Since I was young, I was always sensitive about my hair.  I often touch it and always care about how it looks.  Therefore, it is very important to me that my hair is cut to my liking.  Due to this trait, a seemingly small change in my life had a large impact on me.

From the time of my first haircut, my mother brought me to one specific barber shop. I never enjoyed getting my hair cut because I liked it long. Every time I got a haircut I was unhappy and sometimes I even made a scene.  It became a battle between my mother and I every time she said I needed to get a haircut.  Eventually, since I was so opposed to the idea of a haircut, my mom started using the word "trim" instead.  I thought of any argument I could in order to delay my "trim" but in the end it always happened, and I was always furious.  Some of the most popular ones were "but it's my hair," and "if you make me cut it now I'm never going to cut it when I'm older."  This topic was an ongoing source of tension between my mother and I.

Over the course of some years I started to notice that there were specific characteristics of the way my barber cut my hair that made me unhappy.  For starters, he cut it too short.  In addition, people told me repeatedly that my hair wasn't even.  After every haircut I felt uncomfortable and angry.  For example, the day before I started seventh grade, I was forced to get a "trim" and I walked out of the barber shop with puffy hair on top of my head and a mullet in the back.  When I got home I put a hat on my head and told my parents I wouldn't take it off until my hair grew back to normal because I was too embarrassed.  I am usually excited for the first day of school, but that time I dreaded it.  

The straw that broke the camel's back was when my barber cut my sideburns too short.  This is a violation of Jewish law, which was extra important to me since I had just had my bar mitzvah.  After I freaked out, I knew that this time there was no way my parents would be able to make me return to that barber shop.  As my hair grew and the time approached for me to cut it, I made a compromise with my parents: I agreed to cut my hair at a different barber shop.  My friend recommended a good place to me so I tried it out.  For the first time in my life, I was happy after a haircut.  My new barber cut my hair neatly, evenly and to the right length.  I was proud of my hair and wanted people to see it instead of wanting to hide under a hat.  I even looked forward to my next haircut.  When that time came however, I was nervous that it wouldn't come out as well as the last time, but to my relief and excitement, it did.

From that time on, I enjoyed getting haircuts.  I realized that I did not actually abhor getting haircuts, but rather getting them from my mother's barber.  After I switched barbers, I no longer had the dread that beforehand was prevalent throughout most of my childhood.  This may not seem like an important change in my life but it had a strong effect on me because it ended a large amount of feuding between my mother and I.  Now, we argue much less and become angry at each other less frequently. It also took away the period of anger and unhappiness I had to experience every so often.  It turns out that I just needed to realize what really caused all the tension and change it.  In this way, changing barbers was a significant change in my life.