I recommend it to anyone who has plenty of stress to go around: cut your own hair. Cutting your own hair flies in the face of the things that breed stress in your life.

Think of all those times you made mistakes, mistakes that people don’t really know about and gnaw at your conscience. It’s secrets like these that tend to weigh me down. A lot of people go crazy because they hide the things they find terrible or repulsive. Hiding is clearly not healthy. When I cut my hair I know that any mistake I make I can’t hide. And that’s okay. When my hair is too long on one side or I cut the front too much, these things scream at family members and passersby indiscriminately: My hair is too long on one side! I cut the front too much! A self-inflicted bad haircut will not gnaw at my conscience; it will simply sit on my head. I flaunt it by default, and I love that.

Even people who live in regret need vacations from self-flagellation. Cutting my own hair displays what talent I have in grooming myself. I discover that I have few skills in the grooming department, but those skills are my own. It’s a rare moment of being unabashedly unapologetic for the weaknesses and deficiencies I inevitably have to deal with anyway, and it’s liberating.

Some people have to pay for bad haircuts. Well, this bad hair cut is free! And this bad haircut is me, giving myself a bad haircut. Remember the days when you riled about the various injustices done to you by the worst people who managed to crawl into your life? Well, sometimes it comes: that moment when you realize you had a hand in pissing yourself off. And then it becomes quiet.

So why live to hide, breathe to apologize and pay to get pissed, when you can take a pair of scissors and give yourself a chance to do something you can learn to not regret, and give yourself a choice to do your worst or your best, depending on what you naturally have in store. Cutting your own hair is a lesson in accepting who you are. And let the critics criticize; what never stopped them before is likely to not stop them now, whether you cut your own hair or bought something to wear or ate something you wanted to eat. It’s about time the only opinion you listened to is yours.