The long and short of it

Everyone has that one haircut they look back on and regret. Maybe you rocked a mullet too far into the Nineties or maybe you went for the side-swept, overly straightened layers in the mid-00s. No judgement here if either of those is the case. I have an embarrassing hair story as well.

No trims for a year and this is the result...this, and an embarrassing amount
of split ends. I'm reluctant to snip yet because I've missed my long hair!

I've had super long hair for most of my life. My dad always preferred it, so that is how I wore it until the end of last summer. But last summer was a trying time for my family. In July my mom was suddenly and quite unexpectedly diagnosed with a type of colon cancer and underwent an emergency surgery to remove part of her large intestine and spleen. She spent the next three weeks in the hospital recovering.

We were told she would nave to undergo chemotherapy and radiation treatments for good measure. Hair loss was a possibility.

I'd had my hair long for years and I was bored. It was a hot summer in NorCal, and I was about to head back to school in an even hotter Phoenix. And the guy I was seeing at the time had been urging me to try a pixie cut (partly because he liked pixie cuts, and partly because he couldn't stand my hair touching him). So when the doctors said it might be a good idea to look into wigs for my other, that was it. I chopped. I donated a ponytail of snipped hair to my mother's hairdresser—who just so happened to specialize in treating cancer patients and had a thriving wig business!

Thankfully, my mother didn't lose her hair. The heartbreaker is that I got rid of this:

Sure, it had split ends a foot deep,
but was the chop really necessary?

Now my hair finally hits a good six inches below my collar bone. And now that it's safely back into the "long" range, I think I've learned my lesson. It's still kind of annoying when my hair catches on earrings or sunglasses or my boyfriend's stubble, but it's worth it to finally feel like I look like myself again.

Which do you prefer, long or short? Have you ever regretted a haircut? Tell me about it in the comments below!