How do you measure the success or failure of personal reinvention? Can you look at your accolades and put them on a scale compared to other people’s or your own past successes? Well, you could—we’re fully capable of doing amazing things and claiming failure because they didn’t live up to some imagined standard. But reinvention isn’t about becoming someone else, it is about becoming ourselves. Distillation. Deconstruction.

Feeling successful has everything to do with feeling and almost nothing to do with the objective success or failure of what we’re doing, because there is no such thing as objective success or failure.

It’s all about how you feel, how much of yourself you’re allowing yourself to express and whether or not your life feels like an adventure. If I’m happy I’m successful. If I’m miserable I’m unsuccessful. If I’m having fun, what I’m doing feels successful. If I’m struggling and miserable, I feel like a failure.

Feeling successful has everything to do with feeling and almost nothing to do with the objective success or failure of what we’re doing, because there is no such thing as objective success or failure.

End of story.

But also beginning of story.

The funny thing is that reinvention isn’t really invention at all. It’s almost like de-invention. It’s distillation. It’s getting rid of all the things we thought we were and getting closer to who we really are, which often feels like, well, nothing. In fact, the closer we get to ourselves, the more we may feel that we’re not doing anything. Take the story of my hair for example.

In the mid-90s I got sick of dealing with my hair. I’d been touring with my band in Eastern Europe and resources were slim. In one hostel we each got a token for the shower. We inserted it in the shower’s token-slot and—voilà—nice, hot water.

But halfway through soaping my hair my token’s-worth of water ran out. I stood there in the cold, my hair full of soap, and thought, “This is not working.”

When I got home, I told my then-manager I wanted a new hairstyle, one that required no daily maintenance, could go at least a week without washing, and would make me look utterly cool.

Thus was born my multi-color dreadlock-braid look that became my identity for over 15 years. It was easy and identifiable, and, for the first time in my life, I actually felt like I looked cool (despite what certain relatives said about it).

Fast-forward 15 years, my aunt looked at my hairline with horror at a family dinner and declared the braids were pulling out my hair, something any black woman could have told me would happen, only no black woman did. I denied it, of course. How could I get rid of the one thing that made me cool?

Then, on Thanksgiving 2011, as I stood in post-prandial stupor in front of the TV, I saw Lady Gaga in her Thanksgiving special singing, “I am my hair, I am my hair, I am my hair,” a slow, mesmerizing song that seemed to have only those four lyrics over and over.

Suddenly I thought, “Wait a minute! I am not my hair!” I dashed into the bathroom, pulled out the scissors, cut off each of the braids one-by-one, and walked back out as post-cool me.

So here are two questions to consider. First, who are we when we take on the trappings of something we long to be? Second, who are we when we walk away from who we think we’ve become?

I spent the next four weeks buying wigs, trying on scarves, and attempting to recreate the experience of my oh-so-cool hair. I was preparing for an upcoming show, and as I rehearsed—videotaping myself as I often do during rehearsal—I discovered that without my hair, I had become physically stiff. I had come to rely on the swoosh of my hair to create the easy impression of movement, and I’d disconnected from the rest of my body. So, braidless, I began the process of reconnecting to myself as a whole.

On New Year’s Eve, at my first post-braids show, I walked out on stage and simply left my hair behind. Walking away from my hair was like a speeded up version of walking away from my youth. It was like stepping out of a skin that I identified as me, but that was only momentary. I discovered I am both those people: the multi-color braid woman and the short-cropped-hair woman.

Adding color to my life—literally—adds a sense of adventure, connection, and vulnerability. Cutting closer to the bone is a different kind of adventure, a different kind of connection, a different kind of vulnerability. The good news? We can choose which one we want at any moment. We can adorn ourselves, and we can reveal ourselves. We can take on the trappings of cool and take them off. They each take a different kind of courage and commitment.

As we invent and reinvent ourselves, if we’re lucky, what we find is a sense, not of invention, but of discovery: we are all of that. And more. And sometimes, miraculously less. •