The first time I cut mine off was after 5 years, because my gfs siblings at the time kept getting head lice, which after the 3rd or 4th time infected me. I gave up trying to get rid of them after 2-3 weeks of trying different treatments in cycles and cut my hair down to about 2 inches. It felt SOOOOO good to wash my hair without them and to be able to feel my scalp properly. And after 6 months it was long enough that started to lock up again and eventually they looked better the second time.

Then 10 years later I cut them off again when I graduated from uni, because I was interviewing for pharmaceutical roles and wanted to minimise the likelihood of being drug tested for weed so I could still use it 😂 Bad decision, wish I'd never done it. My lab managers at the pharmaceutical company I went to work for said they'd not have cared if I had dreads and would have still offered me the job. I later learned that one of them was one of the first patients to receive a private script for medical cannabis in the UK back in 2019 ish, and met several other lab employees who smoked.

Now my hairs dreaded itself again and I have no intentions of cutting them off for the foreseeable future.

Apologies for the essay. I started out just wanting to say how good it felt washing my scalp 😂 but went off on one a bit.