Now that I am back at my Kombucha college and everyone is growing out their gorgeous winter coats, I am immediately taken back to a time when I was four years old, clinging onto the back of a young woman who was interning with my mother, as she whizzed to St. Mark’s Cathedral on her scooty. We would sit there and stare up at the century-old trees. I am told that it was on one of these days that I, four years old, fondly petted the healthy foliage on her legs and said, in all honesty, “You have such nice fur.” At four years old, very much like now, I associated fur with all things beautiful in the world. The young woman, however, who must have been 18 or 19 at the time, did not appreciate these words of admiration and shaved it all off the next day. Alas.. stubble.

It’s sad because as I grew older, I also found myself further and further away from that place of four-year-old transparency - no agendas, no ‘norms,’ and really, no giving of f*cks. Because at four years old, my world was what I made it… seashell fairy houses, butterfly kisses and beautiful, ever flowing fur. But that changed slowly, and I can’t really put my finger on why, I mean of course: society and high school and the media and all of that bull shit, but at four I was a firmly grounded, stubborn little blob with a fully developed belief system and I don’t know how or when the other stuff got me.

But I know that it did, because I know that in the sixth or seventh standard I wanted to get my legs waxed so that I could be silky smooth and furless, but I also know that when I went into that tube light room and put on the faded floral print towel I felt inconsolably sad. It was like I was stepping into adulthood and saying goodbye to the seashell fairy houses. I mean, now I know those were bullshit feelings because 1) wtf is adulthood? and 2) I plan to live out my life in a seashell fairy house, but there was a sadness, and I think it came from the exact moment in time that I started to give a f*ck, and that’s why it was so incredibly devastating.

And I mean, we do, right? We give a f*ck...like that’s what all the other articles say about this subject that shouldn’t even be a subject, because I mean, where’s the argument when it’s your body? It bugs me when I see the "33 reasons you shouldn’t shave your pits" stuff. If you need a reason to shave/shape/culture/wax/color/braid/condition or do whatever to your pits, I don’t see why it should come from anyone who isn’t your four-year-old self who probably saw all that shit clearly right from the start. But…oops, reality... it isn’t like that because that seashell fairy house transparency is a precious thing that only sticks around for a little bit before we lose it to the tube lights and to the giving of f*cks.

It’s sad and then it’s kind of funny, because here I am now, full circle, seeing it all, (maybe not that clearly because it’s Sunday morning…), the loving of the fur, the loathing of the fur and then the final intentional loving/loathing of it, because these are our bodies and our decisions and screw the rest of y’all… errmmm...what? So…this is kind of a heavy digression, but do we evolve at all as human beings or do we just lose ourselves at four and then spend the rest of our lives trying to transform into really mediocre versions of that? Or maybe it was just me… damn… Perhaps, left to our own devices… and dreams, we know where it’s at right at the start, and then somehow, somewhere in the middle we shit on all that sacred knowledge that is way too profound for ‘real life things,’ but then we’re soon searching for it again, a few years later, amongst the same real life things that f*cked us up in the first place. But in terms of shooting for that evolved state of being, I think I blew my chance a little after four, at the moment I started giving a f*ck. At that moment, I had forever lost my ability to simply pet someone’s leg hair and say in all honesty “what nice fur you have.” I know… what a travesty… But it was! Because if I ever say that again it’ll be tied to all these statements and agendas that at four would have no place in my seashell world. And we have to keep making the statements, the ‘these are our bodies so screw the rest of y’all statements,’ it’s just sad that we grew out of a world that didn’t require them and into one where we have to scream our lungs off just so they are heard.