Hair Today … gone March 24th.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This is a personal update, nothing to do with writing or writing promo at all. In real life, I’m fundraising to support leukaemia and blood cancer patients in New Zealand, a cause that I really want to help–and not one that I want tainted by the suggestion of self-promo. At the same time, I believe I have a lot of writing friends who will want to support me–and I need all the support I can get. I’ve made the decision to reach out to my writing and reading friends twice only–once in this post, and once again in the aftermath. This is a fine line to walk, and I’m going to do my best not to cross it, but if this strikes you as inappropriate in anyway, do let me know.

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Okay. Important note out of the way, I am freaking out. I’ve committed to participating in the 2017 fundraising campaign organised by Shave for a Cure by–you guessed it–shaving my head.

As far back as I can remember, people have been complimenting me on my hair. Hairdressers tell me how lovely and thick it is, people in the street tell me how nice my curls are, almost every time I see her my grandma says ‘how nice your hair looks,’–and that’s not even getting into the incredulous reactions from my students in Japan when I told them it was natural.

My two best hair stories both involve students in Japan. Once after going from very long hair, to cutting it very short, I went to school to be greeted by various amusing double-takes. The best was a student I’d taught for five years who saw me from behind and asked his homeroom teacher ‘When did we get a new English teacher?’

The best story happened while I was still on my island. Deciding there was no point in having long hair if I never did anything wore it, I wore my hair loose to school. Unfortunately it was a windy day, and by the time I arrived at school my hair was somewhat worse for the trip. I walked into the third year classroom. One of my girl’s shrieked. ‘Sensei! You look like that character from Harry Potter. What’s her name? Harry’s friend.’ The boy beside her called out ‘Dumbledore!’ And for the rest of the week, that class called me ‘Dumbledore-sensei.’

Giving it up is a lot harder than I thought it would be. In fact, the closer it gets to shave-day, the less I want to do this–but the more I know I have to. I do invest a lot of my ego into my hair–it’s a big part of my identity. And I really hope that by taking part in the Shave for a Cure challenge, I’ll be able to raise money for a worthy cause.

If you want to support me in my challenge, please go to my personal page (yup, using my non-author name): Here

If you can donate, that is amazing and very gratefully received! Although this is an NZ charity, you don’t need to be in NZ to support this cause. If you’re unable to donate, please share this post, leave me a message of support (trust me, I will need those), or maybe even be inspired to consider something like this yourself.

Thanks for reading! And yeah, there will be an update, March 27th, with the after photos (gulp).