Once upon a lifetime ago I was a licensed hairdresser. I didn’t do it long, it was a means to an end, a way to take a break from college and figure out if I was heading in a direction I wanted to continue. It also ended up being a way to help me get through school when I finally did go back to University.
For awhile I didn’t tell people at the University that I had been a hairdresser. I left it off my CV/Resume. Then one day I started thinking about that and wondered why I did it. Was I afraid people would think less of me? That they would pigeon-hole me because of something I used to do? I suppose that was probably the bulk of the reasoning. But as I became more comfortable with who I was and with my place in the academic world I started to realize that hairdressing had been much more to me than merely a detour in my life, it had actually been quite life-changing.
I didn’t have a rough childhood, all things considered I had it pretty easy. I could have gone straight into University after high school, or I could have gone straight in after I left home and college. I had been accepted to several Universities that I’d applied to, including the University of Hawaii. Instead I turned them all down, moved to Vancouver with Kirk and went to hairdressing school. My family was absolutely horrified. All except for one uncle who said “leave her alone, she’ll do what she wants and she’ll end up in the right place.” Love that guy!
So how was it life-changing? I am actually a bit anti-social and hairdressing teaches you to leave your day at the door and concentrate on other people. It teaches you how to listen well. It teaches you patience with people. It teaches you how to get along with just about any personality that you encounter, at least in short durations. A good hairdresser is 30% talent and 70% personality. Even though I did cut hair for a bit, I never enjoyed that aspect. Even though I had my license I made very good friends with the chemical technician and preferred to work with her as an assistant. We are still good friends to this day, 24 years later. I worked at that salon, off and on, in a few different positions, for about 15 years, right up into the third year of my PhD. It was fun, it was different from the rest of my days. it didn’t involve fish.
The only hairdressing I do now is cut Kirk’s hair, and even that takes a lot of prodding to make me get the scissors out. When I pulled out the scissors last night to give Kirk a badly needed haircut I started to think again about how much I appreciate having had the opportunity to do something so vastly different than where I knew I would end up, because it is those different paths that provide us with the ability to look at our present place with a different set of eyes than some of those around us.
I work very hard to maintain the ties with all of my past worlds since I have learned, the hard way, that even though we may think we are leaving something behind, we are better off to maintain solid relationships with those who have been a part of our lives.
It is funny what connections exist and how they can help you later in life when you least expect it. For example, there was a man I couldn’t stand, I thought he was arrogant and egotistical (I still think that way to a certain degree). I said “it’s not like he will ever have any involvement in my life or any impact on my career”. How wrong I was! Much later, because of him, doors opened that I never could have foreseen. And because of his timely reappearance in my life I regained something I’d lost.
Where I once kept quiet about having been a hairdresser, I am now quite proud to have been a part of that world because it gave me a very unusual addition to my personal skill set. Besides, it provides some conversation sometimes 🙂