This Morning, I Shaved Off My Beard

The picture you see above was taken just a few hours before I wrote this story. It is a look I’ve carried for quite a long time, before I started growing a beard around a month ago. And this morning, I shaved it off again, and while I did so, I realized just how closely entwined it had become with my mental health.

I’ve always had a fascination with facial hair. At 39, I can identify the fact that my father had a beard. As a child, I made him the example of masculinity, which took root in my subconscious. But my earliest memory of this same man is of him breaking my mother’s forearm in a fit of rage because she disturbed his sleep. And this memory came to the surface only around a decade ago, after years of compartmentalising and numbing. Obviously, there’s a lot of conflict there.

But my obsession with facial hair continued. All through college, I’d trim and shape whatever facial hair I had in order to look older. It is only now that I realize, that I was trying to look something else — something I’m not — because I wasn’t comfortable being what I was; an awkward, bumbling teen trying hard to fit in, and failing.

Much of it has to do with how much Indian society insists on normalizing the most vicious forms of body shaming. Comments on the body are passed around casually. And I was a walking fountain of ammunition for body shaming. Premature greys, a double chin, a plump torso, acne… the “well meaning” adults had a field day pointing out just how imperfect I was, every time they saw me. And thus began my journey of self esteem issues and body image issues.

The beard, at least, was in my control. I could grow it, trim it, shape it, sport a moustache, a goatee, a shaped beard, a stubble… It became my tool to distract myself from the other issues I was facing at the time. So what if I’m depressed, at least I look cool. So what if I’m plump, at least I have a sexy goatee. So what if I have acne, I also have a perfectly shaped beard. These were the lies I told myself every morning for years on end.

My depression peaked in my late 20s and I spent most of my early 30s living in Rock Bottom. And as the depression grew, so did the beard. I spent years looking haggard, unkempt and untidy, despite being in a profession that required me to meet people and be in public every day — journalism, but in print, thankfully — because when you’re living in survival mode, your looks don’t matter any more.

Through all the therapy and the medication and the God-awful side effects that followed, I started seeing what my beard really stood for — the lack of interest in basic grooming stemming from a decreased will to live; not in the self harm sense but just a supreme absence of the will to function. This is why I prefer to be clean shaven now, because the beard has become a reminder of one of the lowest phases of my life.

Four months ago, I joined a new job. A corporate office, radically different from my earlier life of a journalist. It is a job in a field I am really passionate about — cybersecurity awareness — and a job I got after eight months of hard self employment. Fixed hours, great pay, travel and a lovely, lovely team of passionate young professionals. A dream.

But that’s where demons lurk, in the dreams, waiting to turn them into nightmares.

By some strange coincidence, all of my male colleagues have beards. And they carry off those beards really well. As they went from being colleagues to friends, a ‘FOMO’ started setting in. For those who don’t know, this stands for Fear Of Missing Out — a fear of not being part of the trend or the group. And so, around a month ago, I started letting my beard grow. And some of my male friends at work loved it. At least they said they did (haha!)

Within a week, I was checking myself in every shiny surface I passed by. Is it looking good? Was it looking too untidy? Did I need to trim it? Did I need to shape it better? Had I spoiled the shape?

This went on for days till I realised that I had not grown a beard, I had simply added one more layer to my own self esteem and body image issues.

I was literally worrying about how I looked every time I stepped out of the house. And in the process, I was re-inviting all the memories and patterns of the past; which I had left behind for good reason.

Last night, I trimmed it down to a stubble, thinking it was a good compromise — a halfway house between clean shaven and bearded. This morning, though, I looked at myself in the mirror and realized that the beard had added absolutely zero value to my life.

It was something of a moment. I had cleaned out my room, vacuumed the cobwebs off the walls, thrown the curtains in the laundry and had just stepped into the bathroom after marvelling at my sparkling clean room. The stubble looked terribly out of place and unnecessary. So, I shaved it off.

This Men’s Mental Health Awareness Month, I gift myself the freedom to look the way that makes me happy. And the knowledge that the beard was never the problem; it was the aspects of my life entangled in it. And as I look back on the life I’ve lived so far, I am able to see exactly how much of those issues I’ve shed and walked away from.

And as of this morning, there is no beard to cloud my vision either.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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