frustrating!

ok, here's a frustration of mine. i decided a year ago to grow my hair out for locks of love. i've always thought my hair grows slow and now i definitely know it grows slow. (i also recently confirmed through a simple test that i do indeed have high arches and then read that this is the least common foot type. is that why i've always been so picky on shoes and why so few shoes feel comfortable to me?) i digress. after feeling like it was growing so slow, i decided not to cut my hair for six months. as a result, a couple of weeks ago, some of my hair literally burnt off while i was curling it with a curling iron! i had my friend cut off a couple of inches the other day to get it healthy again and then looked up a picture from last year at this time. here's the picture from today (with my other new pair of reading glasses) and below is a picture of last year. after a full year of conscious effort to grow my hair out, i've gotten nowhere! i don't know to whether persevere with my goal or to just give up and say that i'm too old and my hair is too thin to do it. what would you do? (p.s. it was totally unintentional that i happened to be wearing the same sweatshirt/fleece thingy; although i do love this particular fleece hoodie).