When I began looking at fairy tales, and stories in general, I developed an eye for noticing the parts of the body around which the story seemed to center.

Jaws? Self-explanatory.

E.T.? Glowing heart and torso.

Interview with the Vampire? Blood, throat. Underworld focuses more on the blood in a dynastic way.

The Little Mermaid? Legs, tongue (in the fairy tale version), voice. It's a fun game to look for the body of a story, like playing I-Spy in the car.

Hair in fairy tales – well, women's hair anyway – is prominent.

In Allerleiruah, the mother dies and the father goes looking for someone who has hair as golden as hers was.

Unfortunately for the daughter, hers is the only hair that matches her mothers. So she has to flee the castle.

Hair began to connote ownership to me. Told that I had to shave, conceal, pull back, rip out, style, crimp, perm, curl, et cetera – hair seemed like the key to finding out who I was if I could just let it be for a while.

After all, hair just grows out of you. You can't stop it. It'll just grow back. To me it's an embodied analog to a natural creative-sexual energy that animates us all – it just comes out. It's one of the things that is most visibly you unless you change it after the fact and it defines social boundaries in specific ways.

To me, there's such a strong connection to money. After a lifetime of buying those stupid Venus razors, and struggling to develop a sense of intrinsic self-worth in the wake of my divorce, I decided I wouldn't buy them any more until I figured out where my money was coming from.

Why would I keep grooming myself to fit an image that had left me with so little?

The economy around being something desirable – until you're not – and helping a man live his life until you become a nuisance – did not pay very well. The economy around fertility and childbearing is a massive subject with people who are more erudite than I am able to comment on it better – but jeez, to really feel the degree that my worth (in my mind and in the culture and in a reflection I perceived in personal dynamics) had been connected to my ability to bear children – to the exclusion of other things – was so painful. Especially to someone who naturally did want to be a mother and who had saved up for it since she first began making any kind of money.

My story these days is probably about heart and voice. How to keep both of them open somehow.

My last haircut was in Providence, Rhode Island. I walked in and told her, I want to hide less. Please take off at least two inches; I'm so angry, that hair is anger from the past two years or so.

"Your hair's like a curtain," she said. "I think hair can be healing. Let's show your face."

I'd forgotten about Turning Red until just now. There's hair, there's blood. Even though I talk about them a lot, I don't watch movies often these days, but I think I watched Turning Red four times and bawled every time. (I was so worried that there would never be a truly original – truly feminine story – to come out of one of those major animation studios and that team cracked it out of the park. So did Luca.)

The image of the girl being forced through the spiritual circle that would take away that thing – that creative-sexual-emotional thing – hit me on the deepest level. Growing up in a family structure that forced me to wear a wedding ("promise") ring at age 14 created a time bomb. It was a promise I didn't want to make, made at the pressure of someone else who had more power, for a religion that had starved me from the get-go, and even as I aged into my 20s it left an imprint that guided my behaviors in relationship. I believed on a body level that my choices didn't matter and that there were one or two really specific things I needed to accomplish in order to be worth anything and that I didn't have the freedom to leave a relationship that treated me poorly.

My biggest life struggle – one that crept into my awareness probably around 2010, smoothed out during the happy time in my life from 2012-2015, and that guided all of my decisions from 2016 onward, because it felt like a life-threatening creative block – was how to regain my rightful access to that thing. The thing the hair shows. That sexually mature, creative feminine thing, and how to express myself in the world from the basis of that thing.

I have a tattoo on my left arm from Grim Fandango. It never ceases to amaze me how that story that I loved is about a multi-year journey of the soul through the underworld. It's also an epic tale of crime and corruption in the land of the dead. Someone is stealing people's tickets on the Number 9, the train that takes them to their proper life and doesn't waste time doing it. These little golden tickets are bound to each soul, they know the souls, they respond to the souls and are trying to get back to them.

The trap in that story is to get complacent, give up, and stay in the underworld instead of moving on. I'll keep moving.