I like to think of myself as a focused person, but I also carry around a tiny glowing box with more information than someone from previous generations could have been exposed to in three lifetimes that buzzes at me multiple times a day. What I’m trying to say is, it can get dicey.
One of my worst time-suck habits is getting pulled into Facebook threads that have nothing to do with me. I’m not even talking about the dramatic ones where someone I know is fighting with someone else in an intense escalation of emotions. No, I’m talking about completely mundane threads on things that have no impact on my life written by people I have never met and never plan to meet.
What is the best way to clean the grout on that tile type that has never been in my house? How do you treat a bite from a spider that doesn’t live on the same continent as me? What does training your dog to speak using buttons look like even though I haven’t had a dog for over a year?
I love watching the comments fill up with experiences and advice. If I had to step back and analyze my motivation (which, let’s face it, is something I do a lot), I’d say that I find comfort in the way community can build through words on a screen. Seeing people who want to help each other out and share in moments of frustration and joy feels fulfilling. At a time when division feels like the default, these low-stakes threads where even disagreement stays civil feels like hope.
Anyway, it was in one of these moments of hope-seeking procrastination that I found myself reading a thread about hair woes. I thought it was just another example of me falling 53 comments deep into a thread that had nothing to do with me, but I was in for a surprise.
The original poster was complaining about her hair. It was so frustrating to try to wear it down because it took on a triangular shape that was always frizzy and unkempt.
Huh. I thought to myself. That’s what my hair does.
I’d long ago given up on taming my tresses into something manageable. I thought that my hair troubles were just universal, and that everyone else either knew some secret I didn’t know or was willing to put in some time I wasn’t to get a different outcome. Whatever the case, I’d made my peace with living in a ponytail.
I kept scrolling to find comment after comment of suggestions that the poster didn’t actually have the straight hair she thought she did.
That’s silly. I thought. How can someone not know what kind of hair they have?!
Then the comments continued. Advice came fast and furious for different “curly girl” methods, methods I knew well because my daughter has extremely curly hair that needs treatment way different from anything I had ever done for myself.
The original poster ended up popping back up later in the comments (which were days old) to report that she had tried the advice and — wonders of wonder — her hair was actually curly!
I scrolled on (probably to read about how to assemble a sewing machine I’ll never own) and eventually went to sleep, but a seed had been planted in my head.
A week or so later, I was in the shower and decided to experiment. Instead of roughly towel-drying my hair, pulling it into a ponytail, and using a brush to try to tame the eventual poufy mess into submission, I pulled out some of my daughter’s curly hair mousse, dabbed it into my wet hair, and carefully coiled it into a microfiber towel (a technique the commenters had suggested as the “plopping method.”)
Some time later, I unfurled the towel and found . . . ringlets? Certainly something beyond “a little wave,” which is the most I had been willing to claim as my own before this experiment.
Since then, I’ve worn my hair down (and springy with loose curls!) multiple times. In fact, my hair has probably been down more times in the month since I read that thread than the previous five years.
I don’t have any grand moral to this story, but I did want to share how my thoughtless scrolling turned into a thoughtful reconsideration of a basic understanding of myself. Perhaps there are more secrets lurking out there, so I guess I’ll have to keep up my “bad” habit.
