Erna Straatsma
Today at 07:00
Ignoring my body has its limits. Sometimes maintenance and attention is necessary. I outsource most of the work to specialists. They’re watching my insides. Doctors provide repairs, medicines and syringes, they check my blood. But there is also such a thing as appearance. I am responsible for that myself.
Keep the outside a little fresh. A lick of paint on my face, support for sagging parts, camouflaging scars and not letting my muscles weaken.
These repairs are increasingly difficult and annoying. As you get older, body maintenance takes a lot of time, whether you are sick or not. A person in their sixties feels the years in their legs and bones. The stiffness increases and a lot of work is needed to keep things in order.
The other thing is that I don’t really feel like showing off anymore. The pointlessness of exercise and healthy eating looms before me like a ghost every time. Why should I still bother with that? But neglect is my fate and I don’t want that either. A minimum of maintenance can be done. ‘Doable’, as the British say.
I am concerned about my head, which has been largely bald in recent months, but my hair is slowly returning. I’m going to have to go to the hairdresser soon, and I’m really dreading that. I don’t want to go there, because my skull is an abandoned war zone, full of painful dents and bumps. Radiation treatments have caused persistent hair pain. The part above my forehead is the only ‘safe space’.
Visiting the hairdresser has never been pleasant, because of the polite conversations I have there. “Have you been on holiday yet? Free day today?” Now added to that is the unwelcome touch of my tormented scalp. In a crowded hair salon I prefer not to talk to the hairdresser about my wish to wash, comb and cut my head as gently as possible.
I have cut lonely strands of hair with kitchen scissors in recent months. So that the remaining curls did not detonate much at the bald spots. I wasn’t handy, nor was I skilled, but it didn’t matter, I thought. For weeks I watched television every evening with nail scissors and a mirror within reach. A little here, a little there, until the hair was almost the same length everywhere. My ‘crooked hair’, as grandpa called my curls, makes many cutting mistakes invisible. I thought I could get by with it and soon I stopped wearing caps.
Short hair is wonderful, I recommend it to everyone, but it keeps growing. So I have to go to the hairdresser later.
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2024-02-20 06:00:00
#skull #abandoned #war #zone #full #painful #dents #bumps #column #Section
