On Shaving Your Head, Getting Clear on Your Values, and Inner Freedom

Taking a page from Elizabeth Gilbert's playbook

Elizabeth Gilbert shaved her head.

When you’re the beloved author of a juggernaut of a book like Eat, Pray, Love, a cultural icon, and the personal heroine of millions of women worldwide, you attract a lot of attention when you go bald.

Of course everyone wants to know why she did it. What it came down to, she says, is freedom. She wanted to be free of cultural standards of beauty and trying to look a certain way that’s pleasing to men and acceptable to society. Not to mention the time and effort and money it took to maintain her hair and, as she puts it, force it to do what it didn’t want to do.

I get it. If I could have back all the money I spent coloring my hair over the years, I could probably retire.

As Joan Didion famously wrote, goodbye to all that. Gilbert says she feels fantastic and loves the way she looks. Shaving her head was part of the new life she’s creating for herself. She lives alone by choice because she wants to nurture her creativity in solitude and be free of the kind of emotional entanglements and unhealthy relationship patterns she struggled with as a younger woman.

She wrote on Oprah Daily:

“…when I was done, I almost cried. Not because I was horrified by my looks, but for the exact opposite reason: I felt like I had never looked more like myself. I had made this decision because I wanted freedom and convenience, and because I had decided to be ‘post-vanity,’ but what I saw in the mirror looked like beauty to me.”

She says she’s happier than she’s ever been and looks forward to becoming an old crone.

I’m not ready to shave my head yet. But when I heard Gilbert on Marie Forleo’s podcast, it solidified something for me.

As I get older, I think a lot about values and the ones I want to guide my life. That kind of freedom is at the top of the list.

Personal freedom to live the life I choose. Financial freedom, the time and money to pursue my dreams and desires. Spiritual freedom to explore my connection to the divine and what makes a meaningful life. Freedom from too many obligations and possessions—an unencumbered life of beauty and simplicity. Freedom from my own expectations.

Emotional freedom. Freedom from being controlled by my own and others’ emotions. The ability to protect my interior space and maintain stronger internal equilibrium. That one may be the hardest for me to achieve.

The older I get, the more my desire for freedom, in every sense of the word, guides my choices. When I’m contemplating a decision or an action, I ask myself if it’s aligned with that value. Does it make me more free or less free?

The first half of life is about ambition, action, striving, acquiring, achieving—what I think of as “outer world” pursuits. I believe the second half is—or can be—about freeing ourselves of all that, and of all the cultural and emotional baggage that goes with it. In exchange, if we choose, we get the freedom to explore and cultivate our inner worlds instead. That’s as deep and rich and expansive as it gets.

Shaving your head is a bold move. I love what it stands for. She didn’t do it to make a statement or prove a point. She genuinely doesn’t care about standards of beauty or cultural norms. She did it to suit herself.

That’s freedom.

Commonplace Book

It’s possible to live an unfascinating life from the outside, but on the inside you’re mentally free. That’s the kind of freedom we have to claim for ourselves.

-Zadie Smith