I should probably start admitting that I am going bald. I really, really don’t want to admit that, but it’s becoming more apparent to everyone around me by the hour. My hair is just thinning out. I think at some point, my hair all decided that my scalp was a death-island and that it all needed to swim for safety. I’m coming to terms with that. Bald is sexy, or something. Maybe I should embrace my wonderful new bald self and just shave it all off.
The only problem with the idea of going full Patrick Stewart is that my head is shaped roughly like a potato, and not a tasty, sexy potato, like Jason Statham, an ungainly, chunky potato, like the Mister variety. This is the state of things in my life at the moment. This is what I am stuck thinking about day in and day out.
My head is shaped like a potato.
Looking back on the last few years of my life, I have come to realize that worrying about the shape of my head is much easier than worrying about the real issues in the world. There are days when I realize that I am blessed that I have the time to worry about the decreasing volume of my shaggy mane instead of the horrible things that could be plaguing my mind. As few as seven years ago, I would have been worrying about making sure the rent was going to get paid or that I might be able to find food that week. It’s been a long while since I was in that boat, but those kinds of fears still keep themselves gnawing at the back of my brain. I think the hair is what keeps them from gnashing all the way through my brain and firing out my eyeballs like a laser.
I’m copyrighting the phrase “Worry Laser” right now. It’s mine, back off of it.
What I’m trying to say is the world is full of shit that we all have to deal with on a regular basis. There are worries that are always piling up inside our minds. Some of them are very, very real, like the fear that my hair is all abandoning me to start a brand new fur colony deep in the vacuum cleaner. Some of those worries are completely stupid, like the fear that my hair is being stolen by ninjas and delivered to witches that are using it to cast wicked spells on me from afar.
See, that’s stupid. Everyone knows that ninjas and witches would never get along well enough to pull off that kind of concentrated effort to bring me down, even if I did manage to crash both Ninja and Witch conventions in the same night back in 2003.
It was a crazy year. It doesn’t count anyway.
So, I have to tell myself to not sweat the small stuff anymore, because someone out there is being eaten by an alligator right now. I don’t feel like that’s an exaggeration. No matter how bad your crap seems to be at the moment, someone has it worse. I think going forward in my life I’m going to try to keep that perspective a little bit closer to my mind when I make decisions about things. “Not eating this bucket of fried chicken is soooo hard, but at least I’m not being eaten by an alligator, or a grue, or a glitter-farting space penguin.” Trust me, it makes it much easier for me to deal with the day to day minutia of my life if I think of things in those terms.
Maybe you should try it. It might help you realize that it’s a bit easier to not eat an entire pound-cake, or maybe the fact that I’ve only got a quarter of a tank of gas to last until Thursday just means that I won’t be able to drive around all over the place for a few days, not that I’m going to end up dead in a gutter somewhere.
So, maybe, when you’re facing those hardships in your life, you can stop and take a moment to think, that at least you’re not going bald.