I've been going to the same hairstylist for 4 or 5 years. I stuck to the same cut (somewhere between shoulder and bra strap length) and color (blonde highlights/light brown lowlights) for the most part, but a couple of times I've asked her to do something different or drastic and she has nailed it. I'm really bad at explaining hair stuff, so I usually take her photos to replicate and/or just trust her judgment.  I was really happy with her for the longest time, but over the last year, maybe two, I started feeling less and less happy. Since I always asked for the same general style, she never really messed it up, but I felt like she wasn't as in sync with what I wanted as she had been in the past.

Over the summer I started thinking about going dark, something I do semi-frequently and usually spontaneously. I decided I'd go for it at my August appointment, and I actually brought in a photo that I had taken to her 2 years prior and said basically, "Do this." And she did, beautifully. That was one of my favorite hair styles I've ever had (so it makes total sense that I have zero pictures of myself from that time period...), so I decided I wanted her to give me that style again. I took the photo, which she remembered from the previous time, and again told her, "Do this."

Except this time....I don't know what happened. I truly don't. Which I think is evident in my post-salon selfie.

For starters, the color was totally wrong. It was way too red all over (I'm sensitive to red hues in my hair after I dyed it red in college and regretted it immediately), and that was after I had her go back through and tone it down with some darker brown. I'm usually not someone to be nitpicky about my hair to a stylist (and like I said, this one has always been good so I've never had to), but at first when she finished it was SO red and looked nothing like my picture, so I had to be like, "Umm....I thought it was going to look different?" And then I felt horrible because my appointment took even longer but really, I couldn't walk out of the salon like that. So yeah, the color I ended up with was actually the "corrected" version (that still doesn't match the picture).

And then for the cut....the cut I had looked more or less like the photo, it just needed to be trimmed and cleaned up a bit. And since I showed her the photo for the color, but I liked the cut in the photo as well, I told her I wanted it to look exactly like the photo. The cut I ended up with was 2-3 inches shorter than what I was expecting. The back, which I know you can't see, was even shorter than that, like for some reason she gave me kind of an angled bob?

I was not happy after that, and I've spent the last almost 6 months figuring out what to do about it. I know there are bigger problems in the world, like poverty and hunger, but this is a real issue for me. My hair is one of my biggest sources of insecurity when it comes to my looks - it's dry, the texture is weird (not straight but not curly either, coarse, frizzy, all the things no one wants), it's always shorter than I want it to be...I just rarely ever feel like it looks the way I want it to. So add in a style that I really didn't feel comfortable with, and I was desperate to do anything and everything to get my hair back to normal as quickly as possible.

It might not look like a lot, but I'm very particular about my hair and notice even the smallest changes (good or bad).

I've always wanted long hair, but my hair grows super slowly and I've never been able to successfully grow it longer than a few inches below my shoulders. And after this bad cut, I developed an irrational fear that my hair just wouldn't grow anymore and that it would be short forever. My goal is to get my hair at least back to its c. 2014 length

I have no idea how long it took to grow it out that long because, like I said, I kept it the same length for quite a while.