You have been counting the wrong column all year

It happens every year around now. Not as a decision, but the autumn seems to arrive with an audit attached to it.

And you already know which way the tally runs.

You did not lose the weight. You did not start the thing you said you would start in January.

You did not call her back, you did not finish it, you did not go. The list assembles itself without any effort at all.

Now try to fill in the other column. What you did.

It comes much harder. You have to sit and think, and the entries feel like reaching.

That is not modesty and it is not a poor memory. It is a structural problem with the way a year gets measured.

If you often hide your hair under hats or avoid photos due to hair loss… There’s something you need to know: Your hair follicles aren’t DEAD. They’re just ‘CLOGGED’.

Dead cells.

Hardened oils.

All sorts of gunk builds up on your scalp and blocks your hair follicles…

HALTING new hair growth.

Thankfully, once you clear the clog by doing this 2-3 times a week in your bathroom…

Your hair can surge back.

Thicker.

Stronger.

Full of volume.

One woman who tried it commented, “My husband looked at me and said, ‘You’re back.’”

I demonstrate how to “unclog” blocked follicles at home in this video (linked to a 32% reduction in hair loss):

→ Hiding your hair? Try THIS (results in 15 days)

To go from hiding to being proud and seen

A ledger records projects. Things with a beginning and an end, and something to show at the finish.

Almost nothing in your year was a project. It was maintenance, which is to say it was everything that had to be done again the next day in order for anything at all to hold.

Meals that were eaten and are gone. A house that runs and looks exactly as it did in March.

People who were carried through a difficult spring and do not know they were carried. None of it left a mark, which is precisely what made it work. It is the same absence we found in the photographs. Years of documented life, and you barely in the record of it.

So the audit comes back every autumn with the same verdict, and you accept it, because the arithmetic looks sound.

It is not sound. You are measuring a year spent on maintenance against a ledger built for projects, and that ledger was never going to register a single thing you actually did.

Carry this into your week: the tally is not wrong about the facts. It is wrong about what counts.

Zora Neale Hurston wrote that there are years that ask questions and years that answer. Not every year is meant to produce something. Some of them are for carrying what you already have, and that is a full year's work.

Things worth counting that no ledger recorded:

See you tomorrow.

If someone came to mind while you were reading this, send her these letters. The Permission Slips are yours when she stays.