How My Hair Wore My Bipolar Disorder

The more exaggerated the palette, the louder the signal. It was never just about the look; it was about reconciling who I felt like internally with what I saw externally. I was trying to match the madness. Make it legible. Beautiful, even.

But like all cycles, what goes up must come down. After each episode, always came the cut: a buzz, a bob, or a big chop. The urge to start over, strip it all back, and reclaim control. My hair became both the evidence and the aftermath of everything I was trying to navigate mentally. And through it all, the salon chair was where I processed in real time.

My hairstylist’s chairs became a kind of makeshift confessional, not unlike the offices of the licensed therapists I’ve worked with since being clinically diagnosed in 2013. During my hardest season, Milena Rose Salon wasn’t just a space for styling; it was a sanctuary, a holy space for talk-and-chop therapy. The thing about hairstylists like mine is that they don’t just care about how you look when you leave; they care about how you feel. And I don’t think they’ll ever fully know how many times they talked me off the edge with a color, cut, and a truth bomb.

Beneath all the dye jobs and dramatic chops was never just vanity: it was vocabulary. My hair became a translator when words failed me. It shouted when I needed to be noticed. It grieved. It rebelled. It dreamed.

If the body keeps score, what do my strands remember?

Maybe they remember the first time I cut them all off in 2013, when the fog of mania collided with a heartbreak I’d been outrunning for five years: losing my mom to breast cancer. It was the kind of grief I hadn’t named yet, but my body had been carrying it the whole time. My scalp felt what my mouth couldn’t say. That first big chop wasn’t about style; it was survival. A visceral, unconscious attempt to shed what felt too heavy to hold.