Hair Today…

I’ve always wanted to shave my head.

I should preface this by saying I’m not overly precious about my hair. It’s been every length and configuration I’ve ever felt like trying. It’s been dyed and permed and bits of it bleached, pixie-short, or down the middle of my back. Bangs, no bangs, layers, bob, everything but dreadlocks or blonde. I’ll have it short for a long while and then something in me will think, “It would be sexier/Witchier/younger looking long,” and I start growing it out.

Once I passed forty, however, I began to understand why my mother always said women over 35 should not have long hair. It’s not a question of “should,” to me, it’s a question of “Dear god, WHY?”

I spent the last year or so letting my hair grow out, and it was shoulder-length and making me insane. My hair is extremely thick; when it’s long it’s heavy, hot, and won’t really do anything. It eats shampoo. It takes a full day to dry.

To quote an age-old meme, ain’t nobody got time for that.

Every time I cut it off I revel in the freedom I feel. A part of me always mourns, I think, because that weird idea I have that youth and attractiveness are long-hair qualities persists, even though I gave up on the whole idea of attracting male attention back in my 30s when I realized a) I don’t really like cishet men as a social class, and although there are plenty of really great individual guys, I just don’t have the energy and b) given how I look the kind of male attention I tend to attract is not the kind I want. Still, part of me feels like I’m “giving up” on myself every time I cut my hair off, a lot like how giving the finger to the weight-cycling industry was “letting myself go.”

Then I take that first shower with a new pixie cut and I remember fuck all that.

Periodically throughout the years when it’s gotten too long I’ve said, “I should just shave it all off.”

As I said in a previous post, enter COVID-19.

I had recently gotten a regrettable haircut. I was hating it. There was no way I could get it taken care of within at least a month, and my hair grows very quickly. The thought of spending weeks of shelter-in-place loathing my hair was dismaying.

Then I remembered my roommate has clippers for the dog.

(They’re human hair clippers, she just uses them on her dogs from time to time. I think she used to use them on her ex-husband too, which, let’s not go down that path.)

You know where this is going.

I now have less than half an inch of hair all over my head, and I have to say, I love it. It’s fun to rub my hands over. It dries almost instantly. It uses less than a dime-sized sploot of shampoo. It’s going to be difficult for me to let it start growing when I go back out in to the working world…and I may not bother. I am fuzzy and round like a hedgehog. I find this utterly delightful in a time when delight is much trickier to come by.

Even so, I stare at it in the mirror and I have a lot of complicated feelings. I see all the patchy grey mixed into my natural mouse-brown, whole swaths of razed landscape that look like they’ve been burned to ash and are waiting to fly away in the wind. I consider dyeing it, but I feel like leaving it natural for a bit, to look at myself in a rawer form. I am acutely aware of how round my face is and how small my head looks compared to my body. My eyes somehow look brighter. Occasional moments of “what the hell have I DONE?” fade into an odd sort of affection toward myself, as if with a buzzcut everything I’ve been through in life is visible, if only to me, and every prickly patch of grey is a battle scar. There is a fierce femininity in having so little hair, which I was not expecting, and also the feeling that I’ve shed some sort of armor that wasn’t protecting so much as concealing me.

The fact that I’m having this sort of experience while everything is in this lurching state of turmoil and transition is both too much and exactly enough. I feel like for a lot of us this whole strange era has stripped away a lot of the artifice and distraction that made our lives what they were. Americans in particular are dreadful at silence and stillness. The minute we have to face the sort of emotions that are coming up for us all right now, we dive into distractions – only nowadays there are fewer of those, and after you’ve baked bread and done a silly dance video for TikTok and watched all the seasons of Parks and Rec again, in the end you literally can’t get away from yourself. A lot of the funny stuff online is people trying desperately not to be still. What happens when all of that noise and busy-ness and “productivity” is unavailable?

I imagine for a lot of people it feels very similar to shaving their heads.

My suggestion? Learn to love the fuzz. It’s going to take a while for it all to grow back…assuming, by then, you still want it to.