Nayla Mitha

Tag: humour

  • The 5-Step, Fail-Proof Method to DIY Your Own Pixie Cut

    The 5-Step, Fail-Proof Method to DIY Your Own Pixie Cut

    A rigorously tested, professionally unqualified method.

    If you identify as a jack of all trades like me, you already know the real secret to a successful DIY project isn’t skill. It’s delusion sustained over several weeks. 

    Here’s my fail-proof, five-step method for DIY’ing your own pixie cut, developed over a lengthy YouTube playlist, a mild identity crisis, and a very expensive drawer of barely-used scissors. 

    Step 1: Tell everyone.

    Not just your partner. Not just your group chat. Everyone. Your coworkers. Your dentist. The guy who delivers your packages. This isn’t for accountability… accountability implies you might back out. This is so that when it goes wrong, it goes wrong as spectacularly as possible. 

    (But whatever you do, don’t tell your family. Friends offer skepticism. Family opens an inquiry.)

    Step 2: Research extensively. Apply nothing.

    Build a DIY pixie cut YouTube playlist so long it starts to feel like a relationship. Watch every video twice. Sit with your popcorn, expertly judging strangers despite the fact that you’ve never held a pair of clippers, let alone filmed a YouTube tutorial. Most importantly, let yourself believe that watching someone confidently cut their hair is basically the same as doing it.

    This belief will not survive contact with actual clippers. Deep down, you already know that. Ignore it.

    Step 3: Buy every tool you could possibly need… plus several you can’t justify.

    Clippers, guards, hairdresser scissors, thinning scissors, texturizing scissors, and sure, why not… a thinning razor you will use exactly zero times. This step isn’t really about hair. It’s about the deep, specific comfort of owning tools that outrank your skill level by several years. 

    None of them will help. All of them will feel like progress. 

    Step 4: Wait until it’s too late to back out.

    Let your hair grow just long enough that it has to be cut, and just short enough that undoing a mistake means starting over from nothing. This is the sweet spot. This is when fear finally shows up… right on schedule, arms crossed in the bathroom mirror, daring you to blink first. Ignore it. Pick up the clippers. Close one eye (for reasons that remain unclear even to you). Let the muscle memory you don’t have take over. 

    Somewhere, a professional stylist will feel a disturbance in the force.

    Step 5: Reveal your results to a deeply unimpressed audience.

    Here’s the part nobody warns you about… after weeks of buildup, the internal spiral, and the one-eyed leap of faith, your friends will not gasp. They will not so much as flinch. One will simply walk past you. Another will look directly at you and ask if you got new earrings.

    Eventually, you will not be able to take it anymore, and you will do the thing you swore you wouldn’t… announce it yourself.

    “I did it! I cut my own hair!!”

    This will be met with the same energy as someone announcing they’ve reorganized their sock drawer. 

    So there you have it. Five easy steps to a pixie cut, tried and tested by me, on me, with no professional supervision whatsoever… a method that will change absolutely nothing about how people see you, and everything about how you see yourself. (Not as someone with a good haircut. As someone who is clearly ready for the next bad idea.)

  • Everyone Else Is Facing That Way. I Have Thoughts.

    Everyone Else Is Facing That Way. I Have Thoughts.

    What’s one thing you wish you had started doing earlier in life?

    View all responses

    Making peace with what I’m good at and what I suck at.

    In my fifth decade of this thing we call “being human,”* I’m finally aware of (and more at ease with) where I can deliver and where I will fall short.

    *Being human: a lifelong subscription with no manual, no refunds, and terms and conditions you only get around to reading in your forties.

    I think many of us struggle with this, especially when the parts of us that are outliers don’t match what society treats as “the norm.” The pressure to conform is real, and it’s tough to feel like a typo in a world that loves a clean draft.

    Allow me to present three of my own typos, left in on purpose.

    Introvert (aka the Tubelight)

    I’m a card-carrying introvert. Don’t get me wrong, I can say a few semi-intelligent things in a meeting, but my best and deepest reflections show up later, when I’ve been handed a problem to noodle on. Picture a tubelight warming up. It stutters, it hums, and then it’s the most reliable thing in the room.

    I’ve learned to carve out this space for myself with creative subject lines like “Re: Thoughts on the Meeting (Composed in My Head Since 10:15, Now Available).”

    Initiation Energy When It’s My Idea, Struggle When It’s Not

    When I have an idea, I go from zero to a five-part workshop series in eleven minutes, complete with a title slide and no registered participants. For years I wondered why I was always the one starting projects or organizing get-togethers, until I realized that other people’s ideas just don’t give me the same ignition.

    Follow-through is the other half of this though. I definitely need the energy of others, or else my project moves into a folder called “v2_final_ACTUAL,” where good intentions go to nap. So I’ve learned to enlist people.

    Taking Time to Make Decisions

    Sometimes a decision takes me a while, and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise. When a big one shows up, it’ll wait by the door with its coat on while I look for my keys, my shoes, and possibly my feelings.

    Living with that uncertainty used to drive me crazy. Now I understand it’s simply my process, and I’ve learned to sit with it:

    I’m not indecisive. I’m in a due diligence period.

    Future me will have more information and better lighting.

    Nothing is on fire. Probably.

