Hair helps us know where we are. Inside the maze of cavities of our inner ear is a field of microscopic hairs. Submerged in liquid, they behave more like seaweed swaying back and forth, gently rocking the calcium crystals in our inner ears and thus relaying their position back to our brains. How hair ended up with this very important job, I’m not sure. In other animals its used similarly, to detect breezes and how large a hole one’s body can fit into. Being stiff and flexible while simultaneously rooted in the skin, each hair, whisker, or vibrissae acts as a tiny antenna. Even birds have whiskers. If you look close enough you can see the little hairs sprouting around the base of their beak. This helps them catch bugs on the wing—again hair facilitating tiny micro adjustments in space.
As my beard has filled in, I’ve developed the habit of pulling it out strand by strand. You’d think this would hurt, and it does occasionally, but by taking one hair between my forefinger and my thumb, pulling it taut, and twirling it back and forth over and over, it weakens the root until it breaks and I end up with my harvest. I’m not sure if this is an anxiety thing. I mean, it probably is an anxiety thing, but mostly it happens when I’m bored sitting at the computer in a zoom meeting or trying to think of the next sentence to write. It’s weird to have all this hair on my face. Not unpleasant, just strange. As a curly-haired person, no matter how hard I try to trim my beard all one length, there will always be stragglers that are missed time after time until they stick out a good inch or two longer than the rest. Even professional barbers can’t solve this beard problem. So, I pull them, and I sort of enjoy it. The resulting loose hairs look like spidery pen lines against the white scraps of paper littered around my desk.
It is, perhaps, also a grounding exercise. The mildly painful pinch in the hair follicle brings me back to my body, however unpleasantly. So much of my job is sitting in front of the computer thinking about other things, other places and times and people, that the periodic jolt back into the present becomes a necessary part of the process. I alternate between cleaning the dirt from my glasses obsessively and watching the spindly branches of the plum tree toss in the March winds. I keep my binoculars close to my desk so that I can, every so often, look at the juncos and the towhees and the bushtits that hop outside my window. I enjoy pretending to look at something close up from very far away. It’s another way to rapidly alternate between different scales. The vertigo of moving back and forth between the very big and the very small is a great way to transmute anxiety. Even though thanks to meditation and medication I’m not gripped by the same kind of panic-inducing anxiety as I once was, it’s proven difficult to drop the coping habits that evolved out of the ~10 year period immediately preceding and then following my transition.