My head felt unusually light.
That was the first thing I noticed.
The second was that I liked it.
I had just cut off the hair I had been growing, with only one interruption, since 2020. What began during lockdown as an opportunity to try something different had lasted long enough to become part of how I recognised myself.
The man bun had survived the return to offices, ordinary social life, professional meetings and the gradual disappearance of most other visible evidence that lockdown had happened.
Then, on 26 June, it went.
It felt like the end of an era.
Which is a rather grand thing to say about a haircut.
Lockdown gave me an excuse.
Like many people, I stopped maintaining some of the routines that had previously seemed necessary. Haircuts became difficult, then optional, then irrelevant.
At some point, growing my hair stopped being something that was happening to me and became something I was choosing.
I had always wondered what it might look like longer. Lockdown created a period in which I could pass through the awkward stages without having to explain them too often.
Eventually, it was long enough to tie back.
The man bun arrived.
It was distinctive enough to attract comment. Some people liked it. Some clearly did not. Most at least noticed it.
That attention helped make it part of me.
A temporary experiment became my look.
When people picture us, they picture certain features. A pair of glasses. A beard. A style of clothing. A particular way of carrying ourselves.
After enough time, we begin picturing ourselves in the same way.
The choice hardens into an identity.
There was no crisis behind the decision to remove it.
I had not undergone a dramatic personal transformation. Nobody had ordered me to look more conventional. I was not attempting to present a newly serious version of myself to the world.
It simply felt like time.
The look had belonged to a particular period. I had enjoyed it, defended it and become comfortable with it.
But keeping something because it has become familiar is not the same as continuing to choose it.
I wanted a new look.
That was all.
Even so, cutting it felt more significant than the practical decision justified.
I had worn my hair that way for most of six years. It appeared in photographs, accompanied important events and became part of how colleagues, friends and family recognised me.
Removing it felt like closing a chapter.
Perhaps that is what eras are made from: not only the large historical events we use to name them, but the ordinary things that remain attached to a particular version of ourselves.
Around the same time, I had finished reading Sam Harris’s Waking Up.
The book explores meditation, consciousness and the idea that our conventional sense of being a fixed self inside our own experience is an illusion.
That is a considerably more serious proposition than anything demonstrated by my haircut.
Cutting off a man bun does not provide evidence about the fundamental nature of consciousness.
But the book had made me more attentive to the stories through which we construct a sense of who we are.
We collect evidence.
This is the kind of person I am.
This is how I look.
These are the things I believe.
This is the work I do.
These are the choices somebody like me would make.
None of those descriptions is necessarily false. The problem comes when the description begins to feel like the thing itself.
The man bun had become one small item in my account of me.
Perhaps I was somebody willing to look a little unconventional.
Perhaps it represented not becoming entirely absorbed into the expected appearance of a middle-aged manager.
Perhaps it connected me to the freedom of lockdown, when many ordinary rules briefly became negotiable.
Perhaps I simply liked having long hair.
Identity does not always reveal itself through profound declarations. Sometimes it hides inside the reasons we become strangely reluctant to book a haircut.
People noticed.
There were double takes from those who had known me with long hair for years. Some needed a second to identify what had changed.
The reactions were mostly positive.
That was reassuring, although it probably should not have mattered as much as it did.
Changing something visible creates an immediate opportunity to discover how dependent we are upon other people reflecting our identity back to us.
A familiar appearance produces familiar reactions. When it changes, we wait to see whether the world still recognises us.
Of course it did.
Nobody treated me as a different person.
The relationships survived.
My professional credibility neither appeared with shorter hair nor vanished with the bun.
The version of me I had attached to the hairstyle turned out not to live there.
There is comfort in becoming recognisable.
Over time, we settle into an appearance, a role and a set of explanations. Other people learn what to expect from us. We learn what to expect from ourselves.
That stability is not inherently bad.
Identity provides continuity. It allows us to make commitments, maintain relationships and construct a life that extends beyond the mood of a particular morning.
But continuity can become inertia.
We may continue presenting an earlier version of ourselves because changing it would require explanation.
We may preserve a style, habit or opinion long after the original reason has disappeared.
We may become more committed to remaining recognisable than to noticing what we currently want.
The haircut was a minor decision. But it contained a useful reminder.
We are allowed to become briefly unfamiliar, including to ourselves.
A change does not need to reject what came before.
Cutting my hair did not mean the lockdown experiment had been a mistake. I had enjoyed it. The man bun suited that period of my life.
Ending something does not invalidate it.
Sometimes it simply means that it has finished.
I looked different.
My head felt lighter.
People performed their double takes and then carried on talking to me.
The whole event was both significant and completely ordinary.
Perhaps that is why it stayed with me.
We talk about identity as though it sits deep inside us, waiting to be discovered and faithfully expressed.
Much of it may be less stable than that.
We construct it from memories, roles, appearances, preferences and the reactions of other people. Then we mistake the construction for something permanent.
I am not sure finishing Waking Up made me ready to cut my hair. The decision had probably already been made.
But the book gave me a way to notice what the hesitation contained.
I was not only changing a hairstyle.
I was loosening my attachment to a familiar picture of myself.
The mirror adjusted almost immediately.
So did I.
The man bun had to go.
I did not go with it.