TETHERED

Hair for me was the material of the pandemic. Everyone was more aware of it. Without being able to get it cut professionally, hair growth became a symbol of time, reminding us how long we’d been inside.

For me, hair was a symbol of anxiety. With the amount of stress and fear I was facing being alone in a room, in a country that was not mine, away from friends and family, I started to lose my hair. Hair was falling out in alarming amounts, whether on my floor, in my bed or as a horrifying pile in the shower drain. And to make things worse I already suffer from a nervous tic that urges me to pull at my hair whenever I feel anxious. Hair became a physical reminder of my deteriorating mental health. 

But hair loss was not the only side-effect of my anxiety. Chronic brain fog became something I battled with every day. Wanting to be productive, trying to distract myself, it was impossible to focus on any form of entertainment media or ingest any form of writing over five words at a time. My memory felt like it didn’t last for more than a couple of hours. 

So I turned in vain and desperation to The School of Life: An Emotional Education, by Alain de Botton, to see if rationalising my anxiety could help. Naturally the words did not leave the page. My mind was shut to any information it was trying to tell me.

The book was meaningless to me at that point, and so became scrap for experimentation and alteration. I started to sew into the page with strands of my fallen hair. I only had to focus on this repetitive action. The voices of panic quietened a bit and the brain fog was not an issue in those moments. No new information was trying to get in, and the task was simple. 

I was using what I saw as the material of my anxiety to help cure or temporarily subside it. To get it out of me and onto an object. To reveal the parasite I found hard to explain