My hair is a bit provocative. In the course of a single day, it can draw both raving compliments and ugly criticism. It causes normal people to do weird things like try to pat a complete stranger. I’ve been sniffed, okay? A simple change of style can evoke feelings of betrayal. People look at me like, “I can’t believe I thought I knew you!” One friend of mine once looked at me long and hard and said, “You have curly hair. So much makes sense now.” It’s a little extreme is all I’m saying.
When I was small, my mom used to do my braids, ponytails, and barrettes every single day. (Anyone else remember those fasteners with the balls on the ends that gave you a concussion if your mom wrapped it around one too many times and let go of it by accident?) Mom fixed my sister’s hair, too. But my sister had nice soft thick waves. The kind that people expect and accept and admire, rather than the kind that incites abiding trust issues. Our braids and ponytails stuck out from our heads, mine especially, and people often stopped my mom to remark about our hair.
That’s me on the left. My sister, Mel, on the right. I thought you might like a visual. My mom loved our big hair, took good care of it, and it showed.
The first sign that my hair was going to be a life problem was headbands.
All the girls at school wore cute little plastic headbands. This was a fashion choice my sister rocked. I really envied her. When I wore a headband, it not only didn’t hold my hair back, it made a slow but steady transit off the back of my head like a too small paperclip trying to hold a ream of paper. Or worse, it gave me a migraine and BROKE by noon. There were those days.
After headbands went out, banana clips were in. (It was the eighties. We told ourselves plastic was beautiful. We told ourselves a lot of things that weren’t true.) My sister’s mane of honey brown hair spilled out of the back of her fluorescent pink banana clip luxuriously, like a hair model. Mine looked less pretty. And not just because I had to settle for the lime green one. If I could even get the thing closed, my hair sprung out like crispy hay in one of those metal things you feed livestock from. And did I mention my hair broke those, too?
Let’s not get into all the other sweet little accessories that battered my self-esteem. Or the spit balls from the icky boys. We can skip straight to when mall hair was all the rage. Girls were perming, spraying, scrunching, spraying again, flipping, fluffing, and diffusing their hair every single day to get BIG CURLY HAIR. I should have been good to go, right? But Aquanet? NOT ENOUGH HOLD FOR A HAYSTACK. Curling irons? Psshhhaw! I tried everything to get those wings to stay, but maybe I just wasn’t meant to fly back then. Don’t have to worry about me, though. I got through it by wearing black, putting that shit back in a ponytail, and writing morose poetry. Writers are resilient people. You probably have teen angst to thank for a lot of your reading material today. You’re welcome.
It went on like this through college. The more I tried to hide my crazy hair, the more people seemed to notice it. At nineteen, when my beauty routine consisted of blush, Chapstick, and a brown barrette, I’ll never forget the girl who nastily called me Hair behind my back. I didn’t even know her, but it hurt deeply for some reason. How could something I had literally no control over–something that had nothing to do with my character–make a stranger loathe me? (I’ll tell you how. It had something to do with an icky boy. Insert eye roll.)
People talk about defining moments, and I had a series of them in college. I took up the fight against my hair with a fierceness that makes me kind of sad today. I was going to figure this out, damn it. I was in a sorority and I lived in a close knit community with other women willing to share their make-up, their clothes, and their hair secrets. I had no excuse. (Actually liking my hair would have been a great excuse, but to be perfectly honest, I didn’t even know that was possible.) I collected smoothing products, better brushes, a detangling comb, a blow dryer, and a large barrel curling iron. I felt brave like an adventurer exploring Machu Picchu as I chopped, layered, permed, and dyed for the next eight years.
And then came the straightening iron that I embraced with the certainty that one embraces a favorite Blizzard at Dairy Queen. When I straightened, I got less feedback altogether. No one ever told me I had too much hair, even though it was the exact same hair they were advising I thin out just the day before. (You know, so my face didn’t get so lost in it?) I assume that’s because for the first time my hair looked like all the other women’s hair. Me and my hair appeared to be going with the flow when straight, and not trying so hard to be so damn different. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed the silence of fitting in. I enjoyed the not being noticed SO MUCH that I was willing to spend more time than ever looking into the mirror each morning and again in the afternoon to get it to look like everyone else’s. I was willing to avoid things that I had previously loved, just to avoid the painful you-should-try-this-smoothing-shampoo comments from people who didn’t understand that I didn’t want to try their smoothing shampoo. I just wanted my hair to be quietly loved exactly how it was. And if it couldn’t be quietly loved, I wanted it to be left alone.
Are you getting tired of my hair manifesto yet? Yes? Good. Because I’m very tired, too. I’m tired of how the girl who gave up on vanity–the one who said she wanted people to stop noticing her so much–couldn’t stop noticing herself.
It’s so boring and vain and neurotic. I just want to tell my nineteen-year-old self to pump her brakes and breathe. And yet, how many of us do exactly this to ourselves every day about something we can’t change?
If any of my friends told me she was worrying about her looks this much, I would tell her she needed a nap. And a hug. And a good long soak in the tub with a paperback. I would tell her she was her own worst critic. And that no one else really thought about her hair that much, except really mean bitches, who are even meaner to themselves than they are to her. And that those mean bitches could probably stand to tame their inner beasts with a nap and a hug. I would tell my friend I wished she’d be kinder to herself. I would tell her I liked her just the way she was. Frizz and all. And I would mean it.
I think it’s time for me to treat myself like a friend.
So that’s it. That’s what I’m doing. I’m not giving up on haircuts and styling or anything crazy like that. But I do desperately want to stop the constant self-criticism, the constant fear and fight. I don’t want to live my next forty years in fear of a rain storm that might curl my ends. I’m tired of doggy paddling at the lake to keep my head dry when what I really want to do is a nice lazy backstroke. And I’m over running from cameras when I haven’t had a chance to check the mirror. (This last one is gonna die hard, I can tell you that. My sister is a photographer, and she is the family paparazzi, hiding in bushes when you least expect it.)
People still say weird things to me, but their words sting less. Because if I let them ruin or make my day, that’s the real problem, isn’t it? There is a saying about what others think of me being none of my business. I believe that’s true. I wish I had known sooner that what I think of myself is completely and irrevocably my business, but at least I figured it out. Not everyone does.
