Show of hands: who enjoys finding a new hairdresser?
Anyone who put up a hand can put it down right now, you liar.
At best, the process is mildly stressful. At worst, it can be horrifying. You ask friends and scour review websites for something reasonably priced that won’t leave you looking like Sporty Spice had a run-in with Leatherface. Sometimes you win, sometimes you merely survive, and sometimes…
Two months ago, for my twenty-seventh birthday, I embarked on such a mission as part of a misguided “treat yo’self” weekend. Twenty-seven isn’t a particularly big age — a few more gray hairs, no new legal rights, no deadlines in my nonexistent five-year plan — so I decided to lay low and indulge, avoiding the hassle of a party and the admission that I hardly had enough friends in Belgium to even throw one, despite having lived here for six months.
“The people are nice, but my social life is on the backburner. This job is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, you know? It deserves priority right now.” -Me, on pretty much every call with friends and family back home
I spent Friday night drinking cheap champagne, eating Indian delivery, and listening to Pod Save the World in a pleasant, one-step-above-‘budget’ hotel room in the commercial center of Brussels. I spent Saturday speed-walking back and forth across the city, hoping one of the several pampering treatments on my agenda would actually make me feel taken care of.
In 2016, Gallup surveyed employees in the U.S. and found that 57 percent of millennials consider work-life balance and well-being very important. The flip-side of the survey results was that by most standards of well-being, we’re trailing. Out of five elements of well-being — purpose, social, financial, community, and physical — 60 percent of millennials are only thriving in the “physical” element, and 40 percent of us aren’t thriving in any of them.
That weekend, I was laser-focused on physical well-being. Purpose and financial well-being often feel out of our hands, and social and community well-being require investment and trust (i.e. risk) in other people. Physical well-being, however, is straightforward to obtain and has tangible effects. No one could say I wasn’t taking care of myself if I could show them the receipt for a massage. But when all I had to show for that misguided weekend was a self-esteem-destroying haircut and unnecessary financial stress, I realized that no amount of “self-care” could fill the hole where my social life — ease, trust, friendship, and intimacy, not after-work happy hours — had once resided.
I spent that Sunday moving to a new apartment and assembling IKEA shelves alone, even though there were almost certainly people who would have helped (or birthday-celebrated! Or both!) if I had just asked. It became clear that I had chosen this solitude, rationalized by workaholism and enabled by little luxuries; it also became clear that it was not sustainable.
So I’m trying. Colleagues with whom I occasionally enjoyed a coffee or beer before now come over for Girls Night every couple of weeks, and the guy who earnestly pursued me for months got a date. I feared it would be stressful, making space for new people when I’m already spread so thin, but these newly-cultivated connections are actually a relief.
Counter-intuitive though it might seem, when the daily demands of life make you feel like there’s no room for other people in it, that is probably the exact moment to reach out.
In case anyone is worried, I found — and more importantly, trusted — another hairdresser to fix the situation. She nailed it.
