Long Hair Stress

Year

2026

Dimensions

8 in x 9 in

Materials

Micron Pen on Drawing Paper

Long Hair Stress is about the constant back-and-forth of deciding whether I actually want long hair. It seems like a small problem, but cutting it off would feel final, so the question keeps repeating: Do I like it? What would I look like without it? What if I regret it? I photographed myself from several poses and angles, then used different stressed expressions to show versions of the same argument happening inside one head. As I developed the drawing in Micron pen, the hair became less like normal hair and more like the thing trapping the faces together. I wanted the anxiety to come from a real, ordinary decision becoming so repetitive that it starts to take over the entire image.