    I think we all have a few things we were taught were wrong. Too slow. Too quiet. Too sensitive. At some point you stop trying to correct them… a typo left alone long enough starts to look like handwriting.

    If you need me, I’ll be reading through the fine print of “being human.” So far I’ve found no clause requiring me to be good at everything. I’ll send my full thoughts in a week. Subject line: “Now Available.”

  • How to Ruin Your Body With a Paintbrush

    How to Ruin Your Body With a Paintbrush

    Turns out my extinction-level event doesn’t need AI. It has a paintbrush.

    We, as a species, currently seem intent on creating an extinction-level event for ourselves (or letting AI do the job more efficiently). But I want to talk about a much less explored method of self-destruction: art-related injuries.

    Many people stop making art once they’re out of school. I guess I’m an outlier. I missed the memo that said “creativity expires with your student ID.”

    My creative process has always been more like a firehose than a dripping faucet. It comes out fast and furious. Sleep, food, and personal hygiene drop off the radar until I find myself in an exhausted heap on the floor next to some sort of concoction that may or may not make sense to anyone (including me) by morning.

    If I had to explain this in a meme:

    No one: … 

    Me: Here’s a whole set of inner-voices cards nobody asked for, created by vibe-coding non-stop for several days!* 

    No one: … 

    Me: …

    *Vibe-coding: the process of building an app entirely on instinct, hope, and Frappuccinos, wherein you understand roughly 4% of what you just did but it works, so you back away slowly and never touch it again.

    Luckily, my friends know to send out a search party if they haven’t heard from me in a while (or if Find Friends says I’m in the produce section, squeezing mangoes with the confidence of someone who definitely knows what she’s doing).

    Trying to stop the creative firehose when it hits feels like walking past the craft store “just to look.”

    An idea will show up around 7pm and stand there, tapping its foot… just as I’ve closed my iPad and told myself, tonight… I rest! I’ll pretend I have boundaries for about two minutes. Then I’m reopening it, grunting at myself, because apparently the idea knew “tonight I rest” was wishful thinking before I did.

    These days I’m too lazy to get up and work at a proper desk or easel, so I end up hunched over my lap desk on the couch. 

    I wish I could tell you I’ll develop the self-discipline to sit properly when the creative urge strikes. Alas, in those moments my self-discipline has the staying power of a cat who just spotted the red dot of a laser pointer skipping across the floor. 

    So for the last few weeks, my shoulders have been up around my ears and I’ve dug out my Shakti pillow (aka the acupressure pillow). If you’ve been lucky enough to never use one, consider yourself blessed. It’s basically a bed of nails with better branding. 

    The Shakti pillow doesn’t nag. It just sits there… with its spikes pointing viciously in your direction, doing its best “who, me?” impression: Come closer, I won’t hurt you. Maybe just a little, at first. 

    Any creatives out there suffering from art-related injuries, I see you. 

    I’m sure that one day we’ll pass each other in the waiting room of our therapist’s office (when we’re ready to face our refusal to “ergonomically adult”). In the meantime, may your Shakti pillow be gentler than your inner critic, and may your next act of self-destruction end in a half-decent painting.

  • My Cholesterol Is Fine. My Evenings Are Not.

    My Cholesterol Is Fine. My Evenings Are Not.

    The real midlife crisis is realizing you don’t know how to buy a mango.

    But let’s start at the beginning. Before I was personally betrayed by a mango, I visited my doctor for a full check-up. It seemed like a good time to find out whether my original parts were still functioning as advertised.

    My cholesterol was a little high, but not high enough for medication. Instead, I received a beautiful pamphlet called “How to Manage Your Cholesterol.”*

    *How to Manage Your Cholesterol: a 16-page document designed to make you feel personally responsible for every piece of cheesecake you’ve accidentally inhaled.

    What the doctor neglected to mention was that this new regime involves a soul-crushing side hustle called “produce management,” with no unsubscribe button in sight.

    Since starting this plan, my days (and nights) have been filled with chopping, peeling, steaming, and more wistful sighs than I care to admit. I barely have time to make it to work, let alone appear employed when I get there.

    To be clear, I fully recognize that produce management is not a bad deal, health-wise. Many people contend with much more.

    But allow me a quick moment to vent about this past week’s worst offender because mangoes are master gaslighters. 

    They sit there, taunting you with their beautiful colours and the confidence of produce that knows something you don’t. You give them a little squeeze every night, pretending you speak “fruit” and hoping they can’t smell fear.

    Then, when you finally muster up the courage to slice into one, it’s secretly rotting on the inside. What’s worse is you immediately remember this never happened at your parents’ house.

    How did they do it?

    Were they undercover mango whisperers?

    I never called my mom for her secret. Partly because I’m an adult… but mostly because I know how that conversation would end.

    She’d listen to my entire mango crisis, pause, and say, “You’re not buying the right ones.”

    I’d ask what the “right ones” were.

    There’d be another longer pause. Then: “You just know.”

    So here I remain… midlife, mildly hypercholesterolemic, and emotionally invested in more types of produce than I care to admit.

    If you need me, I’ll be in the kitchen, trying to implement page 7 of the pamphlet: “Assume You’re Doing It Wrong.”