PROBABLY, AND MAYBE: no shaving pact

IF 

In 2013, the Dallas Mavericks made a pact to not shave until they got back to a .500 winning percentage (winning at least of their games). They ended up rallying and getting to 40-40 with two games remaining in the regular season. They were 21-28 when they made the pact. It took them two months to get back to normal and some of them ended up looking rather strange. Their star, Dirk Nowitzki said his wife stopped kissing him. My facial hair never grew fast enough for not shaving to be a real punishment, but I decided after my last haircut on June 29th, I was not going to get a haircut until I stopped losing or at least stopped feeling like a loser. It is July 29th and I feel no different. 

If the Mavs were seven games under .500, I feel as though I am 30 or 40. It has simply been loss after loss, the wins don’t even feel good anymore. It’s kinda all just swirling into one thing. Taking the wins with the losses, just feels like losing. If I’m going to take this pact seriously, I need to re-evaluate my entire stance on both winning and losing because no one is keeping score but me.   

PROBABLY 

I think I am punishing myself for not being who I want to be, which doesn’t make much sense in the long run. I thought a pivot away from vanity would make me more focused on my work, my craft, and my happiness but all it has done is make me feel ugly and undesirable. I work best when I feel beautiful and I have often felt like everything but beautiful over the past few weeks. Just because I am in a hard time in my life, doesn’t mean I should make an effort to stack the odds against myself even further. I punish myself too often. 

Self-sabotage is my favorite habit. Not in the sense that I love to do it, but in the sense that it’s what I gravitate towards the most. Strangely, I never want to go lower when I feel great. It’s always when I am in the pits that I want to dig myself even further into the ground and burrow deeper into my sorrow. I probably should make an effort to feel as fly as possible the more earthbound I am. 

MAYBE 

I stopped writing this column because I stopped feeling like I had anything to say but the whole point of this was discovering something to say rather than letting inspiration find me. My whole life is missing agency right now. Maybe I should just get a fucking haircut.

🦋

published July 29, 2